Читать книгу The Invention of the 'Underclass' - Loic Wacquant - Страница 19

Described alternatively as a “ferocious subculture,” a “hotbed of deviance,” and a “tangle of pathology,” or as a “contagion of disorder” and a “nation apart” on the verge of forming “permanent enclaves of poverty and violence” (so many expressions that one finds indiscriminately under the pen of journalists and in leading scholarly publications), the “underclass” does not encompass all the poor, nor even the most marginal of those dwelling at the urban margins. In keeping with the Victorian distinction between the virtuous and the vicious poor inherited from the nineteenth century,¹ it came to designate the “undeserving” and threatening black poor from the dilapidated remnants of the historic Bronzeville. By dint of their “antisocial” behaviors, “dysfunctional” lifestyle, and “deviant” values, those destitute African Americans trapped in the hyperghetto would be responsible for their own piteous fate as for the decline of the metropolis, which they saddle with a string of “social dislocations” that seem consubstantial to them: persistent joblessness and long-term reliance on public aid, marital dissolution and sexual anomie, educational failure and cultural deviation, drug trafficking and consumption, street delinquency and violent criminality, topped off by repeat incarceration.

Dangerousness and immorality in the city, along with membership in a stigmatized ethnoracial category (African Americans and, for some authors, Puerto Ricans), are the distinctive characteristics that motivate the authoritative (nay authoritarian) allocation to this “group” of the poor, whose emergence would explain the continued deterioration of the “ghettos” of the American metropolis. But we shall see that this collective exists as such only on paper, or in the minds of those who invoke it to spotlight a population they find violates their sense of sociosymbolic propriety.

A statistical artefact born of the arbitrary lumping of populations pertaining to disparate social relationships and mechanisms – ethnicity, the labor market, the family, geography, and state action on the social and penal fronts – the “underclass” is a lurid location in symbolic, social and physical space, a reviled and shunned entity perceived from afar (and above) and upon which each can project his racial and class fantasies.² Rather than a sociological category serving knowledge production, it is a social categoreme (from the Greek katégoreisthai): an instrument of “public accusation.”³ The “underclass” thus enters into the sociology of urban marginality not as an analytic tool but as an object of study: a collective belief (or rhetorical mirage) to be elucidated, a confused yet consequential classification that impacts urban reality by twisting its collective representation, a trope of incrimination that reveals more about those who deploy it than about those whom it ostensibly designates.

Whence comes this turbid notion of “underclass,” how is the semantic space it describes configured, and what are the reasons for its sudden, if short-lived, success at the cutting edge of urban and policy research? And what lessons can be garnered from its strange career for the sociology of caste and class in the polarizing metropolis? An abbreviated genealogy takes us from the world of scholarship, to philanthropy and policy institutes, to journalism and the bureaucratic state, and back to think tanks and the university, each cluster of protagonists finding symbolic profit in the endorsement of the category by the others, so that the fiction of the “underclass” gains credibility by circulating across the boundaries of the academic, political-policy-philanthropic and journalistic fields.⁴

Issued from the scholarly and public debates of the 1960s that fueled the launching of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” the term was coined in 1963 by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in a book alerting America to the ominous formation of a stratum of the working class that was being permanently marginalized by postindustrialization.⁵ Myrdal used the term to refer to a new position in the labor market and class structure. But the “underclass” failed to make a mark in university, media, and government circles because two rival notions captured the public imagination at that time: Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology” and Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty.” Applying Koselleck’s prescriptions for conceptual history, we must grasp these three notions in their interrelationships as part of a single “historical arrangement” of mental constructs emerging in the political turmoil of the mid-1960s. And, consistent with Bourdieu’s theory of classification struggles, we must spotlight the contest to establish one or another label as the right diagnosis for the ills of the collapsing ghetto.

