Cold New World

Introduction
 
“It’s all about working-class.” This was the earnest and curious refrain I heard from the Antelope Valley Sharps—a group of young antiracist skinheads in an outer suburb of Los Angeles—each time I asked why they were skins. By the time I got to the Antelope Valley, in late 1995, I had spent the better part of six years knocking around the United States, immersed in the stories you are about to read. The experience had left me something of a specialist in the unexpected. My previous work as a reporter had been mostly in other countries, which may be why I started out with a set of relatively neat, received ideas about what I would find in this country under headings like race, class, poverty, and the drug trade. My tidy ideas were upended, in any case, at every turn. American real life is rowdier, more disturbing, more charming than anything dreamt of in your or my philosophy.
 
This country was (and is) in a strange, even an unprecedented, condition. While the national economy has been growing, the economic prospects of most Americans have been dimming. For young people and males and those without advanced degrees—for, that is, the large majority of working Americans—real hourly wages have fallen significantly over the past twenty-four years. Even during the time since I began this book, a period marked economically by low inflation, one of the great bull markets in Wall Street history, and an unemployment rate that has reached, as I write, its lowest level in twenty-four years, the median household income has fallen and the national poverty rate has risen. What the triumphalism of most American business writing ignores is a frightening growth in the number of low-wage jobs. This growth has left 30 percent of the country’s workers earning too little to lift a family out of poverty. A new American class structure is being born—one that is harsher, in many ways, than the one it is replacing. Some people are thriving in it, of course. This book is about some families who are not. More particularly, it’s about their children who are teenagers and young adults, about their lives and times, how they speak and act as they try to find their way in this cold new world.
 
I spent time with families in four communities: New Haven, Connecticut; San Augustine County, Texas; the Yakima Valley, in Washington State; and the Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County. A rough logic drove this sequence. New Haven is a poor Northern city, ravaged by deindustrialization and middle-class flight, with a large black ghetto that can stand for the many stricken inner cities that have come, collectively, to represent “poverty” in our national imagination and political debate—despite the fact that most poverty in America is, as many researchers have pointed out, neither Northern nor urban nor black. Terry Jackson’s family has been in New Haven since his great-grandparents moved there after the Second World War. The family’s experience with downward mobility has been unequivocal: each generation has been poorer than the one before it.
 
San Augustine County is in the rural Deep South (never mind that it’s in Texas). It is, figuratively speaking, the home place where most African Americans, even those who have lived for many years in cities like New Haven, have or locate their roots. Although social change tends to occur more slowly and subtly in poor rural communities, I found San Augustine racked by distinctly contemporary struggles. Crack addiction, AIDS, and the federal government’s war on drugs had each dealt heavy blows to Lanee Mitchell’s family before we met. To a poor black family in the South, new troubles inevitably appear in a context of traditional oppression. And yet the shutdown of emigration to the cities as a hopeful option for ambitious young people seemed to have given things a newly apocalyptic cast.
 
The Yakima Valley is a rich farming region whose economy depends entirely on cheap Mexican labor. Getting there from the South was less of a stretch than it might seem. Black people in San Augustine complain about job competition from Mexicans—in the local pea and watermelon fields and timber mills as well as in the cities, such as Houston and Los Angeles, where union jobs that they or their relatives once held are increasingly filled by undocumented immigrants working nonunion. Rafael and Rosa Guerrero, a couple from the Mexican state of Zacatecas who have “settled out” in the Yakima Valley (and who happen to be militants in the local farmworkers’ union), came to this country in search of una vida mejor for themselves and their children. My story is about what they—and, especially, what their oldest son, Juan—found instead.
 
