The White Underclass
Does the rise in out-of-wedlock babies and white slums foretell a social catastrophe
The scourge of the white underclass still is alcohol. The poor white neighborhood near downtown Jackson, Mich., has the highest reported crime rate in the city, with much of it connected to alcohol--domestic violence, disorderly conduct and personal assaults. Officer Beth Whaley, who patrols Flint's mainly white south and east sides, says some weeks she is called to the same homes over and over again. With a note of disgust, she observes that "the incidents are almost always alcohol related, and the kids are usually right in the middle of it--watching it all."
Predominantly white gangs, like those in Detroit, have proliferated in a number of white ghettos. Mount Clare, in Baltimore, has two loosely organized "posses," the Lumberyard Gang and the Doghouse Gang; Bayside, in Portland, has the Grant Street posse. For the most part, however, white gangs resemble the Jets and Sharks of West Side Story more than the Bloods and Crips of South Central Los Angeles. Except in Detroit, white gang fights are generally resolved with fists, or perhaps with a bat or beer bottle, not with Uzis.
Patty Duquette, one of 12 children in her French Catholic family, grew up in public housing in South Boston, and for the past 10 years, she and her four sons have lived off welfare in the Old Colony project. The sporadic gunfire of the mid-1980s has largely vanished, reportedly at the order of Irish mobsters. Heroin is back, though; most days her kids see syringes in the courtyard outside her entryway, and not long ago one of her neighbors accidentally pricked himself with a needle while gardening. Racial tensions also simmer--roughly a quarter of the 813 families in Old Colony are minorities, and when Duquette walks through the projects, black residents she barely knows sometimes call her "honky."
Still, not everything is bleak. The father of her children stopped using drugs, started working and contributes to his kids' support, though he has a new girlfriend. Duquette got her GED five years ago, teaches at the Boys Club preschool and wants to become a certified Montessori teacher. She'd like to move, but for now Old Colony is a safe, cheap place to live, and there is a multiyear list of families who want to move in.
Murray revisited. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Charles Murray wrote that "illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time--more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness, because it drives everything else." If he is right, the southern tip of South Boston should be a shambles. It has the highest proportion of female-headed families of any white underclass area in the nation--73 percent. Yet old women walk their dogs at midnight in the "lower end," residents often leave their screen doors unlocked on hot evenings, and if a boy steals a bike, folks will track him down and make him return it. Across the street from the projects are well-kept beaches and a huge park with a half-dozen baseball diamonds, soccer fields and playgrounds. Indeed, project residents would be surprised to hear themselves described as members of a white underclass. Many prominent white Bostonians, including state Senate President Billy Bulger, grew up in "Southie's" projects.
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