RALEIGH – I’m a Charlotte native watching from afar a local controversy that has become statewide news: the debate surrounding Mecklenburg Commissioner Bill James and his comment about urban blacks living in a “moral sewer.” Perhaps because of the distance — or because in my job I’ve been on both the sending and receiving end of allegations about motives and sensitivity — I’ve found the much of the resulting exchange to be stale, juvenile, and not particularly illuminating.
As James now admits, his choice of language was sloppy and counterproductive. This sounds a bit like excuse-making – those who consider James a racist don’t think his problem is inadequate access to a dictionary – but I don’t mean it to be. The fact is that James, as an elected leader in a community struggling with a variety of complex and daunting issues, has a responsibility to make his case forcefully but constructively and to offer ideas designed to persuade, not just to provoke.
This responsibility must be carried out with the tools available to a politician: with carefully chosen words. James chose the wrong tools. If your plumber strode out of your suddenly flooded house and explained, “uh, I meant well but I picked up the wrong set of pliers,” your response might lack a certain sympathy.
That having been said, James was trying to communicate what is a fundamental truth about poverty in Charlotte (and elsewhere): that it is often the result of poor choices. This is not a matter of “blaming the victim.” People often make these unfortunate choices when they are young and immature, when they find it difficult to foresee the consequences of their actions, and because they have little experience in their own lives with role models who have made the right choices.
What choices do I mean? They include dropping out of school, failing to enter the workforce to gain experience and expertise, having children out of wedlock, and abusing alcohol and drugs. These behaviors are highly correlated with poverty, and thus with its consequences in areas such as child welfare, educational attainment, crime, and welfare dependency. According to 2002 Census data, the poverty rate was 14 percent for all families – but only 4 percent among married families with at least one full-time worker. If the spouses are at least high-school graduates, the rate shrinks further.
There is plenty of other evidence – ranging from careful statistical analysis and case studies to the timeless wisdom contained in history and religious teaching – suggesting that the cycle of poverty is frequently a cycle of self-destructive behavior. No, that doesn’t mean that poor people “deserve” their lot, or that they (and in particular their children) do not merit compassion and assistance from the rest of us. In fact, to suggest that poverty rates are related to personal choices is actually optimistic and life-affirming, rather than pessimistic and mean-spirited, because it elevates the moral agency of the individual and rejects the notion that poverty is an inherent and unconquerable feature of a market economy. It isn’t.
One of the frustrations I feel about the controversy is that it has again provided left-wing activists with a convenient cover to fulminate and change the subject. We’ve had quite enough of that. It’s also frustrating that James painted with too broad a brush – failing to recognize the great many African-American individuals, families, and institutions in Charlotte who have made the right choices and affirmed positive, morally uplifting values – because these are the very folks who hold the key to a solution.
It is false to suggest that slavery destroyed the black family, as it was surprisingly intact and resilient into the 20th century and, of course, there are many wonderful and stable black families in North Carolina today. It is also false to attribute our educational, social, and economic problems primarily to racism, which persists but it clearly not the corrosive and debilitating force it was during previous generations.
Promiscuity, out-of-wedlock births, denigration of “brains” and “nerds,” drug abuse – these are vices that afflict every racial and ethnic group, and in part because of government’s growth and intrusiveness they now impose significant costs on all of us. The best thing to come out of the current controversy would be not another couple of rounds of “let’s pummel Bill James” but instead a community-wide, multi-partisan, multi-racial effort to fashion effective solutions rather than trying to find scapegoats, substitute good intentions and piles of tax money for demonstrable results, or sweep the problem back under the rug. Our next generation, white and black and polychromatic, deserve better.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.