This Noble Land (7 page)

When I remarked to the policeman that this was an unbelievably clever tactic, the trailing of a big car to its destination and an easy spot at which to make the heist, he said ‘Well, a Texan who’s bought a big car won’t give it up easily. Often the owner puts up a fight and gets shot.’ He said the police were giving lectures to the owners of big cars: ‘Don’t drive that buggy into the middle of town. You’ll be inviting them to chase after you.’ So in Dallas, as in Austin, the ghetto can invade the quiet residential areas.

Not only whites but the black community, too, must work to solve its problems. Theft and vandalism where they live are rapidly destroying their neighborhoods.

I have twice been peripherally involved when a chain store with a branch located in a ghetto area decided it had to close down the branch to concentrate on areas that were more stable and better policed. In one case it was a five-and-dime store, in the other a branch store of a large grocery chain that did a huge business. In each case the local managers, one of whom I knew as a family friend, told me that profits were impossible because of the thefts by African Americans roaming through the aisles. The grocery manager said: ‘They come in, rip open the tops of our boxes and have lunch right here in the store. We cannot afford to stay open.’

In each case there was public protest when the branches announced they were closing. Civic leaders shouted that the stores had to remain functioning because poor people deserved to be served as well as the rich. An ugly note was introduced in the debate when comparison shoppers proved that the grocery chain not only off-loaded its damaged goods or inferior products onto its branch store in the ghetto, but even charged higher prices for these inferior goods than it did for undamaged goods in the more
favored branches. Public protest at this injustice proved to be irrelevant because, despite the anguished protests, the branches closed. The areas had been redlined not by heartless bankers attending only to their bottom line but, rather, by thieves.

I felt the two closings were both inevitable and justified, but I also followed another happier case in which city fathers with a feeling for social justice arranged for a beleaguered grocery store to remain in place, but with an enlarged group of watchful detectives paid for from public taxation. I applauded this effort, even though I can see obvious weaknesses were the plan widely copied. It shouldn’t require a city to be terrorized before the community provides the services it must have to survive.

If black frustration grows and we do nothing to improve the economic prospects of blacks, there will be fearful consequences, and we already have one striking example of what these consequences might be. In Miami, the sudden influx of white Cubans in the late 1950s resulted in a flood of educated and industrious Hispanics who moved quickly into the workforce. Almost thirty years later, the forced emigration of mostly black Cubans, cynically thrust onto our shores by Castro’s henchmen during the Mariel boatlift of 1980, resulted in a second deluge of far less desirable citizens. They consisted of criminal elements who created havoc in the camps to which they were assigned and who, in time, usurped most of the service-sector jobs traditionally held by African Americans: hospital orderlies, janitors, clerks in grocery stores, practical nurses. Many blacks in Miami were thus deprived of their means of earning a living. And an even more galling disadvantage faced them: to keep or find the kinds of jobs in Miami that blacks had always filled, blacks found that they must now learn Spanish. Their ancestors had been in America for hundreds of years, the Hispanics in Miami only thirty years, yet the blacks had to surrender to newcomers. Blacks went on a rampage
in 1989 that tied up the city for several days and destroyed much property. Rebellion, when one group feels it has been victimized by another, is an understandable form of social protest.

I have long been a supporter of affirmative action as a means of helping disadvantaged blacks. In the 1930s I was profoundly impressed by the results of a study I made in a postgraduate class of the workings—or machinations—of an important union of electrical workers. The members, wanting to keep the union small so that they and their sons and nephews would always find a profitable job, had restricted the number of members. In the course of the century not a single African American had ever attained membership—indeed, had never even been considered for membership. Grievous damage was being done black workers by restricting equal employment opportunities.

In my study I concluded that similar historic wrongs have been inflicted on our black population in many fields, a carryover from the days of slavery and the poll-tax device of refusing blacks the vote. I became an ardent supporter of moves toward affirmative action; an evil had been perpetrated and a correction was called for.

I even supported quota systems. If a community had never had any black police officers even though a significant percentage of its population was black, this was ipso facto an imbalance that ought to be corrected. I saw nothing wrong with some agency of the government handing down an order such as this: ‘The next three promotions to the police force must go to African Americans.’ I became so convinced this was a justifiable move that I advocated it in all aspects of American life. Did the private schools in which I had taught have no black students? They’d better get some. Did my distinguished college have none? Rectify that immediately. Did a business tycoon who was a friend of mine have almost no black employees? Advise him to hire some right away.
Did prestigious law schools and schools of medicine admit almost no black students? Order them to alter their policies.

I was so stubborn about this aspect of our national life, and so firm in my belief that wrong
had
been done to our black population, that I failed to consider the weaknesses in affirmative action until they were pointed out by black scholars like Thomas Sowell. First, any quota system rigorously enforced runs the risk of promoting inadequately trained minority members over adequately trained whites. Second, the black student or fireman or policeman runs the risk of being scorned by his peers for having gained his position by color rather than by merit. Third, a quota system by definition casts a shadow over the entire group being favored and is therefore ultimately unfair to the African American who
is
qualified. Supreme Court decisions have forced me to restudy this inflammable subject. Also, of great importance, I failed to see the degree of bitterness that affirmative action would inspire in the working class; nor did I foresee that the anger of workmen would be directed at the Democratic Party. But despite its negatives I remain committed to the principle of affirmative action and its subsidiary, the quota system, when required to correct egregious imbalances.

