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Long-term unemployment is a factor in that. Many members of the underclass come from the ranks of the 1,061,000 workers who are listed as "discouraged" because they have given up even looking for jobs. To that number can be added the entrenched welfare mothers: at least 2.4 million have been enrolled for one year or longer. Then there are their many children, a few million kids who are growing up without a heritage of working skills or of employed society's values. In addition, many of the chronically unemployed in the 18-to-21 age group have had—and will have—a desperate time landing and keeping their first regular jobs. A portion of the 4.4 million disabled who are receiving welfare also belong. Allowing for the overlaps in those groups, the underclass must number at least 7 million to 8 million Americans—perhaps even 10 million.
Though this subculture is predominantly black, many Hispanics and more than a few poor whites belong to the underclass. Among the most glaring subgroups: the Appalachian migrants to dilapidated neighborhoods of some cities, the Chicanos of the Los Angeles slums, the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem. But the Hispanics appear to be moving ahead somewhat faster; 55% of the nation's blacks, v. 49% of the Spanish-speaking minorities, still live in the mostly depressed areas of central cities. The black concentration in the cities seems fated to increase because the birth rate among blacks is 51% higher than among whites. There are other reasons for this continuing concentration: lingering discrimination on the part of the white majority, a crippling absence of education, training and opportunity among the black minority. Says Randolph Taylor, a Presbyterian minister who works among the underclass in Charlotte, N.C.: "How one feels about society depends on whether one thinks that door may some day open. The whites are generally staying with the system on the basis of hope."
It is the weakness of family structure, the presence of competing street values, and the lack of hope amidst affluence all around that make the American underclass unique among the world's poor peoples. Reports TIME Atlanta Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch, who until recently was stationed in Latin America: "Almost anyone who has lived in or near the crowded barrios of South America knows that looting on the scale that occurred in New York could almost never happen there—and not because the army would be standing by to shoot looters. Family structure has not broken down in South America. Nor has the idea of a neighborhood. A child usually feels that he lives in both in a Latin American city. In a U.S. urban ghetto, he often belongs to neither."
TIME Chicago Correspondent Robert Wurmstedt, once a Peace Corps volunteer, reports: "The poverty in the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago is worse than any poverty I saw in West Africa. The people there are guided by strong traditional values. They do not live in constant fear of violence, vermin and fire. You don't find the same sense of desperation and hopelessness you find in the American ghetto."
Hopelessness is a