Word: collars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kerner, many of the problems it identified are as bad or worse. Before World War II, just 5% of blacks were in the middle class. Today the figure is closer to 60%. But the same years have seen a disappearance of the well-paid manufacturing jobs that pulled blue-collar workers, black and white alike, into prosperity. Good jobs now require skills that schools in poor neighborhoods do an ever more dismal job of teaching. And the white fear of a black underclass fosters the kind of racism that constantly puts even the black middle class on the defensive...
...slacker when it came to details, she augmented an orange vinyl jacket, blue paisley butterfly collar shirt and brown bell-bottoms with a thick gold chain and a patch of black chest hair...
Childhood sexual abuse is a beast in many of these books. In Richard Hoffman's spare, poignant Half the House (Harcourt Brace; 175 pages; $20), it sneaks in almost laconically after the author has given us a searing picture of his blue-collar family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, with a violent but caring father and two brothers who are terminally ill. Hazy reverence for the Catholic saints is counterpointed with hazy submission to the sadistic coach who lures the author, then age 10, to his house with pornography and sodomizes him: "Induced, premature, with a hunger urgent...
...other hand, these indications of progress are undermined by the facts that about a third of black families live below the poverty line; that 1 in 3 black males in his 20s is in jail, on probation or on parole; that a black lower middle class consisting of blue-collar workers is shrinking; that a resentful white attitude has resulted in attacks on affirmative action and government assistance, which, African Americans contend, rather than disabling black families by creating excessive dependencies has been inadequate to their needs. These antipodal positions have been hardened by an intellectual debate between those...
...proved that it can help buy your acquittal. In an imperfect world, money will always be able to skew the outcome of a trial to some extent, but in this case, the effective "dream team" defense was obviously a product of O.J.'s fortune. Had he been a blue-collar worker from south-central L.A., would his defense have been as competent? We think...