In Black America; The Inner City Ghetto

... From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. I approach this occasion with a mix of both an embarrassment and pride, embarrassment that this law school excluded blacks for so many years, embarrassment that it took the

Herkulean efforts of Mr. Sweat, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP, and many dedicated individuals to vindicate Mr. Sweat's fundamental human and constitutional rights in the United States Supreme Court. But there's also pride, the pride that comes from the fact that this symposium is held at the School of Law, that we now have an endowed scholarship and honor of Heeman M. Sweat, and that many other blacks have followed in the wake of his monumental efforts. Virgil C. Laudin rolled into law school in 1950 and he graduated three years later as our first black graduate. Professor Mark Udoff, Dean of the School of Law, the University of Texas at Austin. Recently, the University of Texas at Austin held his third annual Heeman M. Sweat Symposium on Civil Rights. This year's symposium theme was entitled the African American Experience, the Paradox of Civil Rights. In 1949, Heeman M. Sweat applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School, but was denied admission on the basis of race.

Now four decades later, in an effort to pay tribute to Mr. Sweat's historic accomplishments, a group of students at the University proposed the establishment of a campus-based civil rights symposium named in his honor. I'm John A. L. Hanson, Jr. this week, the third annual Heeman M. Sweat Symposium on Civil Rights in Black America. We recognize that an American society today's serious social inequities still exists between the nation's majority and minority populations. Despite significant progress, the difference in the quality of life of majority and minority citizens continues. If these differentials are allowed to persist, the economic and social cost of the nation

will be tragic. To reduce this disparity, enhanced and comprehensive educational opportunities from minorities must be provided. President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke to this critical issue when addressing a White House conference on education in 1965. He said, and I quote, progress in education won't solve all of our problems, but without progress in education, we can't solve any of our problems. The successful recruitment, retention, and graduation of minority students nationwide must remain an urgent and fundamental priority for society. We recognize that the challenge to ensure educational opportunities and academic success for minorities involves a complex set of interrelated demographic, social, and economic factors.

Students historical and current experience indicate that racism has been a major factor in educational failures. Racism in any form is immoral. It is clearly demeaning and wholly unacceptable behavior. It is debilitating to its victims and blocks the path to a wholesome and fulfilling educational experience for all students. This behavior cannot be reconciled with the mission of the university which is in part to cultivate the minds of students, the ethical and moral values that are basis of humane social order. Dr. William Cunningham, president of the University of Texas at Austin. The third annual symposium on civil rights was recently held with participants from education, law enforcement, the law, and social work. The two days symposium is named in honor of him and him sweat. The first African-American to attend the UT Law School after winning a four-year lawsuit

against the university back in 1950. The symposium began with the keynote address given by Dr. William Julius Wilson. Dr. Wilson is an expert on U.S. race relations, and is best known for his book entitled The Truly Disadvantaged, which approaches poverty from an employment perspective. Dr. Wilson is the loosely flower distinguished service professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Chicago. Dr. Wilson is also the president-elect of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Wilson addressed before a standing-remoning audience focused on the inner city ghetto. Dr. William J. Wilson. The theme of this conference is the paradox of civil rights. And one of the paradoxes is that conditions in the inner city ghetto have actually deteriorated since the passage of the great civil rights legislation.

Indeed, in the period which saw the sharpest increases in rates of social dislocation, for example, joblessness in the inner city, is a period that immediately followed the introduction of great society programs and anti-discrimination programs. And this has led to speculation that there must be something wrong with inner city ghetto residents. And indeed, in recent years, this view has grown, particularly in the mass media. However, a number of complex factors have contributed to these perceptions. And I would like to discuss these factors in this evening's lecture. The publication of Kenneth B. Clark, the great black social psychologist, book Dark

Ghetto in 1965, marked the beginning of a series of thoughtful studies based on urban field research of life and large inner city ghettos. These studies were distinctive, and they're focused on the severe macro structural constraints that have compelled many inner city residents to live and act in ways that do not conform to mainstream norms and expectations. They were also distinctive in their frank discussion of sensitive and controversial social issues. Problems of poverty, joblessness, and family structure were highlighted in these studies. And so too were problems of crime, sexual exploitation, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug addiction, and other forms of destructive behavior.

