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Poverty, Values, and the Black Community
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10066 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
5,663 Words |
| Author
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Glenn C. Loury
Glenn C. Loury is University Professor and professor of
economics at Boston University. His book, One by One, from the
Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in
America was published by the Free Press this past spring. |
The civil rights movement now confronts its greatest challenge--to redefine an agenda created during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, so that it may conform with the socio-political realities of the coming decades. The central theme of this essay is that the redefinition should be centered around an effort to expand the range of activities that directly seek to mitigate the worst conditions of lower-class black life.
A long tradition of philanthropy and internally directed action aimed at self-improvement exists among black Americans, predating the emancipation. To give but one example, the Urban League, a major civil rights organization today, was founded early in this century to help new black migrants from the rural South adjust to life in Northern cities. Similarly, black fraternal and professional organizations, through a wide array of programs and activities, have been "giving something back to the community" for decades. Yet the nature of problems facing the black community today, the significant recent expansion of opportunities for blacks in American society, and the changing political environment in which black leaders now operate all dictate that greater stress should be placed upon strategies which might appropriately be called "self-help."
For notwithstanding this noble tradition of mutual concern, the dominant tendency among today's public advocates of black interests is to emphasize the responsibility of government to resolve the problems of blacks. To be sure, policies of local, state, and federal government significantly affect the welfare of black Americans. And no one would deny, in turn, that blacks have the right and responsibility to participate in shaping those policies. But it is now beyond dispute that many of the problems of contemporary black American life lie outside the reach of effective government action and require for their successful resolution actions that can only be undertaken by the black community itself. These problems involve at the their core the values, attitudes, and behaviors of individual blacks. They are exemplified by the staggering statistics on pregnancies among young, unwed black women and the arrest and incarceration rates among black men. Such complicated problems, part cause and part effect of the economic hardship readily observed in the ghettos of America, defy easy explanation. These problems will not go away with the return of economic prosperity, with the election of a liberal Democrat to the presidency, or with the doubling in size of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The fact is, any effective response to such difficulties will necessarily require the intimate
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