Apparently, They Don't Even Care Which Women They Get Pregnant--The Washington Post on the New Book "Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City"

Did liberals and progressives surrender the battlefield after the 1960s because they assumed the best intentions on the part of their enemies? Or did they withdraw because of a reluctance to acknowledge some inconvenient truths?

From the The Washington Post piece on the new book "Doing the Best I Can":

The human realities of these relations were rarely given their due in the culture-war battles of the 1980s and 1990s. For a time after the controversial 1965 Moynihan report, poverty researchers became skittish about discussing obvious pathologies associated with out-of-wedlock childbearing and welfare dependence. Social conservatives rushed in to fill the void, wrongly blaming essential and meager welfare programs for pathologies that were actually caused by broader economic and social forces.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is enjoying a second renaissance. Rejected and shunned, now even "liberals" are discovering that perhaps he was correct in his analysis of ghetto cultural pathologies and the long-term impact of broken homes on the black community.

I presented a paper at a conference a few years ago on black cultural politics. In that talk, I used the phrase "ghetto underclass". As far as academic talks go, I felt I did a good job based on the questions and feedback I received.

While I was packing up, an older black woman approached me. She was enraged. In the logic of a very journeyman student I thought that perhaps I had not cited her in the paper, or committed some other breach of academic etiquette. No. She was upset that I used the phrase "ghetto underclass". Enthusiastically and with finger waving in my face, I was told that the phrase was "inaccurate", "racist", and did the work of white people who wanted to "pathologize us".

I smiled, nodded, and move along.

I know realize from where the anger towards the use of ghetto underclass and the related hostility towards the work of Moynihan is partly rooted--at least within the black and brown community. I do not think it is an objection about the research or empirical findings about the varied nature of the human experiences that are the real people routinely collapsed into one catch all category known as "the black poor."

The culture of poverty thesis has been a cudgel used against all black folks by racists---both "benign" liberals and hostile neo liberals/conservatives--because it reinforces stereotypes about people of color where even "the best" of us are judged by the shortcomings of "the least" of us. The rejection of the ghetto underclass thesis is also an extension of how it is associated with black conservatives, specifically, and the Right, more generally.

Black conservatism of the modern Republican faux populist variety is an outlier in the tradition of black political thought. Moreover, I (along with others) would suggest that it is a hostile and foreign intellectual tradition that is invasive and designed to destroy the black body politic and black counter public by serving the interests of the Right and colorblind racists.

If black conservatives are indeed "Uncle Toms", then no respectable black person would claim the merits of their policy proposals or diagnoses. Thus, "the ghetto underclass" became verboten language.

There is a complication here. For black and brown progressives and those on the Left, Moynihan's conclusions, and those of folks like William J. Wilson, are to be rejected in public, but are often reluctantly embraced in private. The conversations in black private spaces, as well as in churches, hair salons, and barbershops could echo a conference panel at the Hoover or Cato institutes, and most certainly are in agreement with folks like Bill Cosby, who was viciously attacked by many black intellectuals for daring to call out the ghetto youthocracy and an inter-generational culture of poverty and dependence.

There has to be a third way, one which tackles institutional discrimination and inequality in the job and labor markets, as well as examining how people's personal choices serve to reinforce their own poverty. In all, an acceptance of how structures impact life choices and opportunities for all peoples does not necessitate a rejection of human agency on the part of the urban or "ghetto" poor.

Harold Pollack sums this up nicely in his observation that "Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City reinforces one’s instincts as a cultural conservative and an economic progressive."

I did not grow up in a poor community. I am lower working class. I do not propose to judge those folks in the ghetto underclass based on the internal logic of their personal decision-making. I can't judge you if I ain't walked in your shoes. But, I can ask folks how are the decisions they have made up to this point in their life working out for them right now?

I also have to accept that the thought processes of the men profiled in "Doing the Best I Can" are outside of my life world, experiences, and cognitive map. To point.

Still, most of the men chronicled in this frank book fail most of their children. Liberals may be taken aback by the huge proportion of nonresident fathers laid low by involvement in crime, infidelity, heavy drinking or drug abuse. Most pregnancies are unplanned, accidental or “semi-planned” within haphazard and brief relationships:  

Only rarely do such couples “fall in love,” get engaged, or get married before conceiving a first child together, though they may do so later on.…. Precious few men are consciously courting a woman they believe will be a long-term partner around the time that pregnancy issues a one-way ticket to fatherhood. Indeed there is little evidence that many were even attempting to discriminate much among possible partners based on who they felt would be the most suitable mother to their child.  

Couples love their child, and so make a go of things. Yet as Edin and Nelson put things, “having a baby is not a symbol of love and commitment; instead pregnancy and birth are often the relationship’s impetus.” A shared child becomes the glue holding together a precarious relationship. Most of the time, this just isn’t enough.

I was taught that if you have sex with someone then you must be prepared to be stuck with them forever. You should also ask if you want to ruin your life and future by having a kid you are not prepared to raise.

But, what if you do not have a sense that there is a future? And what if you have not been taught the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate cause and effect?

Culture has famously been described as all of the stuff we do not think about and just take for granted. If material circumstances frame individual realities, social networks are truncated, and life goals and life chances are limited, then what to an outsider seems maladaptive and pathological may make perfect sense to those whose lives are bounded by a five square block area, are trapped in rural America, or are stuck on the res.

How do we help folks to dream, and in dreaming of the future, to make intelligent choices in the short-term that can positively serve their long-term goals?