Black Family Agonistes
Tucker, William
returns. Even so, it isn't foolproof, and thus during that adjustment period Lehrman would have the Treasury Secretary keep close track of the activity of marginal North American gold mines,...
...Sure enough, they found that black children who don't have fathers at home test significantly lower on intelligence tests than otherwise identical black children who do have fathers in the home...
...The National Press Club readmitted Stone in 1981, 33 years after he resigned in protest for being refused service when he brought a black friend (a former federal judge and aide to the Secretary of War) to lunch...
...It was to be a "radical paper, fighting the witch Robert Asahina is senior editor at Simon and Schuster, and theater critic for the Hudson Review...
...But, of course, once middle-class black leaders do recognize the problem, they will find themselves on the other horn of their dilemma...
...As Thomas Sowell points out, this is not anything unusual in American history...
...The optimal price of gold would be the "clearing price" of mining an ounce out of one of those mines at full production...
...Today, at the age of 76, he's lived long enough to see at least half of his prophecy come true...
...My guess is that Wanniski and Lehrman are both right...
...Now, of course, somebody is probTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 15 ably already saying, "But this whole argument is wrong...
...Lehrman uses the gold mine as a proxy for full employment in the economy just as one uses the price of gold as a proxy for the general price level...
...Unfortunately, black people aren't thinking in these terms...
...Getting back to gold will involve political courage, and some attention to the return-price details...
...All anybody ever talked about was how to get other people to do these things for them, and how to get more money out of the government...
...Reagan still has doubts as November nears, there are plenty of ways to test the water...
...I identify E.T...
...Wanniski is right that even a freeze would produce substantial benefits, and that within the $350-500 range, the price debate probably does not much matter...
...The answer offered at the Nashville "Summit Conference" was curiously ambiguous...
...You don't want to go down, do you...
...I don't see why...
...These people perceive--correctly--that their babies are worth income, and can often quote what their welfare benefits are going to be right down to the last dollar...
...But the rest of the time, the black these new social misalignments, however crippling, are already starting to produce their own vested interests that are going to be very, very hard to dislodge if anybody ever decides to do something about it...
...Asa Hilliard, professor of urban education at Georgia State University, outlined his interpretation of the movie E.T...
...Both grew less encouraging when gold fell below $400 last summer, and the prolonged $375 price has driven stocks down and interest rates up...
...by 1968, 40,000...
...The 200-or-so black professionals who spent three days discussing the black family last May on the Fisk University campus spent a lot of time playing at being oppressed...
...I didn't see you last night," said my fellow rider...
...But perhaps it isn't even fair to ask black people to think about these things...
...Old iconoclasts never die, they just become icons themselves...
...Paeans to Stone's political prescience began appearing in mid-decade, first in the radical press (Ramparts) and the liberal journals of opinion (the New Republic, Commonweal), then in the news magazines (profiles in both Newsweek and Time), finally in the slick magazines (Life and even McCall's...
...Transformance...
...It is simply kicking black men out of the house and taking in the government as the breadwinner...
...They were here before the Mayflower, and they still haven't been given the chance to suo~eed...
...Yeah, I was looking for you, too...
...Gutman relates tragic accounts of black men and women walking up and down the countryside after the Civil War searching for wives, husbands, or children from whom they had become separated during the chaos of the conflict...
...Robert Asahina I.F...
...That was in 1971, the year he shut down LF...
...They sometimes seem almost inexorably tied to the Old South--even more than the New South itself is today...
...Pained faces, set in masks of despair, listened as speaker after speaker recited the indictment that charged white America, once again, with consigning black America to a permanent, internal exile...
...Do we have to go on this way...
...We know the entire black community is under siege from a hostile society," affirmed one speaker...
...All right, 1 admit it, I can already hear the American Civil Liberties Union--those undying "friends" of 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 black people--screaming that women have a "constitutional right" to have babies without latching on to a husband, and that teenage girls have a "constitutional right" to get pregnant any time they want...
...For years," McCall's gushed, "Stone was treated as a social and political pariah in Washington, because he stood up for civil liberties and for racial justice and against witchhunting...
...On the one hand, they remain hypersensitive to every one of life's little frustrations, quickly identifying every adverse event as some new form of "discrimination...
