Seduced
By John McWhorter

This is a story of how measures intended as instruments of social improvement can cut a people off at their knees.

Until the 1960s, government welfare programs were small efforts designed for young widows and seniors without other means of support. Payments were more likely to go to elderly white women than young black mothers. There were blacks on welfare, but relatively few families depended on the government in any open-ended fashion.

Welfare was a mean little business meant to get people by in a pinch. Mothers applying for checks had to let social workers inspect their homes to see if their lifestyles were “suitable,” and to make sure they weren’t living with a man who could work. And if they qualified for support, the stipends were scanty, certainly nothing to found a life upon. As late as the early 1960s, Lee Rainwater’s study of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis makes only passing references to welfare: even in the worst black communities it had not yet become a norm.

During the decade that followed, the number of Americans on welfare increased by 169 percent, and then another 30 percent from 1970 to 1975. In New York City, almost one out of every six residents was on welfare in 1972. And many of the new enrollees were black. Even though blacks were only about a tenth of all Americans, they constituted nearly half of all welfare recipients by the late 1970s. Among long-term welfare recipients, it was as high as 70 percent.

One could interpret these numbers to mean that poverty and joblessness in black America were on the rise. The truth, however, was that the American economy was booming, opening up opportunities that blacks would have previously envied. Between 1960 and 1970—the very years that welfare dependency mushroomed into a norm rather than a stopgap in many black communities—unemployment among black men decreased from 7.8 to 4.2 percent.

Radical Ideas...

Welfare was not expanded to arrest some downward trend in black progress. Rather, the welfare explosion created a negative pressure all its own on black America, becoming a staple means of living. Many blacks who had previously been under the impression that they were doing the right thing by working for a living were lassoed onto the rolls and culturally corrupted.

Before this time, one could sit at a forum addressing poverty and hear that lack of income was just “one of a constellation of social defects” to be found in poor individuals and communities. That was said in 1956. Just ten years later, a new way of thinking deemed it offensive to think of poverty as a cultural and economic issue. The new consensus insisted that poverty was due to flaws in the capitalist system. Thinking otherwise was “blaming the victim.”

In the academy and among race militants, it was even argued that mainstream norms of work, marriage, and childrearing were racist, and that the single-parent family was a healthy coping strategy. The way to address black poverty, according to the spirit of the age, was not to emphasize family integrity, work habits, or job and educational training, but to teach black people to sign up for welfare even when they had been getting by without it.

In 1966, a report from the Advisory Council on Public Welfare pronounced that “most public welfare recipientsÉcannot realistically be expected to become self-sustaining.” Thus they deemed poverty a permanent condition, and determined that only a combination of wealth redistribution and guaranteed income could provide a solution. Things accelerated further when advocates decided that the working poor—in addition to existing welfare recipients—would also be better off refraining from self-support.

In New York, the Mobilization for Youth was set up to encourage poor people to apply for welfare. In language that suggests a dim view of the applicants’ mental sophistication, the group trained its workers to tap the applicant’s “inner victim”: “In dealing with low-income people who rarely have the experience or the education of thinking in conceptual terms, in terms of where the system is at fault, it’s the immediate thing like the Jewish landlord, the Irish cop on the beat, the Italian grocery-store owner, the lousy teachers, or the welfare investigator.” The National Welfare Rights Organization, led by professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven of Columbia University, organized troops of activists to demand higher payments and elimination of attached strings.

Rarely in American history have people with such a radical and destructive agenda had such power over the daily lives of innocent people. They encouraged as many people as possible to get welfare payments, hoping that this would bankrupt the government and force a complete overhaul of our income distribution. It wasn’t that these activists thought there was no work for blacks—just that it was beneath blacks’ dignity to start at the bottom. Journalist Richard Elman was dismayed that blacks were expected “to go the hard route, to be our taxi drivers, restaurant employees...and factory hands.”

The National Welfare Rights Organization became well known for disrupting government meetings, and held rallies in 40 cities demanding expanded enrollments and bigger checks. While they purportedly addressed all the poor, in practice, they focused mainly on blacks. By the fall of 1968, the organization was staging more than 200 protests a month, sometimes assisted by the Black Panthers. A core idea at this time was that welfare was a “civil right.”

