|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Why the Dream Was Deferred
| Article
# : |
11235 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
3,543 Words |
| Author
: |
Larry D. Nachman
Larry D. Nachman is professor of political science at the
College of Staten Island, CUNY, and is a frequent contributor
to Commentary and Salmagundi. He is completing a book on
psychoanalysis and social theory. |
THE DREAM AND THE NIGHTMARE
The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass
Myron Magnet
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993
Around the time John F. Kennedy became president and America was in the full tide of the civil rights movement, I had a stroke of luck. I was a married graduate student with very limited means, and I lived in one aged walk-up apartment after another. Then came my good fortune. I moved into a low-income housing project in Harlem, just a short walk from Columbia University where I was a doctoral student.
I lived there for five years. My son was born and spent his first two years there. My wife still looks back on it as one of the nicest places in which we ever lived. It was a large project with towering twenty-story buildings. It was, of course, predominantly black, although there was a significant Puerto Rican minority. The only whites there were about half a dozen married graduate students, all of whom had discovered my "find."
To the extent that anything about the life of a graduate student is normal, I lived a normal life there. I went in and out of the building, said hello to my neighbors, and rejoiced that I had a clean, modern apartment in which to live. I had no fancy locks on the door. I went out at night and never thought of purchasing a gun.
I lived there for the same reason my neighbors did: It was convenient and was all I could afford. Speaking to them, I came to know that, like myself, they planned to work their way out and up. They were, in this as well as in other things, rather like me.
Today, a well-armed police officer would not feel at ease walking into one of those buildings alone. That project and other places like it across America have become regions of violence, filth, desperation, and hopelessness.
Something terrible and momentous has happened. In The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson described this change:
In the mid-1960s, urban analysts began to speak of a new dimension to the urban crisis in the form of a large subpopulation of low-income families and individuals whose behavior contrasted sharply with the behavior of the general population. Despite a high rate of
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
