"Race is at the core of problems which confront America's urban areas."

Secretary of HUD

Henry G. Cisneros

"A generation ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that one in four black children was being born to an unwed mother. Today, about two in three blacks and one in four of all children are."

Sam Roberts, New York Times

The dicey, often unspoken, issue of race is once again front and center in the public discourse. This time it isn't in the context of an urban riot, but in a quasi-reflective mood of where we are on race in this country, how we got there and how we move on.

The where-we-are part is pretty simple and terribly sad. Yes, we have Colin Powell, four blacks in the cabinet, more black college graduates, a significantly expanding black middle class. But those blacks left behind in the ghetto are isolated geographically, economically and attitudinally not only from the white community, but from many of their black brothers who got out.

This left-behind urban underclass is being rediagnosed. Conventional wisdom has been that the attitude and behavior of inner city blacks related to the obvious: poverty, technological change, economic stagnation. Now researchers such as Professors Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton claim that the elemental economic diagnosis doesn't suffice. Massey and Denton claim it isn't just a "culture of poverty", it's a "culture of segregation."

"Residential segregation has been instrumental in creating a structural niche within which a deleterious set of attitudes and behaviors a culture of segregation has arisen and flourished. Segregation created the structural conditions for the emergence of an oppositional culture that devalues work, schooling and marriage and that stresses attitudes and behaviors that are antithetical and often hostile to success in the larger economy."

Whether the rationale, none of the researchers ever really tell us how to get out of the predicament. The ghetto norm is systemic unemployment, unwed childbearing, rampant crime and drugs unlimited. How do you transfer this lifestyle to Clayton or Lake Forest and have everyone live happily ever after?

Dr. Joycelin Elders, President Clinton's bombastic and controversial nominee for Surgeon General, is trying to do something about one facet of the ghetto dilemma: unwed childbearing. Dr. Elders claims that as long as young black girls bear children they aren't prepared to raise, this culture of isolation will intensify. Nancy Reagan traipsing through the ghetto whispering "just say no" isn't going to change things.

As The Economist editors put it,

"In parts of the ghetto marriage has almost disappeared as a category of thought. The offspring of these immature and impoverished women are at least twice as likely to suffer from serious health problems as their white contemporaries and much more than twice as likely if the mothers are addicted to drink or drugs. The schools they go to have gun-detectors. A million black men are either behind bars or liable to be put back there if they break their probation or parole. Children who try to avoid this fate by shining at school are accused of being "pervert brainiacs" or the ultimate insult "acting white".

Once there was optimism. Things somehow over time would improve. The horrific isolation of the ghetto would begin to disappear. But today, the optimism has disappeared. The gnawing status quo prevails. America has a permanent, separate underclass disconnected in thought and spirit from the rest of society.