Interestingly, traditional civil rights leaders were not enthusiastic. In recalling a meeting with the director of the National Urban League, Piven stated, “we met with Whitney YoungÉand he gave us a long speech about how it was more important to get one black woman into a job as an airline stewardess than it was to get 50 poor black families onto welfare.”

In New York City at this time, welfare commissioner Mitchell Ginsberg—who had been Cloward’s colleague at Columbia—pushed caseworkers to recruit new recipients and abolished screening requirements like interviews and home inspections. Until 1961, national welfare rules assumed that wherever a father could be identified, he ought to be expected to provide support. Between 1961 and 1968, that was relaxed. In 1969, the one-year state residency requirement was dropped, and people began to move to different states to seek higher payments.

These incremental changes created a program that allowed young women who got pregnant in their teens to receive decades of checks from the government. No one, black or white, had previously known this kind of quasi-permanent welfare. What had been a low-profile, temporary safety net for people in dire straits was now a way of life.

...Create New Black Norms

Any historian of black American life will notice how small a role welfare played prior to the 1960s—it only hovered at the margins in most family and community narratives from those years. This despite widespread black poverty at the time.

Then bureaucrats went courting recipients, unconcerned with when, or even whether, they became independent again. The nation’s welfare rolls exploded, jumping from 4.7 million to 9.7 million between 1966 and 1970 alone. This new version of welfare quickly took over poor black communities, and it became a defining influence.

Thus did black America fall into economic dependence and cultural ruin. In just a matter of years, healthy black people living as passive recipients of government alms achieved a degree of normalcy. Within inner-city slums across the nation, successive generations of black children barely knew their fathers and were raised by unmarried, unemployed mothers stuck in unending poverty, living on modest checks from Uncle Sam.

This was the first time in black American history that dependency had become a norm. And it happened even though economic opportunities were wider than ever before, changing millions of lives dramatically.

Between 1964 and 1976, the number of black children born to single mothers doubled. By 1995, more than three quarters of black youngsters were born out of wedlock. This cannot humanely be chalked up to a “You go, girl!” overthrow of old cultural assumptions. These single mothers weren’t exactly living large, or even functioning at all.

And that badly injured the next generation. Among black children living with two parents, poverty rates plunged from 61 percent in 1959 to just 13 percent in 1995, marking incredible progress. By that time, most black families were no longer living below the poverty line. Yet that same year, the poverty rate among black kids being raised by single women was fully 62 percent.

In other words, after welfare was expanded for the alleged benefit of poor blacks, black fathers rarely helped rear their children. Mothers increasingly raised the young alone and in jobless poverty. Thus came a new world for poor blacks, where children came of age seeing that work was optional, fathers rare, and dysfunction common.

The young black males who grew up in this culture without family loyalty or work also absorbed a new oppositional racial orthodoxy. They were told, through high culture and low, that white America wasn’t worth their allegiance. Not surprisingly, many turned to crime.

A similar youngster growing up a generation earlier saw poor black men taking the bus every day to plants, terminals, and other work sites. Their wives—not girlfriends—rode the same buses to domestic jobs. But by the 1970s, the expansion of welfare made those couples the exception. A new ghetto norm grew up, where men sold drugs on the corner and women fed their kids on the stoop.

The Welfare Temptation

After the expansion of welfare, recipients consisted of three main groups of roughly equal size. About a third were people who were temporarily needy—abused wives with children, new immigrants—using welfare as a stopgap to survive while getting back on their feet. Another third were so addled by drugs, violent upbringings, and other pathologies that they became forever unfit to work.

But there was another third who were essentially taking a free ride, not because they were evil, but because open-ended welfare catered to the lesser instincts of human nature. We don’t like to talk about those people, but anyone with experience in black America knows that a core of the welfare world was women who gave birth in their teens for no particular reason other than that it had become a norm.

As often as not, such women continued having children afterward. There was no reason not to, with welfare standing always at the ready. Their previous kids and lack of husband already barred them from getting much of anywhere in a career, and another child would be one more source of love and occupation.

Former black welfare mother Star Parker illustrates from her own life how these incentives worked: “‘Let me make sure I understand you correctly,’ I inquired of the welfare caseworker as I presented her with my pregnancy confirmation note from a doctor. ‘All I have to do for you to send me $465 a month, $176 worth of food stamps, and 100 percent free medical and dental assistance is keep this baby. As long as I don’t have a bank account, find a job, or get married I qualify for aid? Where do I sign up?’”