As Lee Rainwater, one of the noted authors of these studies, pointed out in his now classic 1966 article Crucible of Identity, the Negro Law class family, individuals and inner city ghettos creatively adapt to the system of severely restricted opportunities, in ways that keep them alive and extract what gratification they can find. But in the process of adaptation, they are constrained to behave in ways that inflict a great deal of suffering on those with whom they make their lives and on themselves. Kenneth B. Clark was equally ingenuous in his book Dark Ghetto. The Dark Ghetto is institutionalized pathology. It is chronic self perpetuating pathology, not only is a pathology of the ghetto self perpetuating, but one kind of pathology breeds another. The child born into ghettos is more likely to come into a world of broken homes and illegitimacy and this family and social instability is conducive to delinquency, drug addiction, and criminal

violence. Neither instability nor crime can be controlled by police vigilance or by reliance on the alleged deterring forces of legal punishment for the individual crimes are to be understood more as symptoms of the contagious sickness of the community itself than as a result of inherent criminal or deliberate viciousness. Dark Ghetto and the other 1960 urban field studies made it clear that although the problems of joblessness, teenage pregnancy, family dissolution, violent crime, exploitative sexual relations, drug addiction, and alcoholism are not unique to black ghettos, they are more heavily concentrated there because of a unique combination of economic marginality and rigid racial segregation. In short, they have been generated by the systematic blockage of opportunities. However, the cumulative effects of racial oppression and economic marginality take their

toll on the structure of ghetto neighborhoods which lack the resources and organizational strength needed to provide basic support for a minimal stability to their residents. As a formal means of social control, we can levels of crime and street violence increase and lead to further neighborhood deterioration. And I believe that the principal contribution of these urban field studies of the 1960s is a systematic use of research data to show how the experiences and patterns of conduct of many ghetto residents are shaped by powerful structural constraints in urban American society. These studies included a frank and concrete discussion of certain forms of behavior, usually forgotten or ignored and polite discussion, so that the reader can clearly understand the consequences of living in and impoverished, racially segregated neighborhood.

The authors of these monographs wanted both policymakers and the general public to focus not on the surface manifestation of the problems of inner city poverty alone, but more important on the ultimate source of ghetto social dislocations, that is structural inequality in American society. To them, to these authors, ghetto specific strategies represent limited if creative adaptations to deleterious structural and racial arrangements. However, this message is difficult to communicate to policymakers and the general public, because it does not resonate with the basic belief system in the United States about the nature and causes of poverty and welfare, which is we shall soon see frames, economic and social outcomes,

mainly in individualistic terms. Furthermore, it is difficult to convey, because conservative intellectuals can easily overemphasize the negative aspects of ghetto specific behavior by playing on the key individualistic and moralistic themes of this dominant American belief system. Finally, it is difficult to communicate, because some liberal scholars, fully aware of the pervasiveness of this belief system, either shy away from describing or fail to even acknowledge ghetto specific strategies and behavior, or take it a step further by denouncing not only conservative studies, but all studies that focus on such behavior. Before I elaborate on these points, let me take a close look at this belief system. Not for the writings of a few social scientists, including the works of the urban field researchers

of the 1960s, American scholars, for the most part, have failed to analyze poverty in terms of the class differences that have evolved from the structure of our national economy and those institutions of property and education that are inextricably connected with our economic and class structure. What other aspects of class inequality is a consequence not only of the differential distribution of economic or material privileges and resources, but of the differential access to culture as well. In other words, an industrial society groups tend to be stratified in terms of the material assets or resources they control. The benefits and privileges they receive from these together with the cultural experiences they evolve from a historical and existing economic and political arrangements, and the

influence they yield because of those arrangements. Accordingly, group variation in behavior norms and values is related to the variations of access to organizational channels of privilege and influence. Now, if we follow TH Marshall's classic thesis on a development of citizenship in Western Europe, we see that the more this fundamental principle, that is the organic, link tying poverty to the social class and racial structure of society is recognized or acknowledged in Western society. The more the emphasis on the rights of citizens will tend to go beyond civil and political rights to include social rights, that is, quoting Marshall, the whole reigns from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to

