ELEVEN
By the mid-1980s it had become fashionable to announce that the upsurge of criminal violence in American society that had begun in the 1960s was finally over or at least slowing down. Reported violent crime was declining and the homicide death rate had fallen from over 10 to about 8 per 100,000 population. Increasingly sophisticated trauma units were saving more victims, but the root cause was supposed to be that the baby boomers were outgrowing their wild days. Fewer young men relative to total population meant lower rates of crime. The authors of one article went so far as to plot predicted rates of homicide, robbery, burglary, and auto theft to the year 2000. All the projected curves showed steady declines through the 1990s. "As the baby boom ages," they commented, "better days lie ahead for the nation's police departments and for its citizens."1
A funny thing happened on the way to the better days. In the late 1980s rates of violent crime and drug abuse began shooting upward, particularly in big cities. In Chicago, for example, the number of cases of aggravated assault, rape, robbery, and murder jumped 16 per cent between 1985 and 1988 despite no increase in the city's population.2
This was no local anomaly. Problems of social order, particularly homicidal violence, worsened throughout the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the homicide rate hitting a new peak in 1991. Though rates of burglary and theft were comparable to those of European nations, the American rape rate was by then eight times, the murder rate four times, and the heroin addiction rate twice the European average. With just 4-5 percent of the world's population, Americans were managing to consume half the world's supply of cocaine. Americans had also achieved the highest rate of incarceration in the world, 455 per 100,000. South Africans, a distant second, had 311. The Japanese had 45. America had plainly become one of the world's most violent and self-destructive nations at the very moment demographers had forecast things would be getting much better.3 What went wrong?
There was nothing faulty about the demographers' logic, at least as it applied to homicide, the single most closely watched index of violence. The rate of homicide among the aging baby boomers did go down during the late 1980s and early 1990s. But these gains were more than canceled out by an unanticipated explosion of murderous violence among males aged fourteen to twenty-four, who were committing more than half of all homicides by 1992.'
It was also clear that the problem of homicide, and the problem of violent crime generally, was centered on young minority men, especially black men, who lived and died in urban ghettos. In New York City in 1990-1991 the homicide rate for black males aged fifteen to twenty-four was 247 per 100,000, higher than that of the Texas frontier town of Fort Griffin in the 1870s. As on the historical frontier, most ghetto slayings involved handguns. Nationally the firearm murder rate for black males fifteen to nineteen, the group that experienced the biggest percentage increase in homicide deaths, was 105 per 100,000, or eleven times that of white males in the same age group.5
Blacks were on both ends of the gun. In the early 1990s there were more black murderers than white murderers, although blacks made up only an eighth of the population. Most of the killing was of the intraracial player variety, black men killing other black men who were involved in drugs and street life or who had committed violent crimes themselves.6 What made the 1994 indictment of O. J. Simpson for murder extraordinary, apart from the defendant's celebrity, was its deviation from this rule. If Simpson had been accused of killing another black man in his youthful San Francisco gang days, the media would have taken no notice.
The police would have taken notice, though their investigation would have been routine, perhaps desultory. The work of big-city homicide squads has long been politically and morally stratified. Certain cases, such as the murder of a child, generate tremendous pressure for a quick solution. Homicide detectives call them red balls or holy-shit cases, and they are taken very seriously. But even in cases without a high media profile detectives distinguish between those in which there is a "real victim" and everyday player violence, such as one gang member or crack dealer shooting another. Gender counts as well as race. Murders of women are investigated more rigorously than the more common murders of men.7
Player violence and drug trafficking are often difficult crimes to prosecute. Witnesses tend to be scarce, uncooperative, or afraid to talk. But enough cases eventually result in convictions to have dramatic penal consequences, particularly for black men. By the mid-1990s nearly one-third of black American men in their twenties were under some form of correctional supervision. In Washington 42 percent and in Baltimore an astonishing 57 percent of black men between eighteen and thirty-five were in prison, on probation or parole, out on bail, or being sought on an arrest warrant. Even allowing for prejudicial arrests and biased sentencing, it was simply not possible that all these convictions and sentences were a manifestation of oppression. Something was amiss in black America, above all in the inner cities.8
Fatherless Bachelors
That something had to do with the universal problem of youthful males and social disorder. Boys experience parental discipline and modeling in the families in which they are raised and self-discipline and adult responsibilities when they form their own families. Men subject to first the one and then the other type of family control are unlikely to behave destructively. Men who are raised in intact families but do not marry are more prone than their married peers to violent and disorderly behavior as well as to higher mortality. The worst case, however, occurs when young men who are inadequately disciplined and socialized in single-parent families of origin also do not marry and establish their own families of procreation. They are doubly prone to irresponsible and sociopathic behavior because their moral horizons, habits of self-control, and economic opportunities have been truncated at both ends of the reproductive cycle.
