The White Underclass
Does the rise in out-of-wedlock babies and white slums foretell a social catastrophe
Recently, in the rough Kennedy Park section of Portland, Maine, a revealing scene played out as youth worker Mike Rodriguez helped three teens put together an AIDS prevention video. Shawn Burton, a 17-year-old high school dropout, was the trio's leader. He disdains the father he rarely saw because he "wasn't mature enough." Back on camera, however, Laurie, a pert 8-year-old, has just said a line thrown to her by Shawn: "Kids are having kids." When a reporter suggested Laurie could say, "Kids shouldn't be having kids," Shawn interjected. "No, that would be a judgment call," he said. "The kids would get turned off."
The low point for Tina Metcalf was the funeral of her lifelong friend Bruce. "If I ever die, don't cry for me--party for me," Bruce always told Metcalf. Then 23, she took that admonition to heart and went on a two-week binge that culminated in her and some of her friends smoking coke for three days before they watched Bruce's funeral procession in a driving rainstorm.
Metcalf has been drug free for four years now, but not before enduring 15 years of dissipation. Raised in Portland's Bayside neighborhood, she started taking drugs in ninth grade and quickly progressed from marijuana to speed, LSD, THC, Valium, cocaine and alcohol; along the way, she had two kids out of wedlock. Metcalf's mother, who worked hard to stay off welfare, wasn't around much. According to Metcalf, her alcoholic father ended up living in a nearby park. When Metcalf was 5, he showed up one day for a visit--and took the kids panhandling. When she turned 13, she says, he gave her some "rush," a cheap liquid inhalant, and some pot.
Whites and blacks. In every city U.S. News visited with a significant black or Hispanic population, poor minorities tended to be worse off than poor whites. The white ghettos had less poverty than the black ones, lower proportions of female-headed families and lower homicide rates. Some residents of white slums seized on conditions in nearby black ghettos to show that things were not that bad for them. Others, however, found white poverty doubly humiliating. Charlene Manley, Michelle Loomis's mother in Waterloo, explained: "If you're white and you're poor, you had all the help in the world and blew it. But if you're black, people say there's an excuse for it."
Given the disparities between white and black ghettos, it's not surprising that white slums tend to be less violent and chaotic. Predominantly black ghettos have more families missing a father who might control errant children; they afford less opportunity for mobility out of the ghetto because of the persistence of housing discrimination and racism; and the communities have had longer to deteriorate. While crime is rampant in white underclass neighborhoods, random violence and murders are infrequent and drive-by shootings almost unheard of. Flint, Mich., had 48 homicides in 1993, but it was a rare event last year when two white teens got shot after they wandered into a black part of town to buy crack cocaine. Crack use--and the violenceit can spawn--is comparatively rare among poor whites, and that accounts in part for the differing patterns of violence in white and black underclass areas. Even so, heroin has made a troubling resurgence in white slums.
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