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The Coming White Underclass

Charles Murray

1 Every once in a while the sky really is falling, and this seems to be the case with the latest national figures on illegitimacy. The unadorned statistic is that, in 1991, 1.2 million children were born to unmarried mothers, within a hair of 30 percent of all live births. How high is 30 percent? About four percentage points higher than the black illegitimacy rate in the early 1960s that motivated Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write his famous mem­orandum on the breakdown of the black family.

2 The 1991 story for blacks is that illegitimacy has now reached 68 percent of births to black women. In inner cities, the figure is typically in excess of 80 percent. Many of us have heard these numbers so often that we are inured. It is time to think about them as if we were back in the mid-1960s with the young Moynihan and asked to predict what would happen if the black illegitimacy rate were 68 percent.

3 Impossible we would have said. But if the proportion of fatherless boys in a given com­munity were to reach such levels, surely the culture must be Lord of the Flies writ large,the values of unsocialized male adolescents made norms—physical violence, immediate gratification and predatory sex. That is the culture now taking over the black inner city.

4 But the black story, however dismaying, is old news. The new trend that threatens the U.S. is white illegitimacy. Matters have not yet quite gotten out of hand, but they are on the brink. If we want to act, now is the time.

5 In 1991, 707,502 babies were born to single white women, representing 22 percent of white births. The elite wisdom holds that this phenomenon cuts across social classes, as if the increase in Murphy Browns3 were pushing the trendline. Thus, a few months ago, a Census Bureau study of fertility among all American women got headlines for a few days because it showed that births to single women with college degrees doubled in the last decade to 6 percent from 3 percent. This is an interesting trend, but of minor social im­portance. The real news of that study is that the proportion of single mothers with less than a high school education who gave birth jumped to 48 percent from 35 percent in a single decade.

6 These numbers are dominated by whites. Breaking down the numbers by race (using data not available in the published version), women with college degrees contribute only 4 percent of white illegitimate babies, while women with a high school education or less con­tribute 82 percent. Women with family incomes of $75,000 or more contribute 1 percent of white illegitimate babies, while women with family incomes under $20,000 contribute 69 percent.

7 The National Longitudinal Study of Youth, a Labor Department study that has trackedmore than 10,000 youths since 1979, shows an even more dramatic picture.For whitewomen below the poverty line in the year prior to giving birth, 44 percent of births havebeen illegitimate, compared with only six percent for women above the poverty line. Whiteillegitimacy is overwhelmingly a lower-class phenomenon.



8 This brings us to the emergence of a white underclass. In raw numbers, European-American whites are the ethnic group with the most people in poverty, most illegitimatechildren, most women on welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for seriouscrimes. And yet whites have not had an "underclass" as such, because the whites whomight qualify have been scattered among the working class. Instead, whites have had"white trash" concentrated in a few streets on the outskirts of town, sometimes a Skid Rowof unattached white men in the large cities. But these scatterings have seldom been largeenough to make up a neighborhood. An underclass needs a critical mass, and white Amer­ica has not had one.

9 But now the overall white illegitimacy rate is 22 percent. The figure in low-income,working-class communities may be twice that. How much illegitimacy can a community tol­erate? Nobody knows, but the historical fact is that the trendlines on black crime, dropoutfrom the labor force, and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward as the overall black illegit­imacy rate passed 25 percent.

10 The causal connection is murky—I blame the revolution in social policy during that period, while others blame the sexual revolution, broad shifts in cultural norms, or structural changes in the economy. But the white illegitimacy rate is approaching that same problem­atic 25 percent region at a time when social policy is more comprehensively wrongheaded than it was in the mid-1960s, and the cultural and sexual norms are still more degraded.

1The white underclass will begin to show its face in isolated ways. Look for certain schools in white neighborhoods to get a reputation as being unteachable, with large num­bers of disruptive students and indifferent parents. Talk to the police; listen for stories aboutwhite neighborhoods where the incidenceof domestic disputes and casual violence hasbeen shooting up. Look for white neighborhoods with high concentrations of drag activityand large numbers of men who have dropped out of the labor force. Some readers will re­call reading the occasional news story about such places already.

