Losing Ground by Charles Murray

Author:Charles Murray [CHARLES MURRAY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

This and analogous accounts of the wrenching cultural transition involved in leaving the ghetto provide a plausible explanation for why large numbers of each generation do not escape. They do not provide an explanation for why the experience has become more, not less, wrenching over time. Leaving a Polish culture, or Japanese culture, or any of the other ethnic enclaves in American society has always been frightening. At any given point in the history of ethnic communities in the United States, most of the younger generation was staying in the enclave, wary of leaving the familiar and the comfortable. What set the black ghetto in the 1970s apart from historical precedents, including black ghettos in earlier years, was that the barrier separating the ghetto youth from the larger society had become nearly an airtight seal at a time when it should have become increasingly permeable. In addition to the effects of the changes in the tangible incentives discussed in the preceding chapters, I suggest that an important part of the explanation lies in the withdrawal of local, visible praise for trying to escape. The young ghetto black on his way up was not cheered on his way, as the young Jewish or Chinese or, for that matter, white Anglo-Saxon protestant youth has been. I further suggest that this withdrawal of support can be traced in some significant degree to the excuse that, starting in the mid-1960s, social policy actively pressed on the ghetto: “It’s not your fault,”

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