Idolizing the Underclass
GOODMAN, WALTER
Perspectives IDOLIZING THE UNDERCLASS BY WALTER GOODMAN Those of us whose fate it is to be white, middle-class and middle-aged today in America are on the defensive. Our crimes are patent: Being...
...But then, if our society shall not be redeemed by its minority groups and its poor, will it perhaps be redeemed by the young...
...Our Doctrinaires of Underclass Supremacy have done their best to widen the gap by endowing persons under 30 (some underclass...
...How ready we are to delude both ourselves and the people we believe we are championing...
...This brings us to the famous Generation Gap-Since its discovery by the proprietors of television and the press, the most tiresome object of attention in the land...
...The lessons of age are worth something...
...but what is the benefit to the poor in pretending that this kind of gesture will revolutionize the teaching of their children...
...The scourgers are readily recognized: They comprise an enthusiastic part of the audience at those theatrical happenings where the actors call the spectators honkies and motherfuckers...
...Put that way, we would probably have to grant the validity of the proposition...
...To say that our society has failed and continues to fail some millions of citizens is basic truth...
...The rest of us, after all, may still play some role in real life...
...In a cultural sense, America has no goyim and no whites-there are simply too many to be lumped together and still permit reasonable generalization...
...Perhaps it would be better, and truer, if we took to thinking of the Generation Gap as existing within each man as well as between establishment parents and their insurrectionary offspring...
...Here it is used as a negative concept, as Jews use goyim when expounding on their own specialness, their own Soul...
...Well, you know them...
...Similarly, when unemployed protestors invade this office or that, the Romance of the Welfare Recipient requires that their action be seen as spontaneous human resistance to bureaucracy, with the implication that if the needy could just cut out the middleman and get their hands directly on the cash, their problems would dissolve like stains in tv commercials for Axion...
...But the notion that the ineffectuality, the criminality, the assorted psychoses that curse the nation's slum can be handled by the victims themselves is romanticism of a fantastic order...
...Our slums are cancers, not miracles of regeneration...
...In particular, they can use allies who are not above pointing out when principles are being distorted or tactics are lunatic...
...At least today's protesting students are far more attractive than the local and national politicos who would put them down...
...When ghetto walls fall, Soul, alas, seems to fly away...
...If "community control" in ghettos is desirable for political reasons or for purposes of local morale, let us admit as much, and do what must be done...
...We might as sensibly direct a cancer patient to relieve his suffering by going and doing his thing...
...The literature produced by radicals of the day has been mercifully forgotten, but public buildings still stand whose walls attest to the glories of sweat and muscle, and to the fatuities of the time...
...Then we should be able to see that Soul, like so many other virtues, is color blind, and that its appearance tends to be related to a community under siege...
...Dubois Clubs, have since learned enough about the middle-class aspirations of the laboring man to be spared recurrent hallucinations of the '30s?only to be confronted by the Romance of the Welfare Recipient...
...So here we sit, white, middle-class, middle-aged-a thoroughly unheroic combination...
...Most of us, excepting members of the Progressive Labor party and the W.E.B...
...and being white, we are not black...
...and the families who have to live in them are victims, not saviors, neither of themselves nor the rest of us...
...they are cheerleaders at every disruption, as instinctive with their hurrahs as another, much larger group of citizens is with its catcalls...
...The resources for any serious effort to improve slum schools, we know very well, has to come from outside the stricken communities, in fact from the very government-university-corporation-foundation complex that white middle-class radicals with college-bound sons and daughters can afford to mock...
...Even the most earnest revolutionary can sometimes be revolting, though, and whatever obligations those of us over 30 owe to our nephews and nieces, unconditional support in every enterprise is not among them...
...What else is there...
...They are the camp followers of the New Left who have succumbed to the Doctrine of the Superiority of the Underclass...
...The Doctrine is by no means un-American...
...they join in cries for Swahili in the schools, without being quite sure whether Swahili is something like lacrosse or a form of Yoga...
...But to go further and adopt the faith that the residents of slums are somehow better, morally superior to the generality of the nation, is condescension of a vicious sort...
...Let a gang of students bust up a classroom or administration office, on whatever pretext, and their supporters above 30 will at once fit the incident into the epic struggle of the idealistic young against the corrupted old...
...And the role of the critic, no matter how friendly, is not consonant with The Doctrine of the Superiority of the Underclass...