The explosive expression “tangle of pathology” was not Moynihan’s; it was coined by the renowned black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark in a report to Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a community action program, that served as basis for his book, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, published to considerable acclaim in 1965 amidst the race riots shaking the country from coast to coast. In that book, Clark wrote somberly:

The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology, it is chronic, self-perpetuating pathology; and it is the futile attempt by those with power to confine that pathology so as to prevent the spread of its contagion to the “larger community.” . . . Not only is the pathology of the ghetto self-perpetuating, but one kind of pathology breeds another.⁶

Clark also used the expression “tangle of antisocial activities dominated by apathy and despair” in reference to delinquent youths at the center of his inquiry, and he repeatedly resorted to the biological idiom of illness and epidemic to describe social conditions.⁷ Indeed, we will see in the next chapter that Clark’s enumeration of the woes of the ghetto, “low aspiration, poor education, family instability, illegitimacy, unemployment, crime, drug addiction and alcoholism, frequent illness and early death,” was a prescient anticipation of the tale of the “underclass.”⁸

The tag “tangle of pathology” was seized upon by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor advisor in the Johnson administration, and used to frame a White House report on The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.⁹ Before it could even be released, the 76-page document, full of statistics and cautious language stressing class bifurcation among African Americans, lit a policy and scholarly firestorm.¹⁰ Its central thesis was that the crumbling of the black family – taking the form of forced matriarchy as a result of slavery and Jim Crow – was undermining the black community from within and threatening to undo the racial progress presaged by the freshly voted civil rights legislation ending the legal basis for segregation and discrimination.¹¹ Moynihan sketched a dire profile of the Negro family as measured by the dissolution of marriages in the city (23% versus 8% among whites), the rise of illegitimate births (eight times the white ratio), the increase in the proportion of single-parent families (one-quarter compared to 7% for whites) and “a startling increase in welfare dependency.”¹² Set in the patriarchal context of American society, the femalecentered family was dysfunctional. Together with “the racist virus in the American blood stream,” it marginalized black men, disoriented black youths, and caused school failure. Unless the federal government launched a frontal attack to establish the patriarchal family among Negros, matriarchy would reproduce itself and consign the black lower class to utter social devastation: “The present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.”¹³

Even though it was never released, the Moynihan report triggered a furious political and intellectual backlash. Critics insisted that it made the “disorganized family,” headed by the single mother with her illegitimate children, “the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior” perpetuating black marginality in the urban core,¹⁴ all but making poor black men the victims of poor black women. No less problematic was the remedy proposed, which consisted in establishing patriarchy among African Americans so that black men could fulfill their seemingly natural roles as bread-winner and disciplinarian. Overnight, the vitriolic controversy remade the public and academic debate on race and urban poverty in America, effectively deterring sustained empirical research on the hyperghetto for the better part of two decades.¹⁵

Regardless of the report’s caveats and merits, the language of pathology had the effect of turning the policy focus away from the economic and political causes of the deteriorating condition of the black precariat – the racially skewed functioning of the labor and housing markets, for instance, was not labelled pathological. It enabled Moynihan to fudge the difference between empirical observation and moral adjudication, and to treat the nuclear white middle-class family as an absolute norm by which to judge and remake the African-American family in the hyperghetto. In this anticipation of the discourse of the “underclass,” the asymmetric counterpart to the disorganized black lower class in the city was out in the open.

The controversy over the Moynihan report established the “tangle of pathology” as a keyword in the dominant approach to racialized poverty in the postindustrial metropolis. Indeed, the expression reemerged two decades later under the pen of the black sociologist William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987).¹⁶ Echoing analysts of the 1960s, Wilson maintained that it was necessary “to discuss in candid terms the social pathologies of the inner city” – among them violent crime, “family dissolution and welfare dependency” – in order to draw attention from policy makers and to press for public interventions aiming to interrupt the involutive course of the black precariat. The Chicago sociologist attributed the waning influence of the liberal perspective in the public debate on race and urban poverty to the reluctance of progressive scholars to “describe any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing to ghetto residents” and to their refusal to use the term “underclass,” even though the latter was needed to grasp “a reality not captured in the more standard designation lower class.”¹⁷