Illegitimacy is a recipe for anomie. Illegitimate children often lack not only fathers and decent family incomes but the whole array of socially obligated kin (paternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins) who come with an official or publicly acknowledged marriage. A male child who is illegitimate is, by definition, missing half his kin and the social and economic capital they represent. He may have many relatives in the sense of shared genes, but any claims he may make upon their time or resources are socially contingent and legally avoidable.
A man who does not marry or acknowledge paternity likewise lacks another set of relatives, his wife, children, and in-laws, for whom he is responsible and from whom he might also benefit through family alliances. Brothers-in-law are useful fellows. They can help find jobs, loan money, serve as children's role models. The myth of individualism notwithstanding, people get up and on in the world through families and family alliances.
Illegitimacy and singleness frustrate this process and, when they reach a certain point, begin to perpetuate themselves. Illegitimate children raised in a social milieu where fatherless families are the norm often grow up poor and conceive children who become, at an early age, unmarried parents, and so on across generations. Within the limits imposed by heredity we mold our sexual behavior—in fact, we become ourselves in every sense— by emulating the behavior of others in our social environment.9
The fatherless bachelor phenomenon has been most widespread among black Americans, who have long had higher rates of family disruption than whites. Black couples have been more often separated or divorced, and bachelorhood has been more common among black men than among white. In 1992 40.4 percent of black men over age eighteen had never been married compared to just 24.2 percent of white men.10 This statistic alone would translate into higher black rates of crime and violent death.
The biggest and most ominous difference, however, has been in illegitimate births. In 1960 only about one in fifty whites and one in five blacks were born out of wedlock. By 1990 the numbers were one in five whites and well over three in five blacks. These ratios would have meant little socially if they had represented technically illegitimate births in stable cohabitations or common-law marriages, but in fact most illegitimate children in America grow up without a father to provide discipline, moral instruction, a positive role model, and regular financial support. By 1991 the combination of widespread illegitimacy, divorce, separation, and abandonment had made the single-parent or "blended" stepparent family the rule in black America, where only one child in four lived in a traditional nuclear family with both biological parents."
Enter Moynihan
The modern debate over the causes and consequences of black family disruption and illegitimacy took off in 1965 with the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Labor Department study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The Moynihan report, as it became known, was an argument that black social problems, including crime, delinquency, and poor school performance, were rooted in the deterioration of black urban families, evidenced in high rates of marital dissolution, illegitimate births, and female-headed, welfare-dependent households.
Moynihan supposed that black family life in America had been difficult from the beginning, owing to the disruptions and separations imposed by a harsh system of chattel slavery. Things had been made worse by the unsettling effects of rural-to-urban migration and catastrophically high levels of black unemployment since the onset of the Depression, relieved only by periods of full employment during wartime.
Yet joblessness was not the whole story. One of Moynihan's discoveries was that from 1948 to 1962 the nonwhite male unemployment rate and the number of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) cases opened during the year moved in lockstep, the correlation being +.91. Black men apparently abandoned families they could not support, increasing the need for welfare services. But then something snapped. In 1963 and 1964 the number of AFDC cases kept growing even as the nonwhite unemployment rate was plummeting. The correlation, having been strongly positive for years, was suddenly negative. Moynihan, who feared that the situation had begun feeding on itself, was at a loss to explain this disturbing new phenomenon.12
He was not at a loss for critics. He was variously accused of racism, of being hung up on middle-class family norms, of misunderstanding the strength and resiliency of black kin networks, of putting too much causal weight on slavery, and, in a famous phrase, of "blaming the victim." The last charge ignored the report's sociological bent and Moynihan's insistence that fatherless families caused chaos in all human communities, none excepted. But the critics had their way. Within a year Moynihan had become a kind of political nonperson and his report had been all but officially suppressed.13
During the 1980s the report was politically rehabilitated, thanks in no small measure to the fact that so many of its troubling prophecies had come true. Indices of black family disruption continued to rise in good times and bad, black illegitimacy became the norm rather than the exception, and the evidence that violent and disorderly behavior, substance abuse, poor academic performance, and mortality rates were all exacerbated by family disruption and illegitimacy continued to accumulate. One Ohio study of death certificates found that children born out of wedlock were five times more likely to die by homicide than children in the general population. Illegitimacy was a better predictor of childhood homicide risk than the mother's race, education, residence, or any other factor.14
But there was no agreement on what was causing illegitimacy and single-parent families in the first place. During the 1980s the two most publicly discussed views were the welfare thesis and the job-loss thesis. The former, articulated by a host of conservative commentators, stressed that generous welfare benefits ("transfers") had created perverse incentives. "Any social transfer," declared Charles Murray, "increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer."15 Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and its subsequent legislative additions had made it possible for healthy adults to withdraw from the labor market, for alcoholics and drug addicts to stay high and live off food stamps and SSI (Supplemental Security Income), and most critically for sexually active women to marry the state rather than husbands, secure in the knowledge that their children would be supported by AFDC. Men could abandon or refuse to marry the women they impregnated, certain that others, however grudgingly, would pay to raise and educate their offspring. Government transfer payments thus removed an ancient check on male sexuality and behavior, the necessity of family involvement to insure the survival of children. In the new ghetto-cum-welfare environment the optimal male strategy for having a good time, enhancing reputation, and passing on genes was simply, and atavistically, frequent intercourse with as many fertile women as possible.
