Wendell Berry: A Second Helping

I really didn’t want to serve up a large second helping of Wendell Berry. Eugene Kane made me do it.

Kane is feature columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. He is a black editorialist who writes on news and policy from an “African-American” perspective. In a pair of columns last week, he connected the dots between household, education and the cycle of poverty.

On November 11, he wrote about a hot new movie called “For Colored Girls.” It’s based on a 1975 play called “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”

It’s a movie he didn’t want to see.

He wrote:

“I understand many black women feel to many black men have let then down and aren’t worth being in their lives…

It all makes for good drama.

But there were news reports last week on the statistics showing that 72% of African-American children are born to unwed mothers…

It’s hard to imagine how any community with major problems involving education, crime and poverty can improve without stronger relationships between men and women, which in turn lead to stronger families and more stable households.”

Last winter, I wrote the following in the beef soup chapter of the cookbook I’ve been working on. I cite my sources. Kane does not.

“I return to statistics to draw the picture. These ones are from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 1980, 18.4% of children were born to unmarried women in the U.S. By 2005 that number had doubled to 36.9%. Among African-American women the nationwide number was 69.9% in 2005. In Wisconsin it was 82.2% in 2007.

While these numbers do not mean a single woman cannot provide a proper household in which to raise a child, they certainly show an increasing decline of traditional households. And there is fall out from it. In 2007 over 8,000 Wisconsin children were placed into foster homes.

The children entering foster care are disproportionately are African-Americans. Psychologist Lori Pyter cited these statistics, from the Center for the Study of Social Policy, in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel column: in 2000 African-American children represented 8.4% of all Wisconsin children and comprised 46.1% of Wisconsin children in foster care.

Pyter called this an “issue of proportionality” which both federal and state child welfare officials were beginning to recognize and address.

The reasons for placement were: neglect in almost 40% of all 2007 cases; parental drug abuse in over 16%; physical abuse in almost 14%; and “caretaker” incarceration in over 10%. (“Caretaker” like “issue of proportionality” are bureaucratic terms and are not mine. They are one more indication of the degree to which the industrial economy dominates our perception and thinking.)

While poverty is commonly considered the ultimate cause behind these statistics, none of the above directly relate to a lack of material resources needed to raise a child. The direct material conditions of poverty only enter the picture with the next leading cause of placement -- inadequate housing in 7.10% of the cases. In 80% of the cases, the cause wasn’t poverty per se, but directly related to “households” that were in one way or another broken.

Two Milwaukee children were recently placed under the formal foster care to their aunt. Both were subsequently physically abused. One of them, a toddler, died from the abuse. A publicly funded private non-profit agency, La Causa, was in charge of providing social services and welfare supervision.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial on the tragedy read:

“La Causa’s announcement Thursday that it no longer would be a contractor with the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare to place children in foster care should not keep the state from pursuing reforms it advocated after the death of 13-month-old Christopher L. Thomas Jr.

La Causa President and CEO Hugo Cardona said his agency his agency will terminate its $11 Million child welfare contract with the bureau because foster care no longer fits its mission.

We agree. State officials cited mistakes by La Causa in the boy’s death and in the beating of his 2-year-old sister, allegedly by an abusive aunt. They said La Causa failed to give the caseworker assigned to the Thomas case adequate training and supervision.

The La Causa supervisor in that case is also linked to the Arkisha Johnson case, in which the unstable woman drowned her 5-month-old son after a La Cuasa caseworker left her alone with the child. Johnson was not supposed to be left alone with her baby unless she was taking her medication.

Even with La Causa out of the picture, the state must continue to institute the changes it has promised, including more frequent home visits. Breakdowns in the system, like those in the Thomas and Johnson cases, can be fixed only with better oversight.” 

The care of children should rightly fall to the economy of household supported by community, or more explicitly – family, extended family, friends, neighbors and church.The state's role should be limited to terminating parental rights, when the community deems it necessary, and placing the child into an adoptive home. That role is solely a legal one.

Instead, the economy of caring for children is becoming an industrial economy defined by a progression of “caretaker,” caseworker, social service agency, a municipal or county Bureau of Child Welfare, a state Department of Children and Families and finally the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

It is a system, an economy, that my newspaper says can be fixed with better oversight. It seems to me it is an economy of nothing but oversight yet largely blind to the care of the individual children. The scale is all wrong. Wendell Berry is right. The “vast centralizing” industrial economy cannot fill the void left by a shattered household and community economy.

Foster care is only part of the picture. In Milwaukee County another 14,000 odd families receive state funded child care assistance. Overall in Wisconsin over 60,000 children were in the subsidized child care programs.

Berry’s view is toward agrarian communities. Mine is on the urban. His conclusions that when the industrial economy runs rampage, ultimately “the country itself is destroyed” applies to both.  

