White welfare, white families, 'white trash'

National Review, March 28, 1986 by Charles Murray

WHITE WELFARE, WHITE FAMILIES, 'WHITE TRASH'

HOW MANY dozens of articles, Op-Ed columns, cover stories, talk shows, and features on the six o'clock news have by now used Bill Moyers's documentary on the vanishing black family as their justification? It is as if censorship had been lifted. Overnight, it has become intellectually chic to say what George Gilder said unfashionably early, eight years ago, in a book called Visible Man: When large numbers of males in a community stop functioning as providers for wives and children, the community collapses no matter what kind of help is given from outside.

The attention is also producing a great deal of distortion, because the spotlight has been trained on blacks. Some try to deny that blacks have a special problem (see box, p. 32). These attempts remain unconvincing. But explanations of the special problems facing blacks nearly all begin with the assumption that blacks are different from everyone else -- whether because of racism (as the apologists argue from one side) or because of inherent traits (as the racists argue from the other). So we end up talking about black families, black values, black leadership, and black solutions.

The focus on blacks cripples progress. A black woman visited me a few days ago, head of the welfare department of a major state for seven years, with 25 years of experience at every level of the system. She has thought through her experience. She has much to contribute. But she feels--rightly-that the issue of illegitimacy and welfare is so intimately bound up with race that for her to speak out would give aid and comfort to people who do not wish blacks well, and would alienate her from the community she needs to work with. She and I found ourselves in broad agreement about the nature of the problem, with no way to join openly in a search for solutions.

So it seems to me that at this moment in the dialogue about the underclass, there is no more salutary activity for whites than to inquire into the nature of white illegitimacy, illegitimacy being perhaps the best symbol for the social and family problems of the poor who stay poor. Whites will find it educational; blacks may be forgiven for finding it sourly amusing. The inquiry must begin, however, with a near void of published analyses. Analyses of illegitimacy by race have been around for years. Oddly, though, numbers breaking down illegitimacy by socioeconomic class have not been published for more than a decade (and then only in an obscure government study). Recently I have been trying to remedy this situation. The following is a nontechnical discussion of what I have found. Two conclusions stand out. One is that there does seem to be a white underclass, and the illegitimacy problem among whites is concentrated there, not in white society as a whole. The second point is that the factors that explain illegitimacy rates as of 1980 could not have been operating in the same way in 1960. During the interim, something fundamental changed in the way that poverty and lack of education interact with illegitimacy. Until we figure out what that "something" was, we will keep guessing at solutions.

In lieu of footnotes, let me assure readers who have technical questions that the findings I summarize here are extremely basic. There is no way to recast the data or procedures to attenuate them, nor is there reason to think that the results would be much different if the data were based on individuals instead of communities.

The data I will be using come from the state of Ohio, which published uniquely detailed racial breakdowns of illegitimate birth statistics (by cities, suburbs, towns, and rural areas of individual counties) for 1980. These can be combined with equally detailed socioeconomic data from the 1980 census. I will be using Ohio out of necessity, but it would be hard to find a better state for our purposes. With 10.8 million persons, Ohio is the sixth largest state in population. Ohio has the same split between urban and rural as the nation as a whole (73 per cent urban in Ohio, 74 per cent nationwide) and nearly the same proportion of blacks (10 per cent in Ohio versus 12 per cent nationwide). It contains the nation's 11th and 22nd largest metropolitan statistical areas (Cleveland and Cincinnati), plus Columbus, Toledo, Akron, Youngstown, and Dayton. It is a major agricultural state, with rich farmers and Appalachia-like pockets of rural poverty. For the indicators I use in the analysis, the data from Ohio match fairly closely with the nationwide figures (see chart, facing page).

While it cannot be proved that what is true for Ohio would be true for a national sample, it is difficult to think of reasons why its should be markedly different.

In Ohio and in the nation as a whole, one out of every nine white babies born in 1980 was born to a single woman. Who is having these babies? There are two unsystematic explanations abroad.

One is the Farrah Fawcett Hypothesis, which argues that the increase in illegitimacy is a phenomenon that cuts across socioeconomic classes. Movie stars like Farrah Fawcett and Jessica Lange have children without husbands, and no one minds. It is socially acceptable in a way that it wasn't thirty years ago, ergo more illegitimate births. Everybody's doing it. The other is the White Trash Hypothesis, which has been around for as long as parents have lectured children, and which says that illegitimacy is essentially a lower-class phenomenon. The children of good families don't get pregnant, and if they do get pregnant they get married or, these days, have an abortion.