This line of thinking was rebutted by liberals who denied the notion that welfare support was in any sense generous. AFDC payments, for example, steadily declined in real dollars after 1972. If illegitimacy were tied to such benefits, the number of out-of-wedlock births should have gone down, not up. A likelier explanation was structural changes in the labor market. Family formation and family stability required decent jobs. But decent working-class jobs were increasingly hard to find. Deindustrialization, government cutbacks, union decline, automation, retrenchment, global competition, and other economic changes had reduced the availability of secure employment for people with high school educations or less. When in 1990 the City of New York announced an examination for prospective sanitation workers (starting salary $23,000, no high school diploma required), more than 100,000 people signed up to compete for 2,000 positions. Many of the applicants were from the city's large minority population and lived in race- and class-segregated neighborhoods where legitimate economic opportunities were scarce.16
The liberal prescription for this problem was to provide the means—public transportation, affirmative action, daycare, education, adult retraining—to make it easier for inner-city residents to get, and get to, jobs. Over the long run more and better jobs would presumably translate into more marriages, fewer illegitimate births, greater family stability, and less violent and disorderly behavior, as had been the case in the 1940s and 1950s.
But this approach also came in for its share of criticism. Teaching poor people to be welders or meat cutters was fine, but unless the number of such blue-collar jobs kept growing the training and placement programs would simply substitute one group of employees for another, having no effect on the overall unemployment rate. The alternative, to train people for skilled careers in growth sectors of the economy, ran into the fact that children from poor, single-parent families spent less time on homework, did less well in school, and consequently ended up less literate and numerate than the general population.17A child in this predicament was necessarily much harder to train later in life for good jobs in the postindustrial economy. The same dilemma confronted rehabilitation efforts of every stripe. It was, after all, much harder to rehabilitate someone who had never been habilitated in the first place.
The Culture of Poverty
Though debate between conservative critics of welfare and liberal advocates of employment during the 1980s was acerbic and politicized, there was at least one piece of common ground. Both sides agreed that the behavior of ghetto residents was in some sense economically rational. That is, marrying the state and using transfer payments to raise children was reasonable: why earn and spend your own money when you can have access to other people's? For market conservatives the basic problem was misguided policy, not individuals' opportunistic response to it.
Liberals accounted for the socially destructive behavior of unwed or irresponsible parents by posing a question of their own: Why even think of getting or staying married if it was financially impossible to support a family? In their analysis the basic problem was the lack of decent incomes and job opportunities, not the individuals' rational if unfortunate adaptation of sexual behavior to chronic unemployment.
But cultures as well as individuals adapt, and cultures are harder to change by altering the details of public policy. In fact cultures can become so distorted by intractable poverty that they become the means by which impoverishment is transmitted across generations. Countervalue norms—why bother, squares work, hustling is hip, high is cool, get it now—are psychologically adaptive, providing a kind of defiant design for living for those who would otherwise succumb to hopelessness and despair. Yet these same norms encourage behaviors that guarantee economic and familial failure over the long run.
This thesis, popularized in the 1960s by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis as the "culture of poverty," has been the main counterpoint to left-right market discourse about ghetto disarray. The concept has had an important influence on conservative thinkers who have stressed the moral dimension of poverty and disorder and, at least initially, on liberal thinkers who believed they had the power and responsibility to break the cycle of deprivation and demoralization that made the lives of the poor so enduringly miserable.
