OK, I know my readership is really too small to ask questions of my readers, but I’ll do so anyway:
I was thinking the other day of the frequently-heard statement that, among the very poor, fatherhood has so much disappeared that no one knows what a father is supposed to do anymore anyway. And I pulled out a book I had held onto from my college days, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy by William Julius Wilson. Flipping through, I landed on a section discussing the fact that the “underclass” lives in an area that’s not just segregated by race, but so far removed from middle-class blacks that they don’t have any role models for what it means to get up in the morning and go to work.
I’d read before the theory that the end of discrimination in the housing market upended the situation of middle-class and poor blacks living next door, as middle-class blacks left the “ghetto” areas — though I can’t recall who proposed this as at least a contributor to current problems and can’t really even think of a good search term that would get me there. In any case, if blacks of different social classes at the time of segregation were forced to live next to each other, it doesn’t explain Wilson’s statement that whites are less likely to live segregated by class. But I have to look at this again.
In any case, it may be that welfare reform (to the extent that it hasn’t suffered too much from waivers) has meant that children are more likely than in the past to grow up in a household with someone going to work, or at least know of someone who does. But it does seem like the bigger issue is not having any sense of the value of a father (other than bring diapers over).
So that’s why I was thinking of this book — I remember my teacher (I’d guess in 5th grade or so) reading it to the class, and it making a strong impression on me at the time. The novel features a depression-era black family in the South, who own their land instead of sharecropping and have to struggle to keep their farm, and climaxes with the teen neighbor boy, who the family tries to watch out for, being tricked into robbing a store with trouble-making white boys, with an uncertain fate awaiting him. I remember some scenes from the book: the girl getting her schoolbooks for the new school-year and seeing them marked each year with their condition, only being turned over from the white school to the “colored” school when they were in wretched condition.
But the family bonds are strong. I don’t remember the details — I may yet check it out from the library — but the mother and father worked together to overcome adversity.
Could literature of this sort be emphasized in inner-city schools, be given a certain pride of place to fill a void in these children’s daily lives? It feels like a lot of modern literature likes to show men as predatory instead. But this book isn’t that old — published in 1977, and won a Newberry Award, so it does count as “literature.”
Can we at least fill inner-city teens’ heads with dreams of having children in their 20s with a dad in the home, at least as much as schools and nonprofits try to fill them with dreams of a college education?
Just a thought. . .
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