Pete Hamill - Piecework

The grim numbers go on and on. In the late 1950s, 30 percent of poor black families were headed by women; today it is more than 70 percent. In 1959 only 15 percent of black births were out of wedlock; by 1982 it was 57 percent (five times the white rate). In i960, 42 percent of babies born to black teenagers were illegitimate; by 1983 it was 89 percent. From 1970 to 1984 the number of black families headed by women increased 108 percent (it was 63 percent for whites). Of the 27,178 families with children living in projects run by the Chicago Housing Authority, only 8 percent are headed by a husband and wife.

What goes on here? When you and I were growing up in the slums of New York, this simply didn’t happen very often. If a young man got a young woman pregnant, her father, brothers, or uncles would come knocking on his door. Today, in the urban wilderness of the Underclass, too many young black men apparently think nothing of getting women pregnant and then moving on, leaving the children’s care, feeding, clothing, and housing in the indifferent hands of the paternalistic state. After all the work done by blacks and whites to destroy the stereotype of the shiftless, irresponsible black man, here come these characters.

“There is, even now, a lot of anger within the black community toward the young black man,” said black psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint (an adviser to The Cosby Show) in a recent issue of The Black Scholar. “And increasingly, if he continues to deteriorate in his ability to function well, he is going to be rejected by black women. That is happening already. Even low-income black females perceive the black male as a loser, as trouble: dangerous and violent. …”

Poussaint believes that some young black males are compensating for feelings of inferiority in the larger society. “Sometimes, if you feel impotent in terms of society, you react by stressing your sexual role. That’s why many of them will see getting someone pregnant as proof of manhood, rather than having a child and being a responsible father to that child.”

Since 1981, unwed motherhood has replaced marital breakup as the leading cause for welfare eligibility (among blacks and whites), but the true cause might be incomprehensible ignorance. In the past few years, I’ve interviewed black women who can’t remember the full names of the fathers of their children and others who can’t spell their kids’ names. Many of these women seem to learn nothing from the experience of the first illegitimate child. They just have more babies. One result, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, is “mothers in their early teens, grandmothers in their late twenties, and great-grandmothers in their early forties.”

I remember you telling me several times that this was part of the heritage of three centuries of slavery, a theory most frequently offered by black intellectuals and white liberals in response to the 1965 Moynihan Report. In the days before emancipation (say such theorists), black families were purposefully broken apart by the slaveholders, who feared uprisings by men and women who didn’t want their children born into slavery. As a result, there has been a psychological fracture in the black family ever since.

But this secular belief in predestination — insisting that human beings are prisoners of history and not its makers — has been refuted by the stirring history of black Americans themselves, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and many millions in between. To insist that only black Americans are permanent prisoners of the past, unable to shape their own lives, is itself a form of racism.

Common sense alone tells us that if it had been true, then the trauma would have affected all blacks; obviously it hasn’t. And the post-slavery history of the black family indicates that this particular consequence of “the peculiar institution” was in fact soon left behind. In his brilliant new book, The Truly Disadvantage^ black sociologist William Julius Wilson shows that in 1940, the last year of the Great Depression, only 17.9 percent of black American families were headed by women, and the reason was usually that the husbands were dead. Today, the percentage is 43 and rising, but widowhood is no longer the cause. The men are in the wind. This has had an obvious economic effect; of black families earning $25,000 a year, only 8 percent are headed by women; of those earning $4,000 and less, 80 percent are headed by women. And that raises the essential question in refuting the theory: How could slavery have a greater corrosive effect on the black family today, almost half a century later, than it had in 1940? The question contains its own answer; it couldn’t.

Alas, we have difficulty even now — in the midst of the catastrophe — discussing such matters. You and I have been asked for a generation to suspend all criticism of the personal behavior of blacks in the Underclass. We would give aid and comfort to racists. Or erode the already uncertain self-image of blacks. To hold blacks responsible for their lives, we have been told (most eloquently by William Ryan), is “blaming the victim.” Before such arguments, liberals fell silent; and the crisis of the Underclass deepened.

At last, the long silence seems to be coming to an end. Both the NAACP and the Urban League have begun to speak about the need to break the trap of welfare dependency. Last year, Michael Lomax, chairman of Atlanta’s Fulton County Commission, publicly discussed the failure of the black establishment to deal with AIDS among blacks. He saw that failure as part of a larger pattern:

“It is a matter of coming to terms, at last, with the fact that there are problems within our community that were not imposed upon us by white society. Intravenous drug use, teenage pregnancy, and sexual promiscuity are behaviors that are pathological in our own community, and we must come to grips with that, to take responsibility.”

That last word is the key. You were responsible for your family, I for mine. But if the typical Underclass family is matriarchal, who is responsible? To blame the system, or Whitey, or history is to embrace a gigantic self-deception.

Coming out of this drastic deterioration of the Underclass black family are multiple pathologies. You know the most obvious one: the staggering rate of violent crime. Black Americans are murdering, raping, assaulting, and robbing each other at alarming rates. Blacks make up about 13 percent of our country’s population, but 50 percent of all those arrested for murder are black, as are 41 percent of the victims. Black women are three times more likely to be victims of rape than are whites. Yes, too many white cops shoot too many black suspects. Yes, there might be an element of racism involved. But in any given year, white cops don’t kill as many blacks as blacks do on some big-city weekends.

Again, we must go back to the numbers. According to a Justice Department survey, 46 percent of the nation’s prison population is black; by 1984, the rate of imprisonment for blacks was six times that for whites. National mayhem rates are bad enough; they are even worse in large inner-city ghettos. In Chicago in the 1970s, eight of every ten murderers were black, as were seven of every ten victims; 98 percent of black killings were committed by other blacks. In 1984, 61 percent of those arrested for robbery were black, as were 41 percent of those charged with aggravated assault.

I remember talking to you one night last year when you were furious with Benjamin Ward, the black police commissioner of New York City. You were angry with Ward because he had described black-on-black crime as “our dirty little secret” to a Columbia University forum sponsored by the New York Association of Black Journalists.