...Mao Tsetung's deliberate efforts to break up the nuclear family on the Chinese rural communes didn't have even a fraction of the effect that contemporary American social policies have had on black Americans...
...I think the internal exile to which most black people seem to feel they are relegated is imaginary at best, self-imposed at worst...
...Until they can resolve these problems themselves, I doubt if there is much that white people can do for them...
...Thus, as Sowell fervently points out, black people are not at all that different from any other ethnic group in America--certainly not as different as they would like to imagine themselves...
...hunt and the cold war," the product of a self-described "independent c a p i t a l i s t . . , a wholly independent newspaperman...
...We are all part of one big black family," declared John Jacob, president of the Urban League...
...In 1981 Stone was also featured on "Sixty Minutes," and Ed Bradley praised his "sincerity and dedication to free thought...
...What this means for the future of our cities, and for American society in general, is something that 1 don't like to spend very much time thinking about...
...That is why we have an epidemic of black teenage pregnancy...
...A documentary, LF...
...Stone's Weekly, narrated by Tom Wicker, was made in 1973...
...I t says to every black female teenager, 'You may be poor, you may have family problems, and you may be discouraged about your future...
...I'm sorry...
...One piece of evidence in Lehrman's favor is the markets themselves...
...We must maintain our allegiance to that family...
...To me, this simply says two things: 1) black people still refuse to recognize that it is the incredibly misguided "charity" of the welfare system that is breaking up their families...
...That just about says it...
...Everyone laughed, and as the elevator moved again, my companion shouted back through the doors: William Tucker is a contributing editor of Harper's...
...His 70th birthday was celebrated by 350 people in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza...
...Hell, no," the other said, stepping off just as the doors closed, and then, dropping into the vernacular, he intoned, " l ' v e been down all my life...
...Either move would invigorate the economy, help the President's reelection chances, and set the stage for a firmer move to gold during or after the campaign...
...His old part-time position of Washington correspondent for the Nation, which he held between 1940 and 1946, had been filled by someone else...
...I was probably in the wrong mood when I attended the conference, l had just read Thomas Sowell's brilliant book, Ethnic America, which, like everything I have read by Sowell, left me with a sense that I would never quite see the world in the same way again...
...After all, for all the miseries and tribulations they have undergone in American history, it is an almost unbearable irony to think that a wrongheaded "charity" has sunk them into an even deeper poverty...
...What's a few hours waiting in welfare lines, compared to a lifetime of having to put up with an unpredictable, emotionally draining, potentially violent man...
...Heads, wearied with grief, nodded as a few responded, "Amen...
...Regan did in late 1982...
...He never forgot who he was...
...The current theory is that fathers play a very crucial role in developing a child's native intellectual abilities...
...husband...
...Over 50 percent of all black children are now being raised in "single-parent households" --meaning by unmarried black women...
...But if you have a baby right now, we will give you your own apartment, free medical care, food stamps, and a regular income over the next 20 years...
...I'm not going to do another one of those hatchet jobs on the black middle class...
...But I simply can no longer believe that white America is the main cause of black pegple's problems...
...Then they will have lost their "black identity...
...Where to freeze, though, can only be viewed as a fullemployment problem...
...More than half the black children born in this country today are illegitimate...
...E.T...
...When you experiment on an individual, the worst that can happen is that the person will die...
...Every year, one speaker noted, more black girls drop out of high school to have a baby than graduate from college...
...I f you live long enough," I.F...
...I think those people are terribly brave, terribly bold, and maneuvering brilliantly for a group that is caught in a cruel crosscurrent of social forces...
...Even so, it isn't foolproof, and thus during that adjustment period Lehrman would have the Treasury Secretary keep close track of the activity of marginal North American gold mines, those mines that are the last to be brought into production as the price of gold nears a fullemployment level...
...It is probably more accurate to say that black people were once America's peasantry...
...This survival continued right through the 1930s...
...And last year, Stone made the front page of the "Style" section of the Washington Post for his "latest scoop": his new translation and interpretation of Greek philosophy, which led him to attack Socrates and Plato in a crowded two-hour lecture at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies...
