The White Underclass
Does the rise in out-of-wedlock babies and white slums foretell a social catastrophe
The origins. While its roots are diverse, the white underclass often sprouts in the shadows of shuttered factories and what were once hard-drinking, blue-collar sections of town. The list of cities with white ghettos--including Detroit, Flint and Jackson, Mich., and Duluth, Minn.--reads like a roll call of rust belt decay. Waterloo, Iowa, a town of 67,000, lost about 9,000 jobs to layoffs at Deere & Co. in the mid-1980s and another 1,500 when Rath Packing Co., one of the nation's largest hog-slaughtering operations, closed its doors. Today, one of the Rath family homes is a halfway house for mentally ill homeless men.
Hardly any of the cities in the U.S. News top 15 are in the West or the South, although the South is the poorest region in the nation. In fact, some white slums in the North contain significant numbers of Southern whites who migrated years ago from Appalachia looking for work. Most of the migrants succeeded, but some--or at least their children--now live in white "hillbilly ghettos" in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati and Baltimore. Novels such as Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker captured the loss of place that many migrants felt in big cities, where tending a garden or helping a neighbor was no longer routine. A man might be dirt poor in Kentucky, but he could still maintain his dignity--that was much harder in Roy Church's Detroit.
Michelle Loomis, 28, opened the Waterloo Courier and gasped. The headline blared: "Two Men Arrested in 16 Burglaries." One of the men was the unwed father of her two youngest children. Her own mother had given birth to her when she was 14 and was so poor growing up that the family collected bath water off the roof. Loomis dropped out of school at 13 and subsequently had five kids, several of whom she supported with welfare and food stamps over nine years. Today, however, all her children are living with relatives, at the behest of either the courts or Loomis herself. On a recent visit with Loomis, her daughter Stephanie points to a man in a photo album. "That's my daddy," she says. But the man in the photo is Chuck, the recently arrested alleged burglar, with whom Michelle hitched up after Stephanie was born. No one corrects the little girl.
The next evening, Kristina Neff, 17, stops by to play Nintendo. An older black man who lived downstairs from her impregnated Neff in seventh grade. The fact is, there's no shame in getting pregnant as a teen in East Waterloo. In 1992, 259 teens gave birth in the county, 228 of them out of wedlock. At nearby West High, half of the 21 babies born this past school year had moms in the ninth or 10th grade. "At first it was kind of fun," says Neff, but now her 2-year-old boy is having seizures. She will wait until her son is 3 or 4 before she gets pregnant again. "I like them," she says, "when they're babies."
The unwed mom. A disturbing little secret, shared among social workers who help poor whites, is that many young women are perfectly content to have babies out of wedlock. Most of those interviewed by U.S. News don't believe in abortion or adoption, and they have easy access to cheap contraception. Pregnant students treated at the South Boston Community Health Center often insist that having a baby will give them "somebody to love." Poor, unwed mothers explain that welfare makes it easier to get by without a husband. Typically, fathers disappear within a year or two of a child's arrival; most are unemployed, underemployed, on drugs, drinking or in prison, or have moved on to another girlfriend. Many mothers, meanwhile, are fleeing abusive families, and those who aren't often still want their own place. Welfare--and if they are lucky enough to get it, housing assistance--helps make the move possible. In only seven states are minors still required to live with an adult caretaker to get their own welfare checks.
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