Customer Reviews

Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America

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Though the book is non-fiction, it at time reads like a quirky novel, with memorable charactors like Buddy the overweight lesbian.

Now that the nation's welfare system is in its final years, its interesting to see the effects of New York State's extreamly generous welfare benefits had on a low-income neighborhood and its residents in the first few years, which is the background of the story, which concerns a black man falsly accused of raping a white woman.

The books is very well-written and engrossing. I read it in only two sittings.

George Gilder has had an interesting and controversial career, including a famous book on economics (`Wealth and Poverty', highly praised by Ronald Reagan among others), several books on the high tech industry (a field in which he has long served as an investment advisor), a book entitled `Sexual Suicide' (later renamed `Men and Marriage', that challenged many of the tenets of the feminist movement - N.O.W. once named him `Pig of the Year'), and his recent defense of the Intelligent Design belief that life might be something more than just an accident wrought by the fluke movements of dead bits of matter.

There is also this lesser known work, `Visible Man', published in 1978, and re-released with a new Introduction in 1995. The title, Gilder tells us, is both "a tribute to Ralph Ellison's classic ['Invisible Man'] and an assertion that whatever the problems of young black men, invisibility was no longer among them."

The book reads like a good novel, as Gilder tells the story - based on hundreds of interviews over two years -- of a young black man from Albany, NY, raised by a welfare mother and her female relatives, who fought in Vietnam, spends his time chasing women who frequent the bars of his neighborhood, fathers several children, works briefly for a government agency, and gets into various scrapes with the law - including a charge of rape, for which he is eventually acquitted. It was during these years spent with `Sam', his family, and his friends, that the author's unconventional views on the causes of poverty in America were forged and confirmed: specifically, his convictions regarding the civilizing and maturing power of marriage, family, and work, and the cruelty and degradation that is concealed within the welfare system.

When someone speaks out against welfare, it is easy to become indignant and to charge such a person with an appalling lack of decency, a lack of caring, a lack of charity and humanity. But shallow sentimentality has to give way to a deeper and more intelligent form of `loving one's neighbor', and I find Gilder's earnest assertions to be exceedingly compassionate and wise. In 1978, he warned us against treating blacks as if they were children -- unable to be told the truth, unable to understand the basic facts of a market economy, unable to rise above a system of fantastic expectations, indulgences, and entitlements. "This is the worst kind of racism in America," he said, "the respectable kind." The kind that unmans black men, that belittles them with pity and charity.

Problems inevitably arise "whenever and wherever the worth of welfare payments and related benefits - crucially including leisure time and related medical care - rises above the value of earnings. Under these conditions, regardless of reforms and regulations, welfare will be a government machine that fosters illegitimacy and turns dads into deadbeats." Unwed mothers are particularly eligible for these generous benefits, which means that the need for husbands is more than simply eliminated: having a working husband, who could not possibly earn as much as the government provides, becomes an outright liability. Thus the family structure is dismantled, more and more fatherless children are encouraged, men are emasculated, boys grow up without strong male role models to teach them how to become worthy adults, little girls are motivated to have babies as soon as possible (the relentless vulgarity of television, movies, and music videos, increases this motivation a thousand-fold), and the spiral of urban problems become more and more unsolvable.

Today, we have reaped the harvest of all this ignorance and condescension. Black teenage boys, wishing to be acknowledged as men, but completely unneeded in the traditional male roles of husband, father, and provider, find other ways to be acknowledged - they act out violently, join together in predatory gangs, rape and degrade their women. The prisons fill to overflowing and the inner city moves toward a police state. Babies are neglected by mothers who are still children themselves. Only a few manage to escape.

All of this is blamed superficially on racism and poverty, and the government pours money into educational programs to promote tolerance as well as more benefits for the poor. But as Gilder points out in his Introduction, "The only welfare reform that makes a difference is a private economy that grows faster than the public dole."

Obviously, in our current economic crisis, a "growing private economy" presents quite a challenge. But it will not be accomplished through superficial, condescending, poorly-thought-out government policies, such as the ones Gilder recognized long ago in this prescient and very worthwhile book.

Gilder wanted to title this book "Sam Beau" but the editors, he said, wouldn't let him. It is doubtful to me that Gilder has any genuine interest in the welfare of the nation's underclass, but he does have a strange fascination with delinquency and depravity. Gilder is attracted by Sam as some derelict version of genuine masculinity, and takes delight in enumerating all of his failures and pinning the blame on the well-intentioned liberals who put him there. More specifically, welfare reverses the relation between men and women: the woman, as the welfare breadwinner, supports the man, who lives off her income and becomes dependent on the "welfare queens," moving from one to other when they turn him out, impregnating each so that they will remain tied to him, and avoiding work so that his wages won't be garnished. For the liberals, he is a father so far as he earns money, and for the woman and her children he is a father only in the biological sense. For the unemployed father watching tv in the afternoon, masculinity can seem restricted to nonconjugal sex (perhaps there is another word for that) and set-to's on the street or in the bar. Again, this fascinates Gilder (or else he wouldn't have written such a quickly forgotten book), and perhaps part of the attraction is being a white man interloping in a largely black world.