...But it's no more impossible than picking up a telephone and saying, "let's do i t . " [] William Tucker BLACK FAMILY AGONISTES How c a n it be said t h a t b l a c k f a m i l i e s a r e " b r e a k i n g u p " when t h e y a r e n o l o n g e r even forming...
...Lehrman is right that there is a better way to go, and that arguments for gold-at-any-price may not convince a hesitant Donald Regan and Ronald Reagan to take the plunge...
...Stone's Weekly (actually biweekly since 1968), the four-page Washington newsletter of which he was the sole editor, writer, researcher, copy editor, proofreader, typographer, assistant to the circulation manager (his wife, Esther), and chief PR man...
...But they played very hard...
...So starting his own journal was, as he put it, a "last resort...
...Now let me ask you this: Is there a black leader or civil-liberties attorney anywhere in this whole land who is ready to start a class-action suit to reform the welfare system on behalf of all black children, on the grounds that they have a "constitutional right" to develop their genetically endowed intelligence by growing up with a father in their home...
...A great number of black people live near the margins of subsistence...
...I f there is, 1 have a message for you...
...They didn't have the inherent suspicions to resist government assistance and avoid sympathetic bureaucrats like the plague--as many ethnic groups did then and still do today...
...He won a George Polk Award in 1971 ("my first Establishment award," he said...
...and 2) no welfare payments should be made for any baby born before the mother turns 21...
...In particular, a whole phalanx of black women have now picked up the argument that "the nuclear family is an outmoded institution," and that families consisting of only a mother and her assorted children is the wave of the future--or, alternately, a return to some mythical African past...
...After ten years, it had 20,000 subscribers...
...But a society is an eternal organism...
...homeless, aimless men inhabiting that netherworld known as "the street"--is 'going to become a permanent American institution...
...The causes of the disintegration of the black family are about as difficult to find as the sports page in today's newspaper...
...Thus, unless something is done awfully quickly, it appears that the new black social alignment--welfare mothers and their children in the home...
...Stone started receiving other kinds of recognition as well...
...If the government can make a better offer, why refuse it...
...One of the things black people clearly fear most is that they may turn out not to be unique after all, but just plain old ordinary Americans...
...T h i s devastating, unprecedented pattern of government "paternalism" is searingly illustrated by one of the most exhaustive studies ever made on American social patterns: The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925, published in 1977 by right through the backlash against Reconstruction and into the early years of the twentieth century...
...The facts about the black family, on the other hand, are brutal...
...No, the black family was more than strong enough to survive slavery...
...They are simply rational human beings making the most intelligent choice on how to improve their economic condition...
...I am prepared to sit down anywhere with you at the soonest possible convenience and buy you a drink...
...and 2) Every year more black girls drop out of high school to have a baby than graduate from college...
...Well, this is going down...
...All this could be merely a longoverdue acknowledgement of a prematurely right man of the Left...
...All we have to do is change a few incentives...
...Everyone in such societies--from rich plantation owner to indigent tenant farmer-turns his nose up at shopkeepers, manufacturers, and anyone who engages in " t r a d e . " As 1 sat among this huge delegation of college professors, hospital administrators, doctors, lawyers, and foundation executives for three days, I heard only the vaguest references to the possibility that blacks might start their own businesses, create jobs to employ other blacks, or develop specific occupational skills, the way the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Italians, Jamaicans, and most other immigrant groups have done...
...Yet what do blacks themselves offer as an explanation for this social devastation...
...with black people," he explained solemnly...
...during its final year, more than 70,000...
...It was just not strong enough to survive the welfare system...
...Black people are not an immigrant group...
...These teenage girls who drop out of school and have babies are not ignorant, they are not morally weak, and they are not sexually lascivious," he says...
...To be fair, there is among black leaders a growing undercurrent of recognition of this state of affairs...
...When you get right down to it, for a woman who wants to have a baby, the whole business of finding a husband to support her while she takes care of the children (or to take care of the children while she supports them) is really a tedious, potentially fruitless, undertaking...
...Advertisements for lost spouses and children were still appearing in black newspapers as late as the 1880s...
...It was just not strong enough to survive the welfare system...
...But here's a countersuggestion...
...as an "Afrocentric family's new social pattern was defended as "one of our own institutions" that is being "called deviant because it departs from the norms that white society tries to impose on us...