the full and the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society. Now, the heavy emphasis on the individual traits of the poor and on the duties of social obligations of welfare recipients is not unique to the general public. This common wisdom has been uncritically integrated in the work of many poverty researchers. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the expanding network of poverty researchers in the United States, with a notable exception of the liberal urban field researchers that I began talking about, paid considerable attention to the question of individuals' work attitudes and the association between income maintenance programs and the work ethic of the poor. They consistently ignored the effects of basic economic transformations

and cyclical processes on the work experiences and prospects of the poor. In an examination of American approaches to the study of poverty from a European perspective, Walter Corpie, a socialist on scientists from Sweden, pointed out in a 1980 article that, quote, on efforts to explain poverty and inequality in the United States, appear primarily to have been sought in terms of the characteristics of the poor, unquote. He goes on to note that whereas poverty researchers in the United States have conducted numerous studies on the work motivation of the poor, problems of human capital, and the effects of income maintenance programs on the supply of labor, they have largely neglected to study the impact of extremely high levels of post-war unemployment on impoverished Americans. Ironically, Corpie states, and I quote, in Europe, where unemployment has been considerably

lower, the concerns of politicians as well as researchers have been keyed much more strongly to the question of unemployment. It is an intellectual paradox that living in a society that has been a sea of unemployment. American poverty researchers have concentrated their research interests on the work motivation of the poor, unquote. Another irony is that despite this narrow focus, these very American researchers have consistently uncovered empirical findings that undermine not support assumptions about the negative effects of welfare received on individual initiative and motivation. Yet these assumptions persist among policymakers and the paradox of continuing high poverty during a period of general prosperity has contributed to the recently emerging consensus that welfare must be reformed. Although these conclusions should come as no surprise to poverty researchers,

familiar with the empirical literature, they should have generated a stir among congressmen, many of whom have no doubt been influenced by the highly publicized works of conservative scholars such as George Gilder, Charles Murray, and Lawrence Mead, that ascribe without direct empirical evidence, persistent poverty and other social dislocations to the negative effects of welfare and the development of a welfare culture. But apparently rigorous scientific argument is no match for the dominant belief system. The views of congressmen were apparently not significantly altered by the GAO report. The growth of social dislocations among the inner-city poor and the continued high rates of poverty have led an increasing number of policymakers to conclude that something should be done about the current welfare system to halt what they proceed to be the breakdown of the norms of citizenship. Indeed, a liberal conservative consensus on welfare reform

has recently emerged, which features two things. One, the receipt of welfare should be predicated on reciprocal responsibilities whereby societies obligated to provide assistance to welfare applicants who in turn are obligated to behave and socially approve ways. And two, able-bodied welfare recipients should be required to prepare themselves for work to search for employment and to accept jobs when they are offered. And these points of agreement have been featured in the welfare reform, was featured in the welfare reform legislation recently passed in Congress. These two themes are based on the implicit assumption that a sort of mysterious welfare ethos exists that encourages public assistance recipients to avoid their obligations as citizens to be educated to work, to support their families, and to obey the law. In other words, and in keeping with a dominant American belief system, it is the moral fabric of individuals, not the social and economic structure of society that is taken to be the

root of the problem. And every time I give this lecture, I have to pause because recently I delivered parts of this lecture at the University of Delaware, and I woke up the next day, read the front page of the student newspaper and with the headline, scholar from Chicago says that it is the moral fabric of individuals, not the social and economic structure of society that is the problem. That reporter probably woke up just as I read that line, as we shall soon see. This belief system is important for understanding the way that Americans with different ideological orientations have studied the problems of the inner city ghetto. In the latter half of the 1960s, the latter half of the 1960s was not only the period

in which the studies of the liberal urban field researchers were concentrated. It was also the period that included an extended and lively discussion of a competing approach to the study of the inner city ghetto poor. Most of this discussion was based on the work of the late anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who in a series of case studies of poor Latin American families delineated a list of cultural traits that characterized the poor. And these included male desertion and a tendency toward matri-focal families, a cult of masculinity, a use of violence, and settling quarrels, a high incidence of alcoholism, consensual unions, gregariousness, and informal credit among neighbors. And Lewis introduced a term, culture of poverty, to describe this configuration of cultural traits, which tend to emerge, he argued, in a class stratified capitalist society that have few, if any of the characteristics of a welfare state, a sizable unskilled labor

