Antiinflamatorios no esteroideos (AINES)

There is no culture there, it‘s only a wilderness, and damn monstrous, too. We are talking about a people consigned to destruction, a doomed people. Compare them to the

last phase of the proletariat as pictured by Marx. The proletariat, owning nothing, stripped utterly bare, would awaken at last from the nightmare of history. Entirely naked, it would have no illusions because there was nothing to support illusions and it

would make a revolution without any scenario. It would need no historical script because of its merciless education in reality, and so forth. Well, here is a case of people

denuded. And what‘s the effect of denudation, atomization? Of course, they aren‘t proletarians. They‘re just a lumpen population. We haven‘t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there‘s nothing but death before it: Maybe we‘ve already made our decision. Those that can be advanced into the middle class let them be

advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don‘t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves. (Saul Bellow)

In the late 1970s, the specter of an emergent underclass started to invade the public discourse. In an address to the annual convention of the NAACP, Senator Edward Kennedy summoned attention to this new, troubling phenomenon, calling it: ―[t]he great unmentioned problem of America today—the growth, rapid and insidious, of a group in our midst, perhaps more dangerous, more bereft of hope, more difficult to confront, than any for which our history has prepared us. It is a group that threatens to become what America has never known—a

permanent underclass in our society‖ (qtd. in Auletta 26).

The year before Kennedy‘s speech, Time magazine had published an article which reported on the emergence of a newly developing dangerous and isolated social group within America‘s major cities. ―Behind the ghetto‘s crumbling walls,‖ the article stated, ―lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass‖ (qtd. in Katz, Introduction

4). The article proceeds to explain that this new class is different from the ―conventional poor‖ and that a large percentage of the cities‘ criminal elements emerge from within it:

Their bleak environment nurtures values that are often at odds with those of the majority—even the majority of the poor. Thus the underclass produces a highly disproportionate number of the nation‘s juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay and demand for social expenditures. (qtd. in Katz, Introduction 4)

At the time, the term ―underclass‖ had not entered the vocabulary of the American public discourse yet, and its use ―conjured up a mysterious wilderness in the heart of America‘s cities; a terrain of violence and despair, a collectivity outside politics and social structure, beyond the usual language of class and stratum …‖ (Katz, Introduction 4). Removed from American mainstream culture in a myriad of ways—in language, in customs, in living and eating habits, in clothing, in education, in forms of interaction, in values, and in just about every aspect involved in life style—these mostly black inner city dwellers seemed to be part of a new culture which reproduced itself by feeding on its own pathologies. Given the high rates of crime, urban analysts wondered aloud, was there a future for this social group beyond self-destruction? Had the rest of America nurtured this group by its withdrawal and

negligence? Why had slum life become a permanent condition for southern black migrants rather than a temporary lot as was the case in other migrant communities? And why had the ―forward march of the black poor … ground to a halt … only a few years after the great civil rights victories?‖ (Leman 28).

The conservative behaviorist response to these questions emphasizes the Cultural Revolution as a paramount factor in explaining the momentous social changes which occurred in black urban ghettos at the time. When American culture as a whole abandoned its traditional values of thrift, discipline and hard work, the change in culture ―rubbed off‖ on the black urban poor. It should therefore not come as a surprise, conservative theorists argue, that black urban

ghettos experienced a sharp rise in social dislocations in the late sixties and early seventies: The unemployment rate of black male sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds nearly doubled between 1966 and 1974 in all black urban communities, and the welfare rolls between 1960 and 1969 rose from 3 million to 6.7 million, climbing even further to 10.9 million in 1972. The numbers were representative of other social indices as well: The arrest rate for black males, the percentage of black children born out of wedlock, and the number of female-

headed households all increased dramatically in the late sixties and early seventies (see Leman 282-3).

Moderate conservatives and liberals point out that the ―change-of-values argument‖ does not account for the intra-racial gap which started to widen in the late sixties. According to these theorists, the widening intra-racial gap is due to the exodus of the black middle class from the segregated black communities. The outmigration of black middle and working class families left poor people isolated and deprived of ―the beneficial effects of the old ghetto institutional structure‖ (Leman 284). It thereby created a schism within black society which allowed those who had left to enter into mainstream American culture while those left behind were trapped spiraling downward on the socio-economic scale.

In his study on the Great Migration, Nicholas Leman observes that ―it is plain that the ghettos deteriorated most severely [when] the middle class began to pull away from the black poor‖ (282). Thus, while social aberrations in black urban ghettos increased dramatically during the late sixties and early seventies, the income of black married couples, most of whom had left their former inner-city neighborhoods behind, rose to match that of whites, while their birth rate dropped below that of whites.

Having established a black culture of their own, middle-class blacks increasingly felt resentful about being ―lumped together‖ with ghetto blacks: ―They still can‘t differentiate the average black person from the ghetto criminal,‖ George Hicks, a migrant from Mississippi, complains about whites after settling with his family in a suburb of Chicago (Leman 280). Implicitly verbalizing the emerging rift in the social stratification of African Americans after the Civil Rights Movement, Hicks hereby points to a process which would intensify over the following decades: While one segment of the black urban community succeeded in taking advantage of the removal of legal barriers by advancing into the mainstream middle-class, others were not able to make those socio-economic strides. For those ―left behind,‖ isolation and deprivation continued to characterize their daily lives and the social dislocations which had markedly risen in black ghetto communities in the late 1960s and early 1970s continued to increase. The result of this continued development was the emergence of a distinct subculture which spread through urban black communities from the seventies onward.