Situation Report

IT is widely believed that the municipal ghetto spawns social and personal problems at an alarmingly high rate. The belief is supported by statistics. Although the U.S. black population, at 23 million, is only one-ninth as large as the white, there are nearly as many black drug addicts (31,184) as white (32,624) according to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics figures based on police reports. The last available illegitimacy rate is 4.9% for all live white births as against 29.4% for nonwhite births. U.S. census figures report 29% fatherless black households as against 9% fatherless white households.

Illegitimacy may in many cases be an understandable result of the problem of a family income so low that it cannot support the unemployed male--and the black unemployment rate is almost twice the white. The figures for black births out of wedlock are also distorted by the simple fact that many more pregnant, unmarried white women can afford to have abortions.

The rate of black admissions to public mental institutions is twice that of white admissions. But in Psychiatry magazine, Joel Fischer, a social scientist at Berkeley, notes that the apparently higher rate of mental illness among blacks is a statistical misinterpretation, caused by the fact that "private treatment is often not available to Negroes, and Negroes diagnosed as mentally ill are simply funneled into overcrowded, custodial state institutions."

Nationally, the white suicide rate is 21 times the rate for blacks. But among males in the 20-to-34-year-old bracket, the ratio is almost even; in big-city ghettos, the black male rate may be double the white. Why? White Psychiatrist Herbert Hendin blames "a sense of despair, a feeling that life will never be satisfying."

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