Or some of the poor. Lewis made an important distinction between being poor, which was often temporary, and being trapped in the culture of poverty, which was not. Most Eastern European Jews, for example, were impecunious when they arrived in America. But because they had what was an essentially middle-class outlook, emphasizing learning, religion, thrift, and community organization, they soon prospered.18
There was another possible explanation as to why some groups escaped poverty and others did not. In the early 1970s a handful of social thinkers, notably the psychologist Richard Herrnstein, began offering a dysgenic version of the culture of poverty thesis. Intelligence and temperament, Herrnstein argued, were to some degree inherited. Because of social isolation and homogamy (like mating with like), members of the lower class were apt to have intercourse with other members of the lower class, conceiving children who were on average less intelligent, more impulsive, and harder to discipline than children of middle- or upper-class parents. Insofar as these traits contributed to educational, economic, and familial failure, they guaranteed that the lower class, black as well as white, would remain poor, troublesome, and self-perpetuating, particularly in an economy that rewarded people with college degrees and high cognitive abilities.19
The idea that low intelligence and other heritable defects were responsible for problems of social order was not new. It had been an article of faith among early twentieth-century social engineers, whose initiatives had ranged from screening programs to identify and treat feebleminded offenders to laws for sterilizing certain criminals and mental defectives. Genetic explanations and programs fell out of favor after World War II, when the culture-learning model reigned supreme in the social sciences, until Herrnstein and other neo-Darwinians began to revive them.20
The dysgenic argument, as it applies to differences in IQ and social class, comes down to a chicken-or-egg question. Moynihan pointed out that black children whose fathers were present had normal IQ scores while black children whose fathers were absent scored an average of only 91.21 Was that difference due to growing up in a poor environment? Or was there something defective about the intelligence of the parents of illegitimate children? Or was it both, nurture and nature working together to form the interlocking jaws of a terrible trap?
There is, to put it mildly, no consensus on the relative weight of environment and genetic endowment in the formation of the urban underclass and its problems. This may well prove to be one of the outstandingly controversial questions in the social sciences for the next generation. What seems incontrovertible, however, is the role of racial and class prejudice (and hence economic marginalization and social isolation) in creating and exacerbating those problems. A good example is the original American urban underclass, the Chinese. They had very serious problems of violence and disorder, and yet their descendants have consistently scored high on IQ tests.
What also seems incontrovertible is that something like Lewis's culture of poverty, non-genetic version, is indeed operating in the contemporary ghetto. That is, an oppositional lower-class subculture has taken root and has divided the black community along lines of value and class. The sociologist Elijah Anderson, employing the terms of the subjects he interviewed, refers to this division as the conflict between "the culture of decency" and "the culture of the street."
The black culture of decency values the same things as most middle- and working-class Americans: close if not invariably traditional nuclear families, financial stability, religion, the work ethic, and getting ahead. It disapproves of that which middle America disapproves: crime, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy. Mature black men ("old heads") steeped in these values were once role models for men coming of age, but with the disappearance of well-paying blue-collar jobs and the rise of the hyperghetto they have lost prestige and credibility among the young, who have become increasingly attuned to the culture of the street.
For young men the key value in the street culture is hipness, or status based on one's person and personal reputation rather than on one's conventional achievements. Indeed conventional achievement and comportment—doing well in school, being civil to whites, speaking standard English—detract from street reputation rather than enhancing it.
So does sexual restraint. Within the peer group, often a neighborhood gang, sexual conquest provides impoverished young black men with a libidinous outlet, reinforces masculine identity, and enhances their standing. Marriage and being good providers do not. Remote prospects in any case, they are more likely to be a prelude to leaving the group than a means of ascent within it. The object, writes Anderson, is to smoothly "play" the girls but never to "play house." They hit on vulnerable, naive, and often fatherless teenage women and then run, maintaining personal freedom and independence from matrimonial ties. When such ties exist, they are to be on the young man's terms.22
Street culture encourages men in the view that women are sexual objects to be cajoled and exploited rather than treated with consideration and dignity, much less regarded as lifelong partners. "For a lot of poor young black males," Patrick Welsh writes in a candid memoir of his career as a high-school teacher,
the tradition of fatherhood seems absent. Many of them have no real fathers themselves. It's a kind of joke with them. When my wife was pregnant with our first baby, a couple of guys I taught quipped that their then thirty-nine-year-old English teacher was "way behind." "I've already got two," said one seventeen-year-old boy . . . Black girls I've known from English class tell me most boys deny parenthood. "Get out of my face, bitch! That ain't my kid," one girl quoted her boyfriend as saying when she confronted him with his paternity.23
The unmarried fathers who do acknowledge paternity are usually part-time husbands and fathers. They may visit and provide a few dollars for Pampers, Similac, shoes, and other necessities, but their spending priorities are elsewhere, often with dating other women and purchasing hip accoutrements. "I don't know if the statement 'the clothes make the man' truly exists anywhere else," says Sharron Corley, a member of a Brownsville shoplifting gang called the LoLifes, "but in Brooklyn it is considered a motto. With this in mind I have no problem admitting my being materialistic."24