Finally, I went to Los Angeles. Jacqueline Jones, a historian of American poverty, has written about how the “postmodern poverty” of the late twentieth century is creating “a multitude of ‘underclasses,’ ” many of them white. I went to L.A. to see how vulnerable white people were dealing with recent upheavals in the Southern California economy. Some of the kids I met there declared, as I say, that their lives were “all about working-class.” Karl Marx might have said that they were, more precisely, about being forced down into the lumpen proletariat—into what is popularly known nowadays as the underclass. Mindy Turner and her friends, while clearly desperate to avoid that fate, often seemed to be doing everything in their power to bring it on: bagging school, getting pregnant as teenagers, abusing dangerous drugs, forming violent gangs, doing time in jail. Even when one of them killed another one—this happened in the midst of my reporting—it seemed to give almost nobody pause. At times the downward momentum in their suburban world felt all-consuming.
 
My reporting method was unscientific. In the communities that interested me, I tried to find hard-pressed people whom I liked enough to spend months with. They also had to be willing, of course, to let me hang around. Because I’m particularly interested in how people understand their own situations, I tried to let them show me, when possible, where their story was and what it might mean. Some of the most eloquent commentary I found came, therefore, not from interviews or as straightforward analysis, but in jokes, asides, quarrels, incidents, display. I can’t think of a more nuanced expression, for instance, of the “double truth,” as Benjamin DeMott calls it, “that within our borders an opportunity society and a caste society coexist” than Terry Jackson’s decision to “go Yale” in the New Haven black community’s spring-cleaning parade, which passes through the Yale University campus. Terry was a fifteen-year-old school dropout and street cocaine dealer at the time, and he used his drug earnings to outfit himself for the parade in Yale sweatpants, a blue Yale sweatshirt, and a Yale baseball cap. The costume was a hit with the crowd. “It was dope,” Terry said afterward. Indelibly, I thought.
 
I did not go looking for “types.” Some readers of an earlier version of Terry Jackson’s story, which appeared in The New Yorker, complained that by writing about him I was reinforcing a stereotype: the young black inner-city drug dealer. I think the point is valid, although the further complaint, made by a few antidrug crusaders, that I should not be writing sympathetically about such a person, is, I think, not. I am sympathetic to Terry, and to the many other kids in his situation. The fact is that the illegal drug trade offers more economic opportunity to more young men than anything else going in the inner city. Depicting this reality may indeed play into the powerful (and politically destructive) association, in the public mind, of poor blacks with crime. I make a sharp distinction, however (one that the law does not always make), between violent criminals and people merely involved in the drug trade. Terry’s story is both common and, I think, commonly misunderstood.
 
I generally failed to keep my journalistic distance. The sheer amount of time we spent together tended to erode the lines between me and my subjects. Often, their ideas about me became elements of my story about them. People usually took me at first for a “news reporter,” a notion that invariably wilted as the months passed and nothing I wrote appeared in print. I was sometimes suspected, even accused to my face, of being a cop. At other times my bluff was “called more shrewdly. Laverne Clark, Lanee Mitchell’s mother and the materfamilias of the all-black village in San Augustine County where I landed up, liked to probe my racial views, hoping to find out “what it is about you and black people, Bill.” She seemed to have me down, at least initially, as what Zora Neale Hurston used to call, during the Harlem Renaissance, a Negrotarian—a de haut en bas patron of black aspiration. Although Laverne’s view of me seemed to soften with time, we often argued—about local history, the causes of poverty, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I found our debates, some of them conducted in the school bus Laverne drives for a living, both rewarding and upsetting. They were also remarkable for how unhampered she seemed by the fact that she had never finished the ninth grade.
 
There is, just as fashionable cultural theory has it, no privileged place to stand. I never found such a place while writing this book, anyway. The moral authority of the social order that once might have allowed me to pass unambivalent judgments on the lives of poor Americans—an authority packed tight, at the best of times, with unexamined assumptions about power and virtue—has, in my view, simply grown too weak to support such exertions. A white middle-class reporter inspecting the souls of poor African Americans is, given our history, an especially dubious proposition. So I’ve tried to keep one eye on my limitations as observer and analyst, and to reflect, where possible, the densely freighted power relations between me and some of my subjects.