12 As the spatial concentration of illegitimacy reaches critical mass, we should expect thedeterioration to be as fast among low-income whites in the 1990s as it was among low-income blacks in the 1960s. My proposition is that illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time—more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else. Doing something about it is not just one more item on the American policy agenda, but should be at the top. Here is what to do.

13 In the calculus of illegitimacy, the constants are that boys like to sleep with girls andthat girls think babies are endearing. Human societies have historically channeled these el­emental forces of human behavior via thick walls of rewards and penalties that constrained the overwhelming majority of births to take place within marriage. The past 30 years have seen those walls cave in. It is time to rebuild them.

14 The ethical underpinning for the policies I am about to describe is this: Bringing a child 14 into the world is the most important thing that most human beings ever do. Bringing a child into the world when one is not emotionally or financially prepared to be a parent is wrong. The child deserves society's support. The parent does not.

15 The social justification is this: A society with broad legal freedoms depends crucially on strong nongovernmental institutions to temper and restrain behavior. Of these, mar­riage is paramount. Either we reverse the current trends in illegitimacy—especially white illegitimacy—or America must, willy-nilly, become an unrecognizably authoritarian, socially segregated, centralized state.

16 To restore the rewards and penalties of marriage does not require social engineering. Rather, it requires that the state stop interfering with the natural forces that have done the job quite effectively for millennia. Some of the changes I will describe can occur at the fed­eral level; others would involve state laws. For now, the important thing is to agree on what should be done.

17 I begin with the penalties, of which the most obvious are economic. Throughout human history, a single woman with a small child has not been a viable economic unit. Not being a viable economic unit, neither have the single woman and child been a legitimate social unit. In small numbers they must be a net drain on the community's resources. In large numbers, they must destroy the community's capacity to sustain itself. Mirabiledictu, com­munities everywhere have augmented the economic penalties of single parenthood with se­vere social stigma.

18 Restoring economic penalties translates into the first and central policy prescription: to end all economic support for single mothers. The AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) payment goes to zero. Single mothers are not eligible for subsidized housing or for food stamps. An assortment of other subsidies and in-kind benefits disappear. Since uni­versal medical coverage appears to be an idea whose time has come, I will stipulate that all children have medical coverage. But with that exception, the signal is loud and unmistak­able. From society's perspective, to have a baby that you cannot care for yourself is pro­foundly irresponsible, and the government will no longer subsidize it.

19 How does a poor young mother survive without government support? The same way she has since time immemorial. If she wants to keep a child, she must enlist support from her parents, boyfriend, siblings, neighbors, church or philanthropies. She must get support from somewhere, anywhere, other than the government. The objectives are threefold.

20 First, enlisting the support of others raises the probability that other mature adults are going to be involved with the upbringing of the child, and this is a greatgood in itself.

21 Second, the need to find support forces a self-selection process. One of the most shortsighted excuses made for current behavior is that an adolescent who is utterly unprepared to be a mother "needs someone to love." Childish yearning isn't a good enough selection device. We need to raise the probability that a young single woman who keeps her child is doing so volitionally and thoughtfully. Forcing her to find a way of supporting the child does this. It will lead many young women who shouldn't be mothers to place their babies for adoption. This is good. It will lead others, watching what happens to their sisters, to take steps not to get pregnant. This is also good. Many others will get abortions. Whether this is good depends on what one thinks of abortion.

22 Third, stigma will regenerate. The pressure on relatives and communities, to pay for the folly of their children will make an illegitimate birth the socially horrific act it used tobe, and getting a girl pregnant something boys do at the risk of facing a shotgun. Stigma and shotgun marriages may or may not be good for those on the receiving end, but their deterrent effect on others is wonderful—and indispensable.

