The American Underclass

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Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC)—1.5 million welfare mothers.

Welfare dependency means that for many members of the underclass, the concepts of income and jobs are barely related, if at all. Says Michael Lemmons, 17, who is earning $2.50 an hour this summer as a janitor's assistant in a Watts federal manpower program: "If you keep giving people stuff, that's why they loot when the lights go out. Working is out of their minds. They think everything must be taken."

For many women in the underclass, welfare has turned illegitimate pregnancy into a virtual career. Says Barbara Wright, a welfare mother of four in Brooklyn: "A lot of young girls in the ghetto believe that the only way for them to get something in this society is by becoming pregnant and getting on welfare." One Harlem hustler makes the all-too-typical rationalization: "Everybody steals. Politicians steal. What's the use to bust my ass from 9 to 5 to get $100 a week?"

Of course, not everyone feels that way. In Harlem, hundreds of youths besieged city manpower offices to sign on as cleaners-up (at $30 a day) after last month's looting episode. In Chicago, nearly 2,000 applicants, most of them black teenagers, lined up last month to apply for some 300 jobs at a new South Side supermarket.

More jobs, of course, are the most obvious need of the underclass—not only economically, but also psychologically and culturally. In the world's most achievement-oriented society, work is more than a source of income. It is also a source of status and selfesteem, a point of identification with the system, and a second social environment, which aids in diffusing the accumulated tensions of day-to-day life. Says Stanford University Historian Clay Carson, a black: "Permanency of jobs, stability in an economic situation, is important. Even if someone is only a janitor, his job still means stability." On the basis of studies, he adds: "Typically, those who can get established with a job in an urban environment can pass this stability on to their kids. Those who can't are likely to pass on more than just poverty. They also transmit poor educational opportunities and a sense of hopelessness."

In attacking the basic problem of job creation, the first sound step is to recognize that the Government cannot and should not try to do it all. Given the public's dismay with inflation and high taxes, there is nothing close to the political consensus that would be needed to support liberal cries for massive job programs or a "Marshall Plan for the cities." Despite some successes, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty is too well remembered as one in which benefits often trickled up to the so-called poverticians—the programmers, social workers and suppliers to the needy. Any massive program to stimulate the whole economy, in an attempt to bring down unemployment rapidly, would only give a rocket boost to inflation. The primary victim would be the underclass.

There is no all-embracing solution, at any price, for the complex malaise of the underclass. It would be more realistic—and much less inflationary—to press for a mix of endeavors, in which the Government would reorder some social spending and new efforts would be made by private business and by members of the underclass themselves.

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