...This is a social tragedy of truly frightening proportions...
...The fullemployment price of gold, logically, is the price at which idle resources of production are brought back into use...
...Long before then, Stone ceased to be a journalistic outsider...
...Some psychologists decided to test the idea, and when they set out to find a large group of children who didn't have fathers--wouldn't you know it--the first place they looked was among American blacks...
...When you experiment on it, whatever the results, it is going to go on living...
...The tragedy occurred because blacks trusted the system...
...They will come under fire as "elitists" and "sellouts" of the black lower class...
...Interest rates and stocks both posted their healthiest movement as the price of gold surged to $450 and $500 from the fall of 1982 to March of 1983...
...The University of Pennsylvania, which Stone'had left in 1927 after three years as anundergraduate, gave him a bachelor's degree (Class of '28) in a one-man graduation ceremony in 1975...
...As we hit the second-floor mezzanine, the doors opened and there stood another middle-aged black professional...
...My wife and I have just become parents, and we've started reading a lot of those "First-Three-Years-of-Li f e " - t y p e books...
...They have climbed up the ladder by working and saving, specializing in certain occupations (Chinese laundries, Korean groceries), passing their "human capital" on from one generation to the next, and above all, keeping nuclear families together...
...Then, as the other man started to get in the elevator, my companion said: "Well, you're not getting on, are you...
...What was completely missing is the understanding that black families are not really "breaking up" at all...
...This time it is not merely their freedoms and opportunities that have been taken away, but their very families--the institution that anthropologists now believe was originally responsible for human evolution itself...
...Instead, black families are no longer Herbert Gutman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York...
...STONE, SELF-CRAFTED ICON A long, hard look at a venerated Old Left/New Left troublemaker...
...As Sowell points out, they have been the least successful of any immigrant group that migrated from Europe or Asia, even though they've been here the longest...
...It has never happened before in history...
...In fact, if there was anything that came out of the Black Family Summit, it was that black people obviously feel an enormous ambivalence about the possibility that they actually are being assimilated into the mainstream of American culture...
...Every ethnic group in America has started near the margins of poverty...
...Well then, it must look like up to you...
...In truth, Thomas Sowell and Waiter Williams, the other leading black dissident economist who is trying to encourage blacks to forget about slavery and treat themselves as just another striving ethnic group, are swimming upstream...
...Yet at the same time, almost every speaker expressed the anxiety that black people might be losing their identity by 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 becoming too assimilated by American culture...
...And the New York Post, for which he had written editorials from 1933 to 1939, was--under the command of a former PM colleague, James Wechslermno longer congenial to the radical politics Stone still espoused at the height of the McCarthy era...
...At one point, an academic economist, who was presenting the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill as the solution to black family problems, looked around the room and whispered to the audience, "Walter Williams isn't here today, is he...
...We are all in one fashion or another dependent on the government...
...Stone founded the Weekly in 1953 partly because he couldn't get a job anywhere else...
...No amount of "counseling," "individual therapy," and "sex-education courses"-the usual nostrums paraded out in Nashville--is ever going to steer this epidemic even slightly off course...
...Half the time it was the usual litany of joblessness, discrimination, poor education, poor housing, and the "failure of the government to give us our s h a r e " - all of which is readily interpreted as a sinister plot by white America to destroy black America...
...It should be noted, of course, that the devastation caused by AFDC is in no way particular to blacks...
...For Lehrman, in other words, the problem of a changing price level is resolved by freezing the price of gold in the future...
...A firmer test would be to urge the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates until gold hits $500...
...If you have another baby soon after, we will increase your allotment.' "How many black men--poor or affluent--can match that o f f e r ? " Gilder asks...
...One study of ethnic groups in Boston in the early part of the century revealed that the rate of "broken families" among blacks was actually lower than among most other ethnic groups--only around 10 percent, at a time when illegitimacy in Irish families was running over 30 percent...
...Nobody is suggesting scrapping the entire welfare system and turning women, children, the elderly, and the crippled out into the street...
...Gutman illustrated that, contrary to all the banter about contemporary black family problems being the "legacy of slavery" or a "product of African institutions," black nuclear families actually remained heroically intact, not only through slavery, but Thomas Sowell's and Walter Williams's presence hung like disembodied spirits over the proceedings in Nashville...