This behavior is encouraged by young women who expect their boyfriends to be sharply dressed and to provide them with expensive presents, never mind where the money comes from. "Got no cash, got not time," summed up one Detroit girl. "I want nice things," said another. "I likes BMWs, Volvos and Benzos. Some niggah tried rapping to me, talking about going out on a date, taking the bus ... I said, 'Niggah, please!'" The no-money no-sex equation poses a Darwinian dilemma for young men without legitimate jobs. "I risked my life for pussy," complained a former drug dealer. "All this scrambling [dealing] and shit is how we can get with [the girls], because if you don't have that money you ain't nobody to them ... So unless you ready to give up the sex or give up the drugs, give up the gun, you take the risk."25
Girls are also extremely conscious of their own appearance and compete among themselves over who is the cutest, or who has the cutest boyfriend. The competition extends to their babies. Far from being viewed as unwanted nuisances, babies are objects of status. Anderson reports that some young mothers spend as much as 75 percent of their welfare checks on fancy baby clothing, to the point of neglecting their own and their infants' nutrition. Street culture, remarks another observer, is a feminist nightmare.26
Make You Tall
Street culture is also extremely violent. Aggression among women most often assumes a verbal form, "he say, she say" gossip designed to tear down another's appearance and reputation. But among men matters of reputation are settled in more direct fashion, often with deadly weapons. As in the South, in which almost all urban black men have personal or ancestral roots, to permit oneself to be insulted is to lose one's self-respect. "Where I lived, stepping on someone's shoe was a capital offense punishable by death," remembers Sanyika Shakur, a Crip gangster in South Central Los Angeles. "Regardless of the condition of the shoes, the underlying factor that usually got you killed was the principle [of] respect, a linchpin critical to relations between all people, but magnified by thirty in the ghettos and slums across America."27
Willingness to retaliate has a practical as well as an emotional logic. Any young man who backs out of a ghetto dispute sets himself up as an easy mark, a target for future attacks: "You got to dog everybody or they gonna dog you." A violent response guarantees status and discourages challengers. So does "going for bad," maintaining a social posture that practically radiates violence by threatening demeanor, gangster clothing, or even signs like the one left in English and Spanish in the window of a brand-new BMW parked on a New York City street: "Yes, I have a motherfucking radio and I dare you to fuck with it."28
A violent response to an affront can produce a wild, almost primitive pleasure. "I just stood there thinking," the reporter Nathan McCall writes of a youthful encounter with a rival at a carnival, "This niggah is gonna make me do something I didn't come here to do. Not only had he disrespected me again, but he'd done it in front of my lady. I had to do something. That's when I decided to shoot him." McCall's antagonist, a loudmouth named Plaz, kept right on bullyragging him: "Niggah, you better get outta my face 'fore I stomp your ass! I'm tired a' you and that bitch ..."
Unwise words. McCall pulled a .22 out of his shoulder pouch and fired point-blank into Plaz's chest. A red speck appeared and Plaz flopped backward, while his startled companions scattered at the report of the gun. Shock and terror showed in his defeated eyes. "In that moment," McCall remembers, "I felt like God. I felt so good and powerful that I wanted to do it again. I felt like I could pull that trigger, and keep on pulling it until I emptied the gun. Years later, I read an article in a psychology magazine that likened the feeling of shooting a gun to ejaculation. That's what it was like for me. Shooting off."
One of McCall's friends, a cooler head, grabbed the gun before he could fire again. Cupping his hand to his bleeding chest, Plaz struggled to his feet, started to run, then collapsed between two parked cars. The carnival grounds turned chaotic with onlookers screaming and running about, to McCall's great satisfaction: "I didn't know whether to beat my chest and yell at the top of my voice or shout some pithy, John Wayne-esque remark to be quoted when the shooting was recounted on the streets." He settled for yelling, to no one in particular, "I hope the motherfucka dies."
As it happened Plaz did not die, but in street terms McCall had proved himself. "I was a bona fide crazy nigger. Everywhere I went after that, guys on the street said, reverently, 'Yeah, man, I heard you bust a cap in Plaz's ass.' My street rep shot up three full notches."29
What is most revealing about this story—and it is unusual only for its vivid detail and the emotional candor with which McCall, a professional journalist, recalls it—is the role of third parties. Left to their own devices the two young men might not have exchanged words, let alone fought. But they had an audience, several men and a woman, McCall's girl, whom Plaz dissed as a bitch. For either to have backed down would have been socially catastrophic and emotionally devastating. In lower-class honor cultures a man may lack property but still have worth, though only and exactly as much worth as others confer upon him. If they confer nothing he is nothing. Hence he has little to lose and much to gain, socially and sexually, through the violent, public defense of his reputation.30
The audience factor helps to explain why gangs are so important in ghetto violence. In the public mind black gangs like the Crips and the Bloods are embroiled in violence because of internecine drug wars. That is only partly true. Street gangs are not simply or even usually organized criminal groups. They are instead surrogate families, well adapted to the psychological needs of outcast teenage males who find in them the companionship, protection, opportunities, and respect often missing in their own households. "A gang gave me a sense of love," explained nineteen-year-old Jamal Hall of Albany, Georgia. "They would do anything to help me, and I would do anything to help them." Anything includes backup, or armed assistance for fellow members. "There'll always be someone to set you up with a gun or whatever you need," said one fifteen-year-old. "You feel safe." Sharron Corley agreed that there was safety in numbers. "If you got props, you got respect and you got a crew. People think twice about cappin' you, 'cause then there are people who are coming back.""