Welfare is another government program designed to help blacks—and whites—living in poverty. While I am committed to the principle that the less fortunate should have a safety net, I recognize there are problems with our current system. That well-to-do businessman who rants so irrationally against the welfare system and says blacks should pull themselves up by their bootstraps like everyone else does, however, legitimately have much to complain about. I have known two black women, whom I will call Salome and Norma and who are prototypes of many stories that have circulated. Together they epitomize both the experiences of African American women and the problems of our current
system of welfare assistance. Both in their early thirties, each had been married to a husband who had casually disappeared, leaving his wife with no funds or child support. Each had children, Salome a lively six, Norma a more restrained three.

There the similarities end, for Salome was a heavy-drinking, raucous party girl whose six children were sired by five different fathers, while Norma was quiet and almost demure and had suffered when her husband deserted her. Salome had a home teeming with children whom she did little to control; Norma was a frugal housewife whose two rooms with minimal conveniences nevertheless formed a real home in which she carefully reared her son and two daughters.

Although both were poor, the two young women had experienced radically different economic histories. Salome was the third generation of women in her family to exist on public welfare, and almost complacently she took for granted that her six children would pass easily onto the relief rolls when they became adults. Her oldest daughter, unmarried, was already pregnant with her second child.

Salome’s family finances were minimal: a total of $313 a week for herself and her children from Aid to Families with Dependent Children; $608 per month in food stamps; and approximately $1,040 a month from the local housing authority for a four-bedroom home and her monthly electric, gas and water bills.

She achieved notoriety when a newspaper wanted to write about a family headed by generations of women without husbands. Someone directed the reporters to Salome, who proved to be a perfect subject. Brassy, outspoken, witty and wildly self-defensive, she said she was proud of her six fatherless children and had brought them up to be good citizens, except for the older boy who was already in jail—‘No fault of his.’ She could not, however, explain how someone else had been guilty of the
armed robbery. In her justification of her lifestyle she gave a memorable quote: ‘I have a right to have as many children as I want, and it’s the job of the government to take care of them.’

As mentioned before, sedate Norma’s husband, too, had vanished, leaving her with three children to care for and with only the most meager income from a part-time janitorial job at the local carpet factory, a job Norma inherited from her mother, who had inherited it from
her
mother. Since it was likely that Norma’s daughter would inherit the job, four generations had lived in the same house. Norma’s minimal salary could not have paid the rent on the old house the family had always occupied, but the safety net provided by our government for just such a family unit as Norma’s swung into action to provide assistance with food stamps and money from the local housing authority and from Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

First, Norma received $160 per month from AFDC and a housing allowance from the local housing authority of about $775 a month, of which about $125 would go toward her utility bills. Like Salome, she received food stamps from the local Department of Human Services, about $320 per month for four persons. With them, she taught her three children how to purchase with extreme care. A local charity provided the respectable family with a constant flow of clothes that had been discarded by other families, and the pastor of her African Baptist Church, awed by Norma’s resolute courage, saw to it that from time to time she received small gifts from church funds. Adequately nourished and housed by the welfare assistance augmenting their mother’s meager income, Norma’s oldest child wanted to be a policeman when he grew up, while the two girls wanted to be nurses.

Norma’s was a devout Christian family, the precise kind that the safety net had been established to salvage. But when white folks saw flaming Salome and heard her challenge to society, ‘I
produce children, you take care of them,’ they lumped the two families together and condemned them both as black women endlessly producing babies that we have to support with our tax dollars.

Our welfare system does require an overhaul—there is too much waste and too much incentive for women like Salome to remain indefinitely on the welfare rolls—but we cannot allow welfare benefits to be reduced so severely that it fails to alleviate legitimate need like Norma’s. To do so will lead to even more frustration and despair in our ghettos.

Government intervention such as affirmative action or welfare assistance is not enough, however. Leaders in the black communities must also step in against destructive influences. For, although I became and remain a champion of African American rights, my enthusiasm is sorely tested when some group of black rap artists comes to town and preaches race hatred, the denigration of women and the general disruption of society. I listen in horror and I’m terrified by the nihilism espoused by such groups. Fortunately there have been outcries from both whites and blacks against such messages of hate being fed to our youth.

I was myself a partner in an interracial marriage, and it was always understood that if my wife and I had had children, we would certainly not have objected if they expressed an interest in girls or boys of another race, including blacks. But I would have been terrified by a daughter’s associating seriously with a black man who subscribed to those teachings of violence or the denigration of women. I would have urged her to study the relationship carefully or perhaps find some young man, whether black or white, with more stable attitudes.

Just how serious the race problem has become in America is evident in some of the extraordinary events of 1994–95, a pivotal year in race relations: heated controversy over a scholarly treatise
on race and intelligence; the O. J. Simpson murder trial; and Colin Powell’s leap to fame and national acceptance as a political aspirant.

The issue of racial superiority or inferiority based on intelligence has long been with us. In 1917, during World War I, the United States instituted a nationwide draft of young men for military duty. To estimate the inherent abilities of the millions of draftees the army administered what was then called an intelligence test. It consisted mainly of verbal and mathematical questions that high school students should have been able to answer. In that massive sampling and in almost every major one that followed regardless of its purpose, blacks scored so far behind whites that serious scholars felt justified in concluding that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. Indoctrinated with that belief, I accepted it.

On my own, however, I started at about age seventeen to question this assumption. I looked at the cases of outstanding blacks of that period and concluded that some at least were certainly as able as the brightest whites I knew. I also became aware of the possible social causes for the discrepancies: poor education, deprivations that persisted even after slavery, and the fact that blacks were so restricted culturally that their children lacked the general information available to whites. I was astounded to learn how many black schools of those days did not even attempt to offer science classes.