23 What about women who can find no support but keep the baby anyway? There are laws already on the books about the right of the state to take a child from a neglectful par­ent. We have some 360,000 children in foster care because of them. Those laws would still apply. Society's main response, however, should be to make it as easy as possible for those mothers to place their children for adoption at infancy. To that end, state governments must strip adoption of the nonsense that has encumbered it in recent decades.

24 The first step is to make adoption easy for any married couple who can show reasonable evidence of having the resources and stability to raise a child. Lift all restrictions on interracial adoption. Ease age limitations for adoptive parents.

25The second step is to restore the traditional legal principle that placing a child for adoption means irrevocably relinquishing all legal rights to the child. The adoptive parents are parents without qualification. Records are sealed until the child reaches adulthood, at which time they may be unsealed only with the consent of biological child and parent.

26 Given these straightforward changes—going back to the old way, which worked—there is reason to believe that some extremely large proportion of infants given up by their mothers will be adopted into good homes. This is true not just for flawless blue-eyed blond infants but for babies of all colors and conditions. The demand for infants to adopt is huge.

27 Some small proportion of infants and larger proportion of older children will not be adopted. For them, the government should spend lavishly on orphanages. I am not recom­mending Dickensian barracks. In 1993, we know a lot about how to provide a warm, nurturing environment for children, and getting rid of the welfare system frees up lots of money to do it. Those who find the "orphanages" objectionable may think of them as 24-hour-a-day preschools. Those who prattle about the importance of keeping children with their bi­ological mothers may wish to spend some time in a patrol car or with a social worker seeing what the reality of life with welfare-dependent biological mothers can be like.

28 Finally, there is the matter of restoring the rewards of marriage. Here, I am pessimistic about how much government can do and optimistic about how little it needs to do. The re­wards of raising children within marriage are real and deep. The main task is to shepherd Children through adolescence so that they can reach adulthood—when they are likely to recognize the value of those rewards—free to take on marriage and family. The main pur­pose of the penalties for single parenthood is to make that task easier.

29 One of the few concrete things that the government can do to increase the regards of marriage is make the tax code favor marriage and children. Those of us who are nervous about Ming the tax code for social purposes can advocate making the tax code at least neutral.

30 A more abstract but ultimately crucial step in raising the rewards of marriage is to makemarriage once again the sole legal institution through which parental rights and responsibilities are defined and exercised.

31 Little boys should grow up knowing from their earliest memories that if they want to h.ivc any rights whatsoever regarding a child that they sire—more vividly, if they wantto grow up to be a daddy—they must marry. Little girls should grow up knowing from their earliest memories that if they want to have any legal claims whatsoever on the father of their children, they must marry. A marriage certificate should establish that a man and a woman have entered into a unique legal relationship. The changes in recent years that have blurred the distinctiveness of marriage are subtly but importantly destructive.

32 Together, these measures add up to a set of signals, some with immediate and tangible 32 consequences, others with long-term consequences, still others symbolic. They should be supplemented by others based on a reexamination of divorce law and its consequences.

33 That these policy changes seem drastic and unrealistic is a peculiarity of our age, not 33 of the policies themselves. With embellishments, I have endorsed the policies that were the uncontroversial law of the land as recently as John Kennedy's presidency. Then, Amer­ica's elites accepted as a matter of course that a free society such as America's can sustain itself only through virtue and temperance in the people, that virtue and temperance depend centrally on the socialization of each new generation, and that the socialization of each gen­eration depends on the matrix of care and resources fostered by marriage.

34 Three decades after that consensus disappeared, we face an emerging crisis. The long, 34 steep climb in black illegitimacy has been calamitous in black communities and painful for the nation. The reforms 1 have described will work for blacks as for whites, and have been needed for years. But the brutal truth is that American society as a whole could survive when illegitimacy became epidemic within a comparably small ethnic minority. It cannot survive the same epidemic among whites.

 


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 809


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