Of course, individual experiences varied, and by no means did all long-term, inner-city welfare recipients make calculations this deliberate or cheery. But the environment made it easier than ever before for individuals to live off of others. It is not surprising that many people accepted this offer—abandoning marriage, children, and self-sufficiency in the process.

I do not mean to “bash” such people. They were devastated by a misguided brand of benevolence. Stephen Goldsmith, a former prosecutor who for 12 years was responsible for locating fathers who abandoned women on welfare, noted that “welfare did not make work unnecessary—it made work irrational.” The welfare culture allowed blacks to realize the worst of human nature. It discouraged individual responsibility, the thing that pushes people to make the best of themselves.

Similar incentives badly damaged some other vulnerable populations. Open-ended welfare policies on Native American reservations, for instance, created growing indolence, dependence, and substance abuse, even as white racism and economic blockages receded. Motivation and risk taking will be undercut wherever basic needs are met without strings of obligation. That is Aesop, the Bible, and common sense. That is human nature.

The Right Thing vs. the Cool Thing

Many investigators have provided pictures of what happens when welfare disconnects black Americans from the workforce. New York Times writer Jason DeParle, for instance, has profiled people like Angie, who drifted casually between welfare and work. Angie started employment at a nursing home but only lasted eight days (“I don’t want to find no dead person!”). She took a Postal Service job, but then let it go for vague reasons. She connected only tenuously to work because she knew she could go back on public assistance at any time. “If I left the post office, I could still have money,” she stated, referring to her welfare entitlement.

DeParle, an opponent of the 1996 welfare reform who reconsidered upon seeing its benefits, begrudgingly toyed with the notion that welfare payments may have “played an enabling role” in his interviewees’ so casually having children out of wedlock. Keep in mind that the rate of childbearing went down during the Great Depression, suggesting that under normal circumstances people with limited opportunity refrain from having children. So why all the kids in black inner cities?

In poor black areas of Chicago during the 1920s, it was considered a problem that 15 percent of births were out of wedlock. Once the Depression hit, that number went down to under 10 percent. Women who had several children by different men were marginal types. And men at that time worked at jobs that immigrants have since filled.

An alternate black America is easy to imagine. Why must cab drivers without foreign accents be rare in New York City? Why are soul-food restaurants vastly scarcer than Indian or Thai ones? The reason, ultimately, is the destructive ideology that infected black America, teaching that entry-level labor is for someone else.

From even further on the left, Katherine Newman wrote a politically correct book called No Shame in My Game. It tries to convince us that poor blacks are stuck—by no fault of their own—in an economy with no place for them. The book, however, ends up demonstrating that inner-city blacks practice a culture which marks them deeply from an early age and ruins their lives.

A typical character is Latoya. She lives with her common-law husband Jason, a carpenter. She had her first child at sixteen, another during a brief marriage, and then another with Jason, with whom she has an extremely unstable relationship.

“I gotta find me a job where I can just work, you know, a certain amount of hours, then spend some time with the kids, and then take my days off and go to school. That’s what I’m looking for,” Latoya says. She will not find a job like that, we all know.

Newman wants us to curse a world that has no place for women with little education and no skills who want to take care of three children without a husband. She insists on “respecting” Latoya’s “choices,” and is extremely wary of questioning poor black people’s “right to reproduce.” Poor blacks themselves, however, are often more
honest. Latoya makes it clear she had those babies quite casually even though she knew she couldn’t provide properly for them.

In this, Latoya and her men contrast with poor blacks before the 1960s. In 1960, 67 percent of black children were born to two-parent families. Few of them lived shiny lives, but in that era, blacks who had children together typically tried to live with one another even if they were poor. Only in Latoya’s time has the orthodoxy settled in that poor black people do not raise children together. A cultural shift has left Latoya unconcerned with squaring her reproductive “choices” with economic reality.

Once upon a time, community norms would have held women like Latoya and Angie in line. Now liberal orthodoxy forces us to blame the economy. But why have poor blacks not improved their position in the economy by, for example, getting associate’s degrees at community colleges, or vocational training of the sort advertised relentlessly on billboards and buses?

