Assessing the Black Mood
ROGERS, TOMMY w.
Assessing the Black Mood LIFE STYLES IN THE BLACK GHETTO BY William McCord, John Howard, Bernard Friedberg, and Edwin Hardwood W. W. Norton. 334 pp. $2.95. Reviewed by TOMMY W....
...Yet what the picture on television portrays, of course, is not the hardworking lower-middle-class father葉he American ideal until the 1950s傭ut the lush consumption of the upper-middle-class family, without the effort necessary to afford it...
...The impact of urbanization has opened up new collective avenues of expression among Negroes...
...and depth interviews with 620 people, representing different response patterns to ghetto life...
...Paradoxically, poverty has become a public issue largely because things have been getting better...
...Still others follow the path of a "white folks' " Negro or seek salvation in an otherwordly church, the Black Muslims or alcohol...
...Elliot Liebow's recent study, Tally's Corner, raises doubts about the degree of social solidarity enjoyed by lower-class Negroes...
...If the currently moribund spirit of reconciliation and goodwill cannot be revived, a new civil war may well be in the making...
...The authors note that the rate of alcoholism among urban blacks is two to four times higher than among whites, and that Negroes account for well over half of the known drug addicts...
...Response patterns range from the "stoics"-who utilize cults, "cool" fronts, passivity, or religion to adapt to their circumstances葉o criminals, civil rights militants, exploiters, and just plain hardworking laborers and professionals...
...In Houston, the authors interviewed a number who had gained such a reputation: five grocery store owners, a reputed head of a numbers racket, three apartment house owners, three undertakers, two physicians, two night club owners, a house painter, two pharmacists, four loan brokers, two policemen, two insurance salesmen, three owners of housing appliance concerns, one minister, and two liquor store owners...
...On a first-name basis with the state governor, a deacon in his church, contributor of large sums to the naacp, and an active participant in Negro lodges, a fraternity, and charitable causes, Vaughn outwardly appears to be a model of respectability...
...Conceivably, this will hasten a national recognition of the authors' conclusion that the only lasting solution to the racial dilemma is "for whites and Negroes to work together to improve their common lot as Americans...
...The incidence of psychosis in the ghettos, particularly schizophrenia, is roughly three times that of white communities...
...On a higher economic level, the Negro middle class, unlike the upwardly mobile Jews, never established a strong foothold in small business enterprises, which would have generated capital for strengthening neighborhood service and welfare organizations...
...Excluding the black ghettos, it would appear that addiction has probably declined since that time...
...Reviewed by TOMMY W. ROGERS Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northwestern State College of Louisiana When Arthur Raper's classic Preface to Peasantry appeared in 1936, the Negro was still predominantly a rural being...
...Nevertheless, they clearly refer to economic discrimination against the poor by charging them higher prices, or through the conscious perpetration of fraud...
...The Black Belt cotton communities, dominated by the plantation, local courthouse politics and a configuration of evangelical religious and political provincialism, provided the arena for the "American dilemma" of race relations and its social corollaries...
...Since heroin deadens sexual desire, and most addicts appear to feel great ambivalence about heterosexual expression, the choice of this drug may reflect a desire to avoid male-female entanglements...
...The authors maintain that in contrast to the European immigrant, whose plight was primarily one of cultural conflict, the social pathology of the urban Negro community is more strongly connected to its economic plight...
...Tragically, some blacks attain great wealth by exploiting their own people...
...50 years ago...
...Nor has anyone really explained satisfactorily why a ghetto merchant is engaged in "exploitation" if the value of his goods does not go above and beyond the price he was paid...
...They and their families represent the last vestiges of a once-integrated community...
...Blumstein's Department Store, for instance, was established in 1886...
...This is only one explanation, yet it may be a key to understanding why one man becomes an addict while others choose alternate routes of escape from their plight...
...Although members of the black middle class organized early to combat racial discrimination, this effort was primarily on their own behalf, with the aim of improving class status rather than the general welfare...
...Yet Vaughn righteously attributes his success to "hard work, careful planning, and keeping my nose to the grindstone...
...The center of his life, he claims, is his local Methodist Episcopal church...
...In some urban ghettos narcotics have become a major path of escape for young males, so that addiction has become indelibly merged with the ghetto subculture...
...While there are numerous contrasts between today's urban Negroes and the immigrant ethnic groups, perhaps the most obvious difference involves the pattern of family life and interest in community institutions...
...This represents a distinctive historical change, for at the turn of the century only one minority group葉he Chinese-were heavy drug users...
...In today's highly charged racial climate, the terms "exploiter" and "exploitation" are often difficult to define objectively...
...One of the most interesting chapters concerns ghetto exploitation...
...It may be, they state, "that those Negroes who experience the greatest feelings of injustice are most likely to seek escape from their sense of power-lessness by taking to alcohol...
...It gives me comfort to know that I am in touch with the Lord...
...If it is true that boys raised without fathers fail to develop an adequately functioning superego, then the black youth who hurls a brick at a cop is not just reacting in anger to white society...
...Far from being demoralized or lacking normative codes that regulate individual behavior, they participated in the large urban society through these intermediate forms and possessed as much solidarity as other groups...
...The authors suggest that a primary function of alcoholism among blacks is to appease their great anger toward white society...
...On another level, he is discharging aggression toward both the father who was not there and the mother whose hostility to inadequate men raised doubts about his own masculinity...
