Inner Cities in Need of a Living Wage

When most Americans, whatever their party or ideology, discuss inner-city poverty, they seem to describe a dilemma that, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s phrase, “consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

For the last 10 years, the United States has chosen, in a de facto sense at least, the disastrous. The consequences of that choice are visible in all our major cities: The number of poor Americans has increased, while the gap between their incomes and those of affluent Americans has widened into what threatens to become an unbridgeable chasm.

And although the majority of poverty-stricken Americans are white, the current poverty disaster has fallen with particular severity on African-American men. Consider these facts:

Although black males constitute 5% of the nation’s population, more than half the men in --America’s bulging prisons are African-Americans, as are more than half of the hundreds of men on Death Row. There are more black men in prison than in all this country’s professional and graduate schools combined. And, although only a small minority of the poor commit crimes, more than 80% of all criminal defendants in urban American courts are indigents who must be represented at public expense.

--The leading cause of death among black males from the ages of 15 to 33 years is homicide, most frequently at the hands of other African-American men.

--For 77 years, the disgraceful discrepancy between the life expectancies of black and white Americans narrowed. In 1987, that gap again began to grow. Public health officials blame the prevalence of homicide among black men, along with their disproportionate rate of infection with the AIDS virus and inability to obtain adequate health care, on low incomes.

These chilling statistics mark the boundaries of a social problem so intractable that thoughtful people on both sides of the ideological aisle admit that their ideas yield no ready solutions.

As Charles Murray, a leading conservative social critic, told Times political writer Ronald Brownstein this week: “The fact is . . . we just don’t know how to help a lot of kids in the inner city.”

Henry Schwartzchild, who for most the 1960s directed the American Civil Liberties Union’s Civil Rights Lawyers’ Group in the Deep South, expressed an even deeper perplexity when we spoke recently. “When I went South to join Martin Luther King in the early 1960s, the majority of poor black Americans lived in the rural South. Today--after all that was accomplished through the civil rights movement--most poor blacks live in the urban centers, and the existential facts of their daily lives are incomparably worse than those that prevailed in 1960 in the rural South. The reasons for this are obscure to me, as they are, I think, to everyone else. But, like most other people who were involved in the civil rights movement, I find this situation deeply, deeply disturbing.”

So, too, do many others, which has led some to suggest that even the unpalatable might be preferable to the disastrous. One of these commentators is the influential neo-conservative analyst James Q. Wilson, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management.

In a recent address to the American Enterprise Institute, Wilson argued that boys living in poor inner-city families headed by single mothers would be better off placed in subsidized boarding schools. “When parents cannot or will not socialize their children, they have in the past turned that task over to boarding schools,” Wilson said. As he envisions it, government financial assistance and social workers would “encourage” single mothers to enroll their children at “an early age” in boarding schools that would provide “moral, political, religious or ethnocentric” instruction.

I will leave it for others to envision precisely what a publicly funded boarding school for the children of powerless, poverty-stricken parents actually might look like. The image that springs to my mind is Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall--or maybe the California Youth Authority. Can you imagine a government that can barely do a simple thing, like deliver a letter on time, trying to raise a child?

Other social critics argue that between the passive acceptance of the disastrous and adoption of the unpalatable--such as harshly punitive policies like breaking up “disapproved” families--there is a third option defined by the American tradition of progress through incentive.

As long-time trade unionist and educational analyst Richard Rothstein recently pointed out, the upward mobility to which several generations of Americans have been accustomed was possible because our “industrialization--extraordinary by any measure--provided jobs for graduates and dropouts alike. And until the 1970s, trade unions and New Deal policies guaranteed that those jobs paid wages high enough to support an improving standard of living. Today, however, most job growth is not in highly skilled occupations but in low-wage retail and service industries.”

As Rothstein notes, Los Angeles’ “fastest growing occupation is now ‘salesperson,’ with an average entry wage of $4.75 an hour. Young black high school graduates’ average yearly earnings declined 44% from 1973 to 1986; Latino earnings declined by 35%.”

It is no coincidence that during this period of declining income, the consequences of poverty in our inner cities hardened into what we now call an “intractable problem.” For all but the most talented and persevering among the children of the poor, the new American economy offers nothing but drudgery. That suggests that at least a part of the current poverty disaster could be alleviated by encouraging the creation of jobs paying a living wage.

That would be a lesson in traditional values--and you wouldn’t have to leave home to learn it.