A member or wannabe who fails to live up to the gang's stand-up values is out. If he shows nerve or pluck in a dangerous situation he is in and his status enhanced. Young men in groups egg one another on; young, undersocialized, armed, and intoxicated men in gangs egg one another on to crimes. These range in seriousness from vandalism to robbery to murder. "Ain't no fun just sittin' here," explained a fourteen-year-old Crip who claimed to have been jumped into his set at eight. "Anybody can just sit around, just drink, smoke a little Thai. But that ain't fun like shootin' guns and stabbin' people. That's fun. Like, see . . . people you kill..." He paused, then held up his hand to indicate his height. "Okay, look, I'm so high and killin' somebody, that make me higher. 'Cause you got enough heart to kill somebody, then, like you got the heart to destroy. Make you tall.""
It can also make you dead, particularly if your victim happens to be a member of another gang. Insults or trespass, let alone a killing, will trigger retaliation. In Los Angeles one conflict between two Crips factions, the Rollin' Sixties and the Eight-Tray Gangsters, claimed twenty-five lives over twelve years. That was more than died in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, more than were killed by the outlaw legends Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, more than perished in the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud. Honor cultures have an almost unbelievable capacity to elevate the trivial to the tragic. The Hatfield-McCoy feud originated in a dispute over two hogs; the Rollin' Sixties war in an obscene insult hurled by a jilted suitor." Yet few Americans outside of Los Angeles have ever heard of the latter, an indication perhaps of the extent to which the larger society is inured, or simply indifferent, to the slaughter in the ghetto.
The most thorough statistical study to date of urban gangs, crime, and violence was undertaken by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and published in 1992. Even bearing in mind that Los Angeles has an unusually serious gang problem, the results were startling. Los Angeles County was home to an estimated 1,000 gangs, some 800 of which were involved in criminal activity. At least 70 percent of the 150,000 gang members used illicit drugs and 50 percent engaged in violence, rates respectively seven and four times those of youths not in gangs. While non-gang murders in Los Angeles had been declining for several years, gang killings were up sharply, hitting a record 771 in 1991. In fact all of the growth in homicide since 1984 was attributable to gang slayings. At least three-quarters of these killings were intentional, but anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the dead were innocent bystanders, known in gang parlance as mushrooms. (They popped up in the wrong place and got mowed down.) In Los Angeles as in the rest of the nation the unexpected increase in the homicide rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s was driven by the surge in youthful inner-city murder and manslaughter.34
The Los Angeles gangs were overwhelmingly concentrated in ethnic neighborhoods and composed of teenagers and young men from poor or single-parent families. Only 0.5 percent of Anglo men in their early twenties were involved in gangs, compared to 6-7 percent of Asian, 9-10 percent of Latino, and 47 percent of black men of similar age. Doubtless more young black men end up in police data bases because police associate young black men with gang activities. But allowing a discount for prejudice, there is no question that gangs have become a deadly problem in ghetto neighborhoods in Los Angeles, or in Chicago, East St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, and other cities with substantial black populations.
Nor can there be much doubt that gangs flourish where conventional families do not. To join a neighborhood gang in South Central Los Angeles, one former member observed, "is the equivalent of growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and going to college: everyone does it." "Most people in gangs come from families where parents don't care about you and don't want to know what you're doing," admitted Hector Guzman, a sixteenyear-old gang associate. "You wake up steppin' over people on the floor of your house," a veteran Blood explained. "Mom's smoked out, she don't care 'bout nothin', for sure not you. You roll up out on the street, same ol' homies. And no father around at all."35
Black Population Structure
For someone who is purportedly missing, the absent father is everywhere in the literature of ghetto social problems. Conservatives trace his absence to welfare, liberals to unemployment, culture-of-poverty sociologists to the baneful effects of macho street culture. But there is yet another explanation, one that is both surprising and surprisingly powerful. It is the idea that illegitimacy and female-headed households are common in the ghetto because of a chronically low gender ratio.