force that is poorly paid, high rates of unemployment and under-employment, few organizations, if any, to protect the interests of the poor and advantage classes who emphasize the value of upward mobility and the accumulation of wealth and who associate poverty with personal inadequacy or inferiority. Lewis argued that these conditions constitute powerful and enduring constraints on the experiences of the poor. As a poor learned to live within these constraints, he points out, they develop a design for living, a culture of poverty, if you will, that is crystallized and is passed from generation to generation. Harrington drew upon Lewis's work and used a concept culture of poverty in a non-technical and diluted way to drive home the argument that poverty in America was a vicious cycle and had become a, quote, a separate culture, another nation with its own way of life, unquote.

Indeed, Harrington argued, quote, there is a very real possibility that many, even most of the children of the poor, would become the fathers and mothers of the poor, if that were to take place in America for the first time in its history, would have a hereditary under class, unquote. Now Harrington's book created quite a, quite a splash. It was cited by the Council of Economic Advisers in its January 1964 economic report of the president, which concluded that, quote, poverty breeds poverty, a poor individual or a family has a high probability of staying poor, it further stated that quote, ugly, the ugly byproducts of poverty include ignorance, disease, delinquency, crime, irresponsibility, immorality, indifference to poor and habit of worlds, scarcely recognizable and rarely recognized by the majority of their fellow Americans. It is a world apart whose inhabitants are isolated from the mainstream of American life and alienated

from its values. Worst of all, the poverty of the fathers is visited upon the children, unquote. On this scene of intergenerational transmission of poverty was picked up and given a distinctly conservative slant in the popular media, for example, the Saturday evening post in a 1964 editorial stated that the causes of poverty, quote, lie in the self-perpetuating culture of poverty, of ignorance, apathy, resignation, defeat, and despair by which one generation of the poor infects the next, until among thousands of families now on the relief roles across the country, poverty has been perpetuated into third and fourth generations, unquote. Now considering the prevailing American belief system on a nature and causes of poverty and welfare, it is easy to understand why certain of the culture of poverty notions severed from the structural framework which for Lewis gave them their explanatory power became

popular. Moreover as a historian James T. Patterson pointed out and I quote, although some who employed the term head in mind places like Appalachia or Appalachia, most people probably thought of the new poor of the ghettos. Not because the ghettos contain a majority of the poor, only one of seven poor people live in central city slums, but because these people were fairly visible, at least in contrast to the rural poor of past generations, moreover they seemed overwhelmingly black. Their comparative visibility, their geographical concentration, and their color made cultural interpretations of poverty more plausible than they might otherwise have been, unquote. As a culture of poverty explanations grew in popularity, they were subjected to vigorous criticisms, academic critics zeroed in on Oscar Lewis's discussion of the transmission of a culture of poverty.

As all handards noted for example in his book Soulside, it is debatable but certainly possible that the father's desertion of mothers and children, a high tolerance for psychological pathology and an unwillingness to defer gratification are products of cultural transmission. However, it is much more difficult to entertain the idea that unemployment, under employment, low income, a persistent shortage of cash, and crowded living conditions directly stem from cultural learning. Handards contended that Lewis's work on cultural transmission had generated a great deal of confusion because he failed to draw a clear distinction between causes and symptoms, between what counts as objective poverty created by structural constraints, and what counts as culture as people learn to cope with objective poverty. Dr. William J. Wilson, the first source of sociology and public policy at the University

of Chicago, speaking at the third annual Hemingham sweats symposium on civil rights, hailed at the University of Texas at Austin. If you have a common or suggestive, abstract future in Black America programs, write us. Remember views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we meet again for in Black America's technical producer Cliff Hargrove, I'm Johnny O. Hanson, Jr., please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America cassettes. Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in Black America cassettes.

Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm Johnny O. Hanson, Jr., join me this week on in Black America. The authors of these monographs wanted both policymakers and the general public to focus not on the surface manifestation of the problems of inner-city poverty alone. The third annual Heamingham Sweats Symposium this week on in Black America.