The damage done to our large urban centers, tragically, is nearly complete.

The comparison in unwedded birth rates, foster care placement and high school graduation rates between black and white Wisconsinites has nothing to do with race. Our urban black families, already wounded by the combined legacies slavery and racism, found themselves literally located in center of the industrial assault on household with public social services set up to mend the damage. The assault, like a military siege, economically isolated our urban neighborhoods. The social services are an industry unto themselves that misguidedly unbound the ties of family, household and community.

The end results too often are deadly.

I wrote an editorial for the Journal-Sentinel on Milwaukee’s homicide rate a few years ago. In 2002, the most recent statistics available at the time, Wisconsin’s homicide rate by firearms was 40 times grater among black males than for white males. It was 48.2 and 1.2 per 100,000 individuals respectively. Over the 10 or 15 year period when African-American men are most at risk, the individual odds of being murdered are somewhere between 150 and 200 to one. Growing from adolescence and through young adulthood is risky business for Milwaukee’s black males.

I looked at those fatality rates thinking of a public health issue. After all, if one out 200 young men in my community died of similar type of cancer over a 15 year period. It would be a cluster, the source of which would diligently ferreted out. Law suits would follow. 

I got it wrong. I wasn’t writing about public health I was writing on the “issue of proportionality.” I didn’t know that at the time. 

There is one more “issue of proportionality” to consider before returning to the passage from Berry’s essay Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.

In 2006, according to Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, overall 11 percent of pregnant women terminated their pregnancies. In Milwaukee County with the state’s largest concentration of African-Americans, that rate was nearly double at just over 20 percent from 2001 to 2005.

While a number of factors enter into the disproportion, nationwide African-American women account for 36 percent of all abortions, yet comprise only 13 percent of the population. According to the Guttmacher Institute, again nation wide, overall one out every five white pregnancies ends in abortion. Among African-American women that ratio is nearly one out of two.

The issue here isn’t about race. Sadly, African-Americans, whose roots go to the gross injustice of an earlier vast centralizing economy of plantation agriculture and slavery, now confront the heaviest fallout from the industrial economy. It’s about the harm the industrial economy has wrecked on community and household. For all of us, above all, it is about the harm wrecked on sexual love which is the glue that holds both together.

Now back to Berry’s essay.

“…but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.”

Among the consumer products the modern industrial economy has given us are a full array of contraceptive products. It is an economy that in trying to control fertility is in fact at war with fertility and ultimately at war with life itself. This is as true in agriculture as it is in family planning. It delivers an abundance of cheap food while degrading the natural environment upon which agriculture ultimately depends. It delivers sexual liberation while degrading the deep social bonds and the profound intimacy of sexual love.

Later in the essay Barry observes:

“Because of our determination to separate sex from the practice of love in marriage and in family and community life, our public sexual morality is confused, sentimental, bitter, complexly destructive, and hypocritical. It begins with the idea of “sexual liberation”: whatever people desire is “natural” and all right, men and women are not different but merely equal, and all desires are equal. If a man wants to sit down while a pregnant woman is standing or walk through a heavy door and let it slam in a woman’s face, that is all right. Divorce on an epidemic scale is all right; child abandonment by one parent or another is all right; it is regrettable but still pretty much all right if a divorced parent neglects or refuses to pay child support; promiscuity is all right; adultery is all right. Promiscuity among teenagers is pretty much all right, for “that’s the way it is”; abortion as birth control is all right; the prostitution of sex in advertisements and public entertainment is all right. But then, far down this road of freedom, we decide that a few lines ought to be drawn. Child molestation, we wish to say, is not all right, nor is sexual violence, nor is sexual harassment, nor is pregnancy among unmarried teenagers. We are also against venereal diseases, the diseases of promiscuity, though we tend to think that they are the government’s responsibility, not ours.

In this cult of liberated sexuality, “free” of courtesy, ceremony, responsibility, and restraint, dependent on litigation and expert advice, there is much that is human, sad to say, but there is no sense or sanity…”  

This liberated sexuality is free of the bonds of sexual love that bind a couple, a family, a household and the community.

So there it is. Our vast centralizing industrial economy has dehumanized sex by turning it into a commercial industry, has set in motion an ever increasing assault on family life and household, and in doing so has wrecked the social and economic foundation of genuine community, has waged war upon fertility, has both assaulted our natural environment and alienated us form it, and finally, allowed us to impose a new order of slavery on others.

Today, Eugene Kane nearly completed the circle. He wrote about how poorly African-American boys struggle in school.

"That's right: No matter how you slice it, among just about all students of similar ages, black boys end up on the bottom of the pile...

Sometimes, the only answer why so many black boys don't do well at school ins't about poverty or bad teachers but lies in the way they are raised and the households where they grow up..."