The notion that sexual behavior is connected to the balance of men and women dates back to the pioneering work of the sociologist Willard Waller, who studied American courtship during the 1930s. Waller, an unflinching realist, thought sexual relationships were governed by the "principle of least interest." The person who had less to lose—who was less in love, less dependent—exercised power over the other person, who was more willing to sacrifice to keep the relationship alive. The gender ratio figured in the least-interest equation because men would have more alternative partners available if it was low, women if it was high. That is, the minority party in a relationship had less to lose if the relationship broke up and hence could make more demands. On college campuses where women were scarce, Waller observed, they had the upper hand in courtship. But during the summer term, when men were briefly in the minority, women were more willing to pay for dates or grant sexual favors. The most stable, least stressful situation occurred when the gender ratio was even and couples settled into a routine of going steady.36
The principle of least interest, rechristened "dyadic power," was central to a wide-ranging 1983 book entitled Too Many Women? The social psychologists Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord argued that in high-gender-ratio situations most women would prize their virginity and expect to marry up, marry young, stay home, and bear large numbers of legitimate children, at least in cultures where contraception was not yet common. Low-gender-ratio situations produced the opposite pattern: more premarital sex and illegitimacy; more femaleheaded households and female labor-force participation; later marriages for women and more divorce.37
These hypotheses have been corroborated by comparative historical and cross-cultural studies. For example, Italian women in nineteenth-century Rochester, New York, married younger than their counterparts in Southern Italy and were more successful in resisting premarital sexual advances. A firm "no" did not hurt their chances of marrying well because they were greatly outnumbered by Italian immigrant males who were denied the alternative of WASP brides by nativist prejudice. The reverse was true in impoverished Southern Italy, where men were scarce because of the overseas exodus and hence exercised greater dyadic power.38
The sociologists Scott South and Katherine Trent, in a systematic study of late-twentieth-century data from 117 countries, found much the same thing. Controlling for differences in socioeconomic development, women in low-gender-ratio nations consistently had lower rates of marriage and fertility and higher rates of divorce and illegitimacy." Given favorable sexual odds it seems that men everywhere act like, and produce, bastards.
Black America, which has had the lowest gender ratio of any of the country's major ethnic groups for the last century and a half, is no exception. The difference begins at birth. The gender ratio for black newborns typically ranges from 102 to 103, compared to 105 to 106 for whites. The higher mortality of black male children and young men causes the gap to widen with age. At ages twenty to twenty-four the black gender ratio is 97, the white 105. By ages forty to forty-four the black ratio is 86, the white 100.40
The gender ratio alone understates the extent of the problem. Young black urban men are far more likely than whites of comparable age to be unemployed, imprisoned, institutionalized, crippled, addicted, or otherwise bad bets as potential husbands. The increase in interracial marriages following the Civil Rights movement has further contributed to the unavailability of black men, who take white wives more than twice as often as black women take white husbands.41
The situation has given rise to frustration, anger, and deepening poverty among black women, whose marital prospects have declined steadily since 1960. In that year only 17 percent of black females aged twenty-four to twenty-nine had never married; by 1987 it was over 53 percent. The problem has been particularly acute among educated and successful black women, for whom the pickings have become increasingly slim. They have either had to do without husbands or marry down, the opposite of the pattern on the female-scarce frontier. "I don't care what kind of problems you have," McCall reports one anxious female suitor as saying, "drugs, alcohol, whatever—I'm willing to work with you."42
Dyadic power equals sexual leverage. Black women unwilling to engage in premarital sex are at a huge disadvantage in an already tight market. Black men know this and can easily exploit the situation. But such sexual opportunism increases the prospect of illegitimacy, and illegitimacy feeds the problems of poverty, unemployment, and violence that gave rise to the shortage of marriageable men in the first place. Low gender ratios turn out to be as circular as every other black urban social problem.43
Let me anticipate an objection. Having offered so many examples of problems stemming from high gender ratios it may seem contradictory to claim that low gender ratios are likewise fraught with social peril. Should not fewer men translate into less crime? Yes, but as the sociologists Steven Messner and Robert Sampson have shown, the effect of fewer men is, over time, more than canceled out by the effects of increased illegitimacy and family disruption. There may be proportionately fewer men in the ghetto, but because they are less often socialized in intact families or likely to marry and stay married they more often get into trouble.44
So the relationship between the gender ratio and violence turns out to be paradoxical. Both too many and too few women can lead to problems. The best case, as Waller discerned, is a marriage market in equilibrium. When a population's structure is conducive to marriage it is conducive to social order. But migrations, economic upheavals, and changes in mortality patterns are constantly shifting the male-female balance, guaranteeing that America—or any other nation—will never rest permanently in the optimal situation.