...White-collar types have embraced this kind of self-flagellation before -In the 1930s, for example, when virtually the entire Left joined in the Cult of the Sturdy Worker...
...Unlike E. E. Cummings' Olaf, there is no shit they will not eat...
...What paltry consolation it is for a poor family to be assured that the street life their children are compelled to cope with is inestimably richer than life in the sterile suburbs...
...Well, if there is any hope at all, indubitably it lies with youth...
...A real loss, no doubt, yet the middle-class black father in the suburbs may find some return for his loss in a decent place to live and bring up his children, and it is surely unbecoming for the middle-class white to cluck his tongue at this betrayal of the African heritage...
...We may safely concede that even well-intentioned bureaucrats tend to be mindless and rigid and unresponsive -and not all bureaucrats are well-intentioned...
...There is rhythm and religious fervor, a talent for preaching and Mammying, a capacity for enjoying uncomplicated existence, and so forth...
...with a degree of purity heretofore reserved to martyred saints...
...Soul, to be sure, is meant to suggest something more than the sum of these qualities, a response to life on a fundamental level, beyond the reach of whites...
...But to try to live in the heroics or imagined heroics of others is a pathetic evasion for grown men, one that we may leave to those Madison Avenue swingers who sport blue denim shirts and Che Guevara mustaches, or to the high school teacher in Scarsdale who led his guerillaship class into the woods with water guns...
...People on welfare may call up many emotions among the affluent, ranging from compassion to disgust-but idealization...
...The misleading half of this equation is the category "whites...
...We (the liberal, educated, public-spirited section of the middle class) are anything but a secure bunch, and by joining in the adoration of those who do not share our physical comforts, we may effortlessly show our disdain for all we supposedly represent...
...Indeed, a kind of humility has been forced upon us by so many years of satire-descriptions of Babbitry and the rest of it-penetrating our consciousness like an anti-hubris virus...
...Such a condition is damnably difficult to conceal, so, as men of honor and sensibility, we must be prepared to grit our teeth and take our lumps...
...The middle class has its own myths about itself, but Soul is not among them...
...Now, this is a peculiar development...
...certainly, there is a spontaneity and richness in the lives of black people that seems to have no equivalent among whites...
...There are old young men and young old ones, and the challenge is not only to reconcile the generations but to examine and reconcile the conflicts in one's own responses to the world...
...The poor, the black and the students can very likely make do without a gushing audience to their posturings, but when they turn to real issues they need all the help they can get...
...being middle-class, we are not poor...
...As it happens, the much-belabored Generation Gap is not quite as new as the miniskirt nor quite as American as the Grand Canyon...
...The late discovery of Soul among Negroes is in part a white accomplishment, deriving from the various qualities we have been pleased to invest upon the black servant class for 100 or 200 years...
...Our crimes are patent: Being middle-aged, we are not young...
...Defending bureaucracy is a job for which I have no heart...
...By deferring altogether to the young, we insult our own experience, and deprive our successors of what little we may have to impart...
...The Doctrine of the Superiority of the Underclass dictates that when a group of black men call upon a church for "reparations," they are not only justified in their demands but will, if given the money, put it to work in ways that will finally reach the core of black people's needs...
...It is in the spirit of the connoisseur radicals, who savor from afar the life styles of neighborhoods they would not, for sound reasons, set foot in after dark...
...The enlightening comparisons in matters of Soul would be to set black neighborhood culture against, say, Irish neighborhood culture, or East Harlem's Puerto Rican culture against that of the Lower East Side as it existed 50 years ago...
...While bending over for punshment, however, we cannot fail to notice that some of those wielding the whips most vigorously (on their own backs as well as on ours) have no more wish than the rest of us to be poor or black, and no more hope of again being young...
...Most thinking men come to a time when, in Matthew Arnold's lines, "long the way appears, which seem'd so short to the unpractis'd eye of sanguine youth...
...It has played a significant part in Western politics for 150 years or so and, though the record is not all of a piece, youth movements probably have less to be ashamed of than, say, adult movements...
...It has often been our humor in this country to exalt those on whom we work our will: We have hailed the Noble Savage, wept over the Good-Hearted Prostitute, and acclaimed others who (in our comfortable imaginings) support their afflictions better than we could in their place and thus merit them...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 22
