_Random Family_

I've mentioned _Random Family_ by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc a few times in other posts, but it came to mind again today as I was reading a couple of NYT articles (about which more later).

_Random Family_ follows two women in the poorest part of the Bronx for about 20 years. It covers the people who circle in and out of their lives, their children, their mothers (not so much their fathers; fathers aren't a big part of this world), their doomed and floundering affairs with doomed and floundering men. It's clear-sighted about the weaknesses in their characters and the poor choices that they make, and they make a bunch of poor choices.

The first time I read the book, I was in a pretty uncharitable frame of mind, because when you spend all day every day dealing with people like this in some of their worst moments (i.e., after they get deservedly locked up for doing bad things -- and it's to LeBlanc's credit that she makes it clear these people get deservedly locked up for doing bad things; ain't no "but he's really innocent!" excuse-making here), it's hard to look at these lives of repeated bad decisions (and they are all lives of repeated bad decisions) and not want to yell "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WHY YOU KEEP DOING THIS."

But the second time through (and in no small part due to Peter's prodding for me to pay more attention to the surrounding factors), it became pretty clear why they kept making terrible decisions: because there weren't any good decisions that these people could make. There's only "bad" and "worse."

The people in _Random Family_ are just people. They each have some gifts: one woman is uncommonly beautiful and spirited; another is warm and open-hearted and devoted to her family. But the environment in which they live does not allow them to make good use of those gifts, and it takes advantage of their weaknesses relentlessly. It punishes them viciously for every misstep, offers them no way out, and ensures that any small mistake keeps them locked down in poverty for life.

The beautiful woman never has the chance to parlay her looks into a trophy marriage or modeling career. Her world doesn't include the kind of people who could make that happen for her, and (due to terrible role models and perverse societal incentives) she doesn't have the skills to sustain a lasting relationship anyway. The one rich man she meets (who immediately snatches her up, because she's the kind of girl you snatch up) is a violent, abusive drug dealer who eventually gets locked up and takes her down with him. But there never was a better prince that this Cinderella could have picked.

The kindhearted woman never has the chance to build a close and loving family, although it's clear that in other circumstances she would have been one of those cozy lovey-dovey homemakers whose Pinterest makes you want to stab things. Instead, the family she actually has -- a temperamental and drug-abusing mom, various unreliable boy-men, and children she can't afford or care for -- drag her down into self-mutilating madness and keep her trapped forever, because she loves them too much to ever say "no" and cut them dead.

Her sister does, and though the sister's only a minor character in the book, she's still pretty instructive. The sister is the closest possible thing to an ice-cold Ayn Randian golem of self-interest, and she barely makes it to the ranks of the struggling working poor, and it takes a tremendous psychological toll on both her and her husband to get that far. People are not meant to live in a way that turns loving social relationships into liabilities. People are not meant to choose between affection and survival. If you have to make that choice constantly for years, it eats your soul. And even then, even if you have the wherewithal to make that trade, lack of skills and schooling will ensure you only make it to the next-up rank of the exploited.

The one flaw in _Random Family_ is that it doesn't really talk about the schools available in this setting. You have to read Jonathan Kozol's _Savage Inequalities_ or a comparable exploration of underfunded (and de facto segregated) schools to get that important part of the picture. In _Random Family_, people just drop out of school casually and it seems like a total bonehead move (WHY YOU DON'T TAKE THE AVAILABLE ROAD OUT); it's only when you see how dire the available schools are, and how illusory their promise of escape-through-education actually is, that you realize "oh, that's not a way out after all." There's no reason to stay in school when the school offers you nothing useful.

Anyway, I thought about this all again when I was reading the latest Edsall thing on "What Does It Take to Climb Up the Ladder?" and, as a companion piece, this profile on three Kansas kids weighing their college choices.

And I've been thinking about it in connection with all those pieces talking about the "diseases of despair" (Case and Deaton have a new set of findings out; surprise!, less-educated white people are dying even more than they thought previously) and the hollowing of poor white communities by opiate addiction and family dysfunction, and how the pathologies of the urban inner city are moving out to those communities.

I have considerably less sympathy for the plight of heroin-addicted suburban people, mostly because they're still one generation removed from middle-class stability and are therefore at a point where it's still fair to talk about "character" and "personal responsibility" as factors here. If you grew up in a stable, loving household and you had the opportunity to go to school in a meaningful way and not everybody in your personal universe was a dead end of dysfunction your whole entire life, yeah, in my view that choice kind of is on you. You had better options. You just didn't pick them.

But the fact remains that these people's kids won't have that choice. These people's kids are going to grow up in a universe that in some respects looks more like the one in _Random Family_ than the one their parents had. Not totally -- they'll still have some advantages and some escape routes that wouldn't be available to people in the Bronx in 1992 -- but close enough that it's a similar conversation.

What that conversation needs to be, I think, is how you offer ladders up and out. How do you make good choices feasible? Because "character" and "personal responsibility" stop being adequate answers as soon as we start talking about children born into homes that won't teach those things and communities that won't reward them. "Character" and "personal responsibility" aren't answers that can save anybody in _Random Family._ Increasingly, they're not going to save the opiate-addicted ruins of the formerly middle-class.

It's a good book. I recommend reading it if you want a clear and honest picture of people often subject to stereotype as lazy welfare grifters. The fact is, they're often frustrating to read about and they do make a bunch of terrible decisions -- but it's useful to question what decisions they could possibly make that would be better, and whether it's truly reasonable to expect kids (because they're usually kids when they make the first big mistake that crimps all future options) to do better, and what We As A Society might do to improve things.

I also think it's pretty key to understanding how somebody like me can simultaneously be a Big Government Liberal and spend all day hitting people with sticks for doing bad things. Those two things aren't really in conflict, but you might need to read something like _Random Family_ to see why.