The other unusual demographic feature of black America is lower median age. Sexual activity begins comparatively early among blacks. Unmarried mothers conceive and give birth while still in their teens. Their children have children at a similarly early age. Women in the projects are sometimes great grandmothers by their mid-forties. Because of earlier conception and higher mortality, the median age of blacks in the United States is fully six years less than that of whites. More than half of the U.S. black population is composed of children, teenagers, and youth in their twenties, who are much more likely than older people to run afoul of the law. Urban black society not only has proportionately more undersocialized males than nonblack society, it has more young undersocialized males, a combination guaranteed to increase violence and disorder.45
The root cause of the wave of black inner-city male violence that began building during the 1960s and 1970s and rose again in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the decline of stable two-parent families and the institution of marriage in the context of an entrenched culture of poverty in an isolated, youthful subsociety with diminishing employment opportunities and a chronically low gender ratio. This combination of factors will increase problems of social order in any society. A young man of any ethnic background who is undersocialized and unrestrained by domesticity is potentially dangerous because of his physical capacity for and biological tendency toward copulation and aggression. Libido, a transracial universal, requires the check of the superego, and it is through stable family life that the superego, as well as a sense of social responsibility and connection to ancestry and posterity, is best and ordinarily formed.
Imagine a kind of negative of American history, in which the country had been explored and colonized by black adventurers and settlers who exploited their immunological advantages over the Indians. Imagine further that they had enslaved, then freed, then ghettoized white laborers in isolated, vice-ridden inner cities characterized by widespread poverty and single-parent family life. Under those circumstances the young white men, or at any rate the most disadvantaged among them, would have been overrepresented among criminal offenders.
But it happened the other way around. It is young black men who are overrepresented not only in the statistics of violence but in drug dealing, rape, robbery, and other serious criminal offenses. It is the not-so-secret will of affluent Americans to deal with this problem by avoiding it through residential segregation, an ancient crime-control tactic given new impetus by the automotive revolution. Ever-more-distant suburbs and gated, privately policed communities are the real "solutions" that underlie a veneer of public discourse and policy tinkering. The tinkering divides along ideological lines: more urban enterprise zones, workfare, prisons, and stiffer sentences for the right, versus Head Start, job training, condom distribution, and Medicaid-funded abortions for the left. Whether any of these measures begins to address let alone resolve the familial crisis that is at the heart of ghetto violence and disorder is another matter.46
Critics on the left are correct about one point: family life has a material as well as a cultural and religious basis. The percentage of unmarried men was strongly correlated with the unemployment rate throughout the mid-twentieth century. There is no reason to think this is any less true near the end of the century. Nor is there reason to doubt that structural shifts in the economy hurt the job prospects of inner-city residents. "Moynihan was right to point to the deterioration of the black family as a crucial factor in the growth of the underclass," sums up the writer Michael Massing. "Yet . . . black family life is itself highly susceptible to broader forces in American society. Among the most important of these is the nature and availability of work."17
The rub is that job prospects, though they may be a necessary condition for stable urban family life, are not always sufficient to change behavior. Labor-market improvements do not guarantee immediate improvements in black family stability, as Moynihan himself discovered when he looked at the AFDC numbers for the 1960s. The street attitudes that have become common among some men in poor black neighborhoods—the casual sexual exploitation of women, the contempt for adult authority and legitimate work, the murderous sensitivity about reputation—have assumed a life of their own and have been passed across generations by everyday acts of role modeling. A boy is much more likely to join a gang, for example, if older relatives (brothers, cousins, uncles) are already involved. Street banter has its own effect. A child growing up in the ghetto hears work referred to as "slaving," women as "bitches," men as "motherfuckers," and good as "bad." A boy calls his gang associates "my people," his closest friend "my gun." Places where sex is performed are "slaughter houses." The values conveyed by this sort of language are not simply the byproducts of this month's unemployment rate and they will not disappear at a wave of the wand of transfer payments.48
The same is true of black urban demography. Bigger checks or new jobs in the inner city will not abruptly balance the gender ratio or increase the median age of the black population. (They might even lower the age by triggering a baby boom.) Jobs and better family prospects would eventually help equalize the gender ratio by giving more black men an incentive to stay alive. The more at stake the smaller the number of "zeros," ghetto slang for men who have nothing to lose. But the socially beneficial effects of gender balance would emerge over many years and then only if the job opportunities persisted.49 Although on the frontier the elementary facts of human reproduction ensured that the gender imbalance would abate, there is no comparable homeostatic mechanism built into black inner-city populations. This is yet another reason why ghetto violence and disorder have assumed such an intractable character.