Children Often Suffer
By Categorization

LEONARD FEIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

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AD 194

ometimes we — all of us —
need to be reminded of
things we already know,
even know well. Take, for
example, what it means to be
black in America today.
But to think about that, we
have first to make space, and that
means clearing out the things
that so often these days come first
to mind when "black" is men-
tioned, and then leave no room
for anything else. We have to set
aside affirmative action and quo-
tas and crime and slums and kids
having kids and drive-by shoot-
ings, and also "the crisis in black-
Jewish relations," Crown Heights
and Louis Farrakhan and
Leonard Jeffries, et al., all the
contentious stuff that has led to
the renewal of an almost casual
racism that degrades us all.
Which is to say that we have to
set aside all the categories into
which we slot Them.
And think, instead, about the
children. Here is one thing about
the children, about the African
American children: Most of them
are trying.
Why and how they continue to
try, I cannot say. The odds are
very heavily stacked against
them, and are getting no better.
This the statistics confirm year
after year. And yet they try.
Too many drop out of school
and too many fool with guns and
with drugs, too many break the
law, too many engage in violence,
but very, very many slog away,
do what they are supposed to do,
obey the rules and so forth, and
some of these manage to beat the
odds, to make it. "Making it," in
this context, means finishing
school and growing up to a job
with decent pay, a family, escape
from the chaos, victim (as all of
us are) of one's own shortcomings
but not of poverty's impositions.
Nearly three decades ago, in a
troubled but withal more inno-
cent time, Pat Moynihan — then
director of the MIT/Harvard Joint
Center for Urban Studies — was
actively promoting an American
version of the Canadian system
of child support. As I recall the
details, his plan would have pro-
vided every American family $2
per month for each of its children.
I was at the Joint Center myself
during that time, and once ex-
pressed my surprise that he'd
spend so much energy promoting
a plan that would provide people
so very modest a benefit. He ex-
plained to me, and he was right
that there are families in Amer-

Leonard Fein is a writer living in

Boston.

ica where every ice-cream cone
has to be budgeted. He was right
for then, and, to our collective
shame, he'd be right today. In
fact, the share of the nation's
household income "enjoyed" by
the poorest 20 percent of our cit-
izens has declined from 4.2 per-
cent in 1968 to 3.6 percent in
1993. (Six-tenths of a percent
doesn't sound like much, but
that's a 14 percent decline.) And
those figures are for all the poor-
est 20 percent of our nation,
among whom African Americans
are poorer than the rest. I can-
not begin to fathom what it
means to live in this country of
plenty and to have to save up for
an ice-cream cone. And I have no
doubt whatever that there is a
connection between growing up
in such a condition in such a
country and the chaos that per-
vades our inner cities.
So I am dazzled that so many
young people, children, find cause
for hope, have the energy and the
ambition to stick it out in schools
that are too often inadequate,
search out menial part-time jobs
for minimum wages. I know
something from the history of my
own people about hope as a form
of defiance, and just as I am
proud of that in us, I admire it in
others. Praise, then, to the chil-
dren who persist in hope, and to
the parents who urge them on.
The supermarket where I do
my shopping abuts Boston's black
neighborhoods, its staff and cus-
tomers overwhelmingly black.
Often, I find myself in a long
checkout line behind people on
food stamps. It's easy to feel re-
sentment. They're shopping with
my tax dollars, and their choice
of foodstuff is atrocious; it's late
at night, and they've got little
kids in to the clerk, a teen-ager,
is moving slowly, and the bagger
is incompetent. I could, I sup-
pose, travel the extra mile or two
to a market with a more middle-
class ambience, but shopping
here is one of my small stubborn
ways of insisting on our connect-
edness.
And if it is sometimes irritat-
ing and sometimes frustrating,
that is a good way for me to re-
mind myself that if we were will-
ing to fund early-childhood
intervention in disadvantaged
neighborhoods, intervention
starting just about at birth, we'd
find — the data here are com-
pelling— an average increase in
the IQ of the children of about 20
points. Those happen to be the
points between lifelong intellec-
tual disadvantage and entry into
the mainstream. ❑