...He might simply talk about a monetary reform, as Mr...
...1 was riding with a fiftyish black college professor--prosperous, articulate, intelligent...
...It is even worse among Puerto Ricans, and has been seen almost everywhere that the welfare system has gotten its foot in the door...
...I ' m going up to my room...
...F o r me, the prototypical moment of the Urban League/NAACP's "Joint Summit Conference on the Crisis in the Black Family" came as I was riding down one of the plate-glass, open-view elevators that spider up and down the walls of the stunning, 23-story atrium inside the Nashville Hyatt Regency...
...They will be charged with "talking the white man's talk," just as they now accuse Sowell and Williams of "adopting the language of the oppressors" and "going over to the other side...
...9 In reality, the "black family" is not "breaking up" at all...
...This would be more in line with the "family allowances" offered in all other Western countries--which are not suffering from epidemics of family break-up...
...About 75 percent of all poor black children are in these "families...
...As one speaker in Nashville put it, "Every immigrant group has climbed the ladder by forcing the government to give up its share of wealth in American society...
...She was looking through one the other day and came across a section about the importance of fathers in developing children's intelligence...
...How many teenage girls anywhere--black or white, poor or affluent--can afford their own apartment and pay their own medical expenses at age 16...
...The three left-wing papers he worked for between 1940 and 1952--PM, the New York Star, and the New York Daily Compass-had folded...
...They simply marry the state...
...What black women are discovering is one of those inherent biological truths long suppressed by social conventions...
...What is different about them (and about Puerto Ricans, who are rapidly following in their footsteps) is that they have become entrapped in the sinister blandishments of the welfare system...
...It would simply restore the original intent to a program that was designed to help "widows and orphans," and was never conceived as becoming an outright subsidy to illegitimacy and " s i n g l e - p a r e n t families...
...The black family was more than strong enough to survive the ordeal of" slavery...
...The characteristic of any landed aristocratic society, of course, is that it has no middle class...
...Welfare work'r that I have talked to say that when they sometimes try to encourage teenagers to have abortions, or to put the children up for adoption, the girls and their families treat them as if they were crazy...
...On the other hand, groups that suffered discrimination and political oppression that was often worse than anything black people have undergone since slavery--the Chinese and Japanese off the West Coast, for example--have ignored politics, put their nose to the grindstone, and are now significantly above the average of even white Americans in economic success...
...As William Graham Sumner said, "It is dangerous to tinker with societies in the same way we carry out experiments in the medical field...
...Hey, Charlie, how you been...
...1 suppose that is right...
...integrated the white neighborhood, but he always kept his mind on going home...
...If Mr...
...When it came to discussing the actual mechanisms of preventing family break-ups, the talk was even more irrelevant...
...When women start "families," they no longer look for a The black family was more than strong enough to survive slavery...
...Widespread opposition to the Vietnam war, which he had criticized from its start, had made him something of a cult hero in the sixties...
...There was a lot of chatter about divorce rates, similar break-ups among white families, and the need for " b e t t e r communications between family members...
...Stone began with 5,000 subscribers and claimed the Weekly was in the black from the very first issue...
...Black social patterns were ruined only when liberals arrived on the scene in the 1930s with their "Aid to Families With Dependent Children" and other blandishments to "let the state do for people what they aren't capable of doing for themselves...
...Yip" Harburg ("Over the Rainbow") wrote him a birthday song...
...Stone once said, "you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had...
...Almost half of these--23 percent of all black children--are born to unwed teenage mothers...
...forming...
...Ironically, the only other group that did use this strategy--politics instead of economics--to climb the social ladder is the Irish...
...Here are two simple suggestions: 1) welfare payments should be made only to intact families, unless either the husband or wife is deceased...
...During the last several years, however, he has found himself not only socially and politically acceptable, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 17...
...The Weekly picked up 5,000 subscribers after he was a guest on the "Dick Cavett" show in 1969...
...t h e welfare system makes an irresistible offer to every eligible female over the age of 16," says George Gilder, whose totally ignored book, Visible Man, is one of the most sensitive, sympathetic, and clear-eyed portraits ever made of black welfare culture...
...I'm not even going to try to cope with the legal sophistries of that one...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