The storm over the “tangle of pathology” was still raging when another concept arose to occupy the intellectual scene at the intersection of academy and policy, and prevented the “underclass” from taking hold: the “culture of poverty.” The anthropologist Oscar Lewis fashioned the notion to account for what he saw as the self-perpetuating dynamic of destitution in Western nations. Based on a field study of the everyday life of five families in a Mexican village and a team ethnography of Puerto Rican families in San Juan and New York City, Lewis claimed that the poor in capitalist societies develop a distinct “subculture” or lifestyle in “an effort to cope with feelings of hopelessness and despair” arising from “the improbability of their achieving success” according to the prevailing values.¹⁸ Born as “an adaptation and a reaction to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society,” this subculture tends to lock them into marginality across generations because it is transmitted to their children even as “it goes counter to the cherished ideals of the larger society.”

Lewis listed some 70 traits characterizing this “design for living” of the poor that stressed “the inexorable repetitiousness and the iron entrenchment of their lifeways.” Among these traits, “the low level of organization,” “the disengagement from the larger society,” and “hostility to [its] basic institutions,” including the police, seemed to fit well poor blacks then rioting in American cities from coast to coast.¹⁹ But the thesis that the latter obey a distinctive life design perpetuating their dispossession seemed to disregard material forces keeping them down and to make (hyper)ghetto residents responsible for their own parlous fate – what the psychologist William Ryan would later call “blaming the victim” in his cutting critique of the Moynihan report and assorted middle-class nostrums deployed in denial of the realities of caste and class.²⁰

As a result, the “culture of poverty” became the epicenter of a second venomous debate among social researchers, much as the “tangle of pathology” fixated discussion among policy-oriented scholars. These two notions worked in tandem to fasten attention on the internal properties of the (hyper) ghetto and its inhabitants, effectively obscuring the web of external relations linking the latter to the broader structure of the city, the economy, and the state. In particular, these two notions obfuscated the continuing significance of caste as an active principle of social vision and division bisecting social and physical space in the metropolis. Myrdal’s “underclass” did not enter into the academic, journalistic, and policy vocabulary because it went against the grain of both rival notions: “tangle of pathology” consecrated race over class, but race construed as a substantialist property as opposed to a relational construct;²¹ “culture of poverty” prioritized culture over structure. Class receded into the background of both scholarly-policy disputes; the state as generator of marginality all but vanished.

But the “underclass” did not disappear so much as go underground, and it gained currency a decade later among philanthropic foundations. The latter seized on the notion as the rhetorical device ideally suited to relegitimizing their action in the face of the alleged failure of the “War on Poverty” to ameliorate conditions in the inner city. The “underclass” identified for them a new target population seemingly impervious to traditional means of poverty remediation and therefore requiring a renewed enterprise in observation and intervention. Two decades later, a senior staff member of the Rockefeller Foundation in charge of the “underclass” program under the aegis of the foundation’s Equal Opportunity Division, would confide to sociologist Herbert Gans that “poverty didn’t sell” anymore whereas “underclass” was an “energizing” term.²²

The key role here was played by Mitchell Sviridoff, the Vice-President for national affairs at the Ford Foundation and later a professor of urban policy at the New School for Social Research. As early as 1966, Sviridoff provided a large grant to launch and support the Vera Institute of Justice to carry out “demonstration projects in the field of criminal justice and the underclass” – the first mention of the category referenced in the foundation’s archives.²³ He was then the architect behind the creation of the Manpower Development Research Corporation (MDRC) in 1974. The MDRC’s mission was to establish and evaluate employment and job training programs showcasing incremental change carried out in cooperation with the US Department of Labor. This was motivated by Sviridoff’s view that “‘the activist experimentation’ of the 1960s had gone ‘too far, too fast’”; that poverty was best tackled by teaching poor individuals good “work habits” and by clearing paths to self-sufficiency; and that, to moderate the liberal agenda, it was best “to avoid direct confrontation with the issue of race.”²⁴ The first training program administered by the MDRC targeted the “chronically unemployed,” chiefly welfare recipients, recently released criminal convicts and drug addicts, viewed by Sviridoff as making up “the core of a new ‘underclass’.”²⁵ This move laid the groundwork for the Ford Foundation’s forceful intervention into research on the urban “underclass” a decade later, after the latter had made its way into America’s social imaginary by way of the popular media.