Do apologists believe poor blacks are incapable of such achievements? Earlier generations of black Americans used education to elevate themselves. While 95 percent could not read in 1860, by 1910 that ratio had tumbled to 30 percent.

Attitude plays a big part in success. Contrast those ex-slaves fighting their way to literacy to Latoya’s reminiscence: “You know, when my mother told me [to get an education] I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever’.”

Apologists would like us to have a mental picture of poor blacks desperately clambering for work, only to find that there are too few jobs for too little pay. Yet one actually leaves a book like Newman’s with an image of people holding a distinctly ambivalent attitude toward working at all. Many are torn between doing the right thing and doing the cool thing.

Young blacks now commonly mock peers who try to work for a living, accusing them of toiling for “chump change.” This is a problem well known to anyone familiar with the inner city. Newman actually quotes one girl who proudly notes that she is not “ashamed” to have a job.

Even if they are not completely hostile to work, many ghetto youngsters are hard to employ because they are incapable of being polite to customers. The defensive, tripwire demeanor that underclass life tends to encourage conflicts with the requirements of customer-service jobs. Some apologists actually argue it is unfair to expect alienated black kids to smile at McDonalds.

When a slum renovation project in Newark, New Jersey sought local workers in the early 1990s, managers found almost no takers. They ended up bringing in workers from the suburbs. Apologists responded that locals did not want “dead end” work, but this work could have yielded skills and contacts as well as entry-level income.

Low-income locals were obviously getting by, most of them either by selling drugs or relying on welfare payments through one channel or another. That so many of them felt these “choices” to be natural, and preferable to taking decent work, says something. It says a new culture has emerged that separates today’s black youth from their ancestors who slept in beds in shifts so they could hold whatever jobs they found. It says that black Americans were seduced by the post-1960s welfare culture. And for many of them, the result was hell on earth.

Help That Harmed

There is no better argument against open-ended welfare than the results of the five-year time limit instituted in 1996, which has already diminished black poverty. Opponents of the 1996 reforms predicted that poor blacks would be starving on the streets—but they’ve been proven dead wrong. The proportion of black children in poverty fell by a third in just a few years.

The reduction of welfare rolls is being driven as much by a new zeitgeist as by economics. “Message effects,” social scientists call it. Since 1996 we have learned a simple lesson: when open-ended welfare disappears, people work.

Yet there are still many critics who see little value in that. Unless former welfare recipients end up in the middle class, they say, something is very wrong. Former welfare recipients, it is said dismissively, are now in the ranks of the working poor, depicted as having no realistic chance of anything better than a subsistence lifestyle.

But why would we expect people with little education and fitful work experience to be suddenly living comfortable suburban lives? Too many people pretend today that the hardships of black Americans can never be traced to personal life choices—choices made under a system that often enables the worst in people.

The countercultural revolution of the 1960s—led largely by white radicals—tried to absolve black people from working. It insisted that childbearing out of wedlock was harmless. It encouraged a new animus against “The System” which absolved individuals of the consequences of their actions. And these ideas ended up having grim impacts on poor blacks.

Many were speeded into eternal economic dependence. Many ended up starkly separated from mainstream American culture. All were breaking from pre-’60s black history.

Black leaders in places like post-Victorian Indianapolis were embarrassed to accept charity, believing it would imply that blacks were not worthy enough to make their own way. Tell those struggling blacks in 1915 that generations of poor black women would never know work, that their children would casually have children and go on the dole as teens, that their sons would grow so estranged from the work ethic that selling drugs with “gats” in their pockets felt ordinary, and try to imagine them saying, “Oh, that’s okay.”

Were these proud black people in high collars and shiny shoes, leaders and toilers, really just dupes who failed to understand that capitalism and racism make it unrealistic to expect more than a few lucky blacks to rise above sweeping floors and burping white babies? Would it have been better for those earlier generations of blacks if they had had open-ended welfare programs to apply to?

It’s better for a person to work for a living. We all know that. Yes, slave ships and lynching and segregated water fountains were hideous. But it’s still obvious that the descendants of people who suffered these things will be vastly better off if they work rather than live off others.

That’s why when radicals taught us to thumb our noses at traditional expectations of responsibility, family cohesion, and economic self-support, and told us to go on welfare instead—because white America hadn’t done enough for us—they sent us straight to hell.

John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This is adapted from his new book, Winning the Race.