...when cultural conflict was so prominent in discussions of slum problems, absolute poverty was fairly widespread...
...The second part of the book focuses on individual reactions to life in the urban ghetto...
...All this is combined with insightful and systematic exposition, making the volume an important link in the chain of evidence some future historian may use to understand the blacks of today...
...On the other hand, Negroes commit suicide only about one half as often as whites...
...Distrust could easily develop over women in a way that it could not have occurred with Whyte's Italians, who had strong convictions about the sanctity of marriage and made clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" girls...
...Drawing on recent studies, the authors observe that "the typical Negro addict has enormous difficulty in 'becoming a man' and . . . this confusion about his sexual role lies at the heart of the problem...
...Tenant, field hand, domestic servant, sharecropper, small farm owner or operator葉hese were the occupations that characterized the life styles appropriate to the setting...
...Films and television have engendered a view of wealth as almost something of an inherited right because it seems so taken for granted...
...In addition, Negro males brought up primarily by mothers or elderly mother surrogates fail to develop a constructive masculine self-image or an internalized set of ethical controls...
...Besides their higher incomes, it was found that the "exploiters" were typically older, better educated and expressed a different view of life than the average black Houstonian...
...Sociologist Franklin Frazier's use of the term "black peasant" in describing the Negro family in Chicago's Black Belt ignores the fact that European peasants at least enjoyed a stable family existence even when they lived under the most oppressive manorial system, as in Ireland...
...But as Lionel Lokos pointed out in his book, House Divided, it has been forgotten that some white merchants who are still grimly hanging on opened their stores long before the great influx made Harlem all-Negro...
...There is, for example, a provocative discussion of alcoholics, drug addicts, psychotics, and suicides葉he defeated, who have fled the harsh realities of ghetto life to find solace in hallucinations or total extinction of feeling...
...The interpersonal distrust pervading the ghetto family is further grafted onto other, less formal associations and, coupled with the transiency of urban Negroes, contributes to instability in peer-group relations...
...The book begins with a general description of the Houston and Watts ghettos and a discussion of factors affecting ghetto life...
...He found that relationships among friends were complicated by a kind of "open season" attitude toward both married and single women...
...Life Styles in the Black Ghetto seeks to assess the mood of the contemporary urban Negro...
...The greater instability of the Negro ghetto family has meant the growth of female-dominated households, where poverty is not simply the consequence of discrimination but also of the fact that there is no male breadwinner and the mothers are too burdened with children to hold jobs...
...They don't live here but they got all the businesses and everything," is a typical complaint echoed throughout New York City's Negro community in one form or another...
...Amid increasing affluence, it is more conspicuous and less acceptable where it still exists...
...Indeed, it is hardly possible to understand American racial history without learning from such revealing human portraits of the Negro condition as The Shadow of the Plantation, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, Sharecroppers All, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, and other period dissections of Southern society...
...Thus, the backdrop for pressing racial tensions has changed, with the cities replacing the cotton fields...
...The different types of adaptation are presented in richly illustrated variety...
...Now, as a result of an unprecedentedly rapid migration, the black population is nearly 75 per cent urban, and increasingly concentrated in the nation's largest metropolitan centers...
...On the other hand, the varied activities directed from the paneled office of his $80,000 home include the numbers racket, which he supposedly heads, a successful mortuary where funeral costs average 14 per cent higher than those charged by 10 morticians serving whites, and ownership of several apartments used by prostitutes in the city's well-known red-light district...
...Studies like William F. Whyte's classic account of Italian streetcorner men in Boston have found that immigrant slum inhabitants were supported by patterns of informal social organization...
...As for the authors, William McCord and John Howard are, respectively, sociologists at Syracuse University and the City College of New York, Bernard Friedberg is the director of Project Bridge in Cleveland, and Edwin Hardwood is a sociologist at Rice University...
...Blacks compare their situation with the society around them rather than archival descriptions of the immigrant slums...
...He believes that many Negroes "are just plain lazy," and that their salvation lies in "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps...
...DuBois predicted that the major domestic issue during the next 100 years would be "the problem of the color line," only one-fourth of the Negroes擁n contrast to over two-fifths of the whites...
...Clifford Vaughn (a fictitious name) lives the double life of a black who thrives on society in its present form...
...At the turn of the century, when W.E.B...
...Rioting has become a significant factor in American cities in the second half of the 1960s, new groups (such as the Black Power Coalition) have emerged, and Negroes have sharply increased their participation in the everyday American political processes...
...I enjoy stately, dignified religious services," he says...
...Except for the churches, the Negro lower class has not been involved in strong community institutions to the same extent as the Jews, Poles or Italians...
...Relative deprivation has become a major urban psychological problem...
...The riots, the concern with poverty and more equalized opportunity, and the millions of new voters represent a mass expression of power heretofore unknown in the black community...
...The unique data they present includes 1,185 interviews with ghetto residents in their homes, bars, barber shops, and streets...
...direct observation of riots in Watts, Harlem, Oakland, Newark, Detroit, and Orangeburg, South Carolina...
...In contrast to most other Negroes, they generally approved of the existing political leadership of the city, more frequently condemned the use of violence, and were more likely to make the claim that their religion was an important factor in guiding their lives...
...I'm sick and tired of these Jew business places in Harlem...
...lived in cities...
Vol. 52 • July 1969 • No. 14