The “underclass” burst onto the public stage in the summer of 1977 via a Time magazine cover and feature article that warned the country about the portentous presence of this newfound group:

Behind the [ghetto’s] crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass . . . Their bleak environment nurtures values that are often at odds with those of the majority – even the majority of the poor. Thus the underclass produces a highly disproportionate number of the nation’s juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay and demand for social expenditures.²⁶

The article notes that, borrowed from the Swede Gunnar Myrdal, “the term itself is shocking to striving, mobile America” (it wrongly states that the term has “long been used in class-ridden Europe”). Yet, despite a strong labor market and billions of dollars in public spending to fight poverty, “the underclass remains a nucleus of psychological and material destitution” stuck at the bottom that defies government intervention. Indeed, an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development warns that “the underclass presents our most dangerous crisis, more dangerous than the Depression of 1929, and more complex.”²⁷ This threat is made more urgent still by the boiling envy that the “underclass” is said to feel toward successful blacks who left the ghetto and its aggressive resentment toward the affluent society that ignores them. This much had been demonstrated a month earlier when New York City lost power for 25 hours, during which time black rioters set off some thousand fires in 31 neighborhoods and looters ransacked over 1,600 stores, leading to 4,500 arrests, in what Time magazine called a “night of terror.”²⁸ The blackout mutiny of New York City made the headlines around the country and the globe, announcing to the world the coming out of the American “underclass.”

Alarmed at the sighting of the group, public officials from coast to coast at every level of government asked in unison, “How big is it? Who is in it? What motivates its members?” The article answers by coursing through the demographic, social, and psychic makeup of the “underclass,” adorned by a dozen dramatic photos all displaying sullen and beaten black men, women, and children amidst physical chaos and social detritus.²⁹ Special attention is accorded to men who have never held jobs and terrorize the streets, and to women who receive more from welfare than what they would earn working: “Welfare dependency means that for many members of the underclass, the concepts of income and jobs are barely related,” and “for many women in the underclass, welfare has turned illegitimate pregnancy into a virtual career.”³⁰

Given the failure of the War on Poverty to contracept the “underclass,” the path to salvation is said to rest on “new efforts by the underclass themselves” and by private business, along with a reallocation of social spending to improve public education, toughen policing, expand courts and jails, and subsidize low-paying jobs. As an example of remedy, the article vaunts a job-training program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, “aimed at long-term welfare mothers, ex-drug addicts and ex-convicts,” providing intense supervision and stringent work discipline for its participants. Whatever the combination of public, private, and philanthropic efforts, to tame the “underclass” promises to take not years but a whole generation.

The article had an immediate impact on politicians, who quickly repeated its claims almost word for word. Thus Senator Edward Kennedy, the standard bearer for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, alerted the country in a 1978 address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People:

The great unmentioned problem of America today: the growth, rapid and insidious, of a group in our midst, perhaps more dangerous, more bereft of hope, more difficult to confront than any for which our history has prepared us. It is a group which threatens to become what America has never known – a permanent underclass in our society.³¹

The Time Magazine portrait primed the turn toward a racialized and behavioral vision of the “underclass” that was accelerated by the book, The Underclass, by the New York journalist Ken Auletta. In 1982, Auletta was a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Village Voice, weekly political columnist for the New York Daily News, political commentator on WCBS-TV, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, all but guaranteeing the high visibility of his investigation. Serialized in The New Yorker just before its release, The Underclass was an instant hit and drew myriad reviews in the mainstream media, including a laudatory front-page review by the political scientist Andrew Hacker in the New York Review of Books. Remarkably, it was also reviewed in Contemporary Sociology as if it were a scholarly tome.³² It popularized the term “underclass” among the educated public and political personnel, and it quickly established itself as a central reference invoked by other journalists as well as by academics and think tankers alike as evidence of the existence of the group.³³