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Of course, some of these ostensibly unemployed young black men do earn money illegally, often from selling drugs. But the explosive growth of the ghetto drug culture further erodes the work ethic. In a recent paper, Anderson laments the growing cleavage between what he calls "old heads and young boys." Old heads were the traditional neighborhood mentors of ghetto youth. Their message, Anderson writes, "was about manners and the value of hard work, involving how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to dress for a job interview, how to deal with a prospective employer." But with work scarce and cocaine permeating the ghetto, young blacks now tend to dismiss old heads as old fogies preaching a message as irrelevant as antidrug lectures.
A lack of jobs for young black men translates into a lack of ability for them to take responsibility for the children they father. This, Wilson argues, helps explain the staggering growth of inner-city illegitimacy. A recent study by the Children's Defense Fund found that 90% of all babies of black teenage mothers are born out of wedlock. As Harriette McAdoo, professor of social work at Howard University, puts it, "Men are unable to maintain themselves in the labor market, and they are unable to maintain their families."
What can be done to break this iron triangle of social isolation, black joblessness and single-parent families? Even 20 years after the ghettos of Detroit and Newark erupted into the fires of long-suppressed rage, Americans cling to the sanguine faith that some magic formula can end this cycle of poverty and social pathology. More money for social programs, a welfare system with stronger incentives to succeed, the teaching of values in the schools: these are the familiar answers of policymakers. But compared with the gravity of the problems of the black underclass, almost all the standard remedies amount to little more than changing the bandages on a festering wound.
Twenty years of failed programs, from community development to public housing, point to a depressing conclusion: little will be done to make the ghetto an acceptable place to live and raise children. This by no means suggests abandoning those trapped in the inner city. Rather, the emphasis of both government and private philanthropy must be on helping the black underclass escape the social isolation of these inner-city wastelands. What successes there have been come not through cosmetically improving the ghettos but by providing residents with opportunities through jobs and education to rise out of them. Saving people, not inner-city neighborhoods, may be the only way America can redeem the promises that were made against the charred urban landscape of that terrible summer of 1967.