The White Underclass
Does the rise in out-of-wedlock babies and white slums foretell a social catastrophe
Using 1990 census and Urban Institute data, U.S. News pinpointed the worst white underclass areas. There U.S. News reporters found people like Roy Church of Detroit's rough southwest neighborhoods, whose three daughters dropped out of school in junior high and bore eight kids out of wedlock. They found Tina Metcalf of Portland's Bayside area, who started doing drugs in ninth grade and, before she quit 15 years later, had a friend die of a heroin overdose. They found baby-faced Kristina Neff of Waterloo, Iowa, who got pregnant in seventh grade but never married her boyfriend after he went to jail for robbery.
Evolution of a debate. The rise of the white underclass was heralded last fall by Charles Murray, a libertarian social critic with the American Enterprise Institute. He pointed out in the Wall Street Journal that 22 percent of the children born to white women in 1991 were born out of wedlock, a rate close to the 23.6 percent illegitimacy rate that prevailed among blacks when Daniel Patrick Moynihan drafted his famous 1965 report presaging the breakdown of the black family. "In the white low-income communities, you are going to see the kind of social disintegration ... we've seen in the inner city," Murray later declared. "Just think of the amount of anxiety and fear that is created by the inner city right now. Imagine that six times larger." In the controversial new book The Bell Curve, Murray and co-author Richard Herrnstein say that most white women who give birth out of wedlock have below-average IQs. They conclude that "these women are poorly equipped for the labor market, often poorly equipped to be mothers, and there is no reason to think that the outcomes for their children will be any better" than those for the children of black unwed mothers.
Ironically, both conservatives and liberals have embraced the notion of a white underclass. For conservatives like Murray, its formation accords with his argument that perverse government policies have enabled more women--black and white alike--to have babies out of wedlock. That theory lends support to his draconian proposal to eliminate welfare benefits for single mothers. Mincy and liberals including President Clinton cite the plight of the white underclass as proof that many problems afflicting poor blacks are colorblind, driven by economic forces.
For now, the status of the white underclass depends in part on how one defines "underclass." Researchers generally employ two definitions. The broader one classifies any urban census tract that is extremely poor--that is, where 40 percent or more of the residents live below the official poverty line--as part of a ghetto. The Urban Institute found that the number of Americans living in ghettolike tracts where most residents were non-Hispanic whites shot up in the 1980s--from 863,000 to 1.6 million, an increase of 85 percent.
The narrower underclass definition measures "dysfunctional" behavior instead of concentrated poverty. Using this standard, underclass neighborhoods are those with high rates of female-headed families, welfare dependency and labor force and school dropouts. The population of these troubled white neighborhoods stayed roughly constant from 1980 to 1990--at about 380,000.
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