Word: ghettoes
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...handsome features taut, his fist balled in indignation, Biden was in danger of losing his audience by painting a vivid picture of ghetto hopelessness. So totally did he capture his listeners, however, that their approval punctuated the meticulous cadence of his clincher: "And these are not someone else's children. They are our children. ((Applause begins.)) America's children. ((More applause.)) Blood of our blood. ((A louder ripple.)) Heart of our soul." This was Biden at his best, the impassioned idealist displaying the soaring rhetoric that has become his trademark...
...primary reason for the worsening plight of the black underclass, Wilson argues, is not present-day discrimination or a lazy dependency on welfare or the entrenchment of destructive values into the ghetto culture. Rather, he places most of the blame on two factors that have little to do with racism. The first involves a change in the structure of the national economy: the decline in the number of well-paid industrial jobs available to low-skilled workers and the increase in the number of service jobs that either require white-collar skill or provide little chance for advancement. This...
...other major factor Wilson cites is the widening class division between blacks who have escaped the ghetto and those who have not. In what may be the book's most contentious section, he argues that the easing of discrimination against middle-class blacks has contributed indirectly to the desperate plight of the underclass. Once, he says, segregation forced middle-class, working- class and poor blacks to live together in "vertically integrated" communities with thriving churches, small businesses and schools. But desegregation laws allowed blacks with stable jobs to flee the ghettos in great numbers, knocking the props from local institutions...
This thesis is already under attack by some black social scientists. Says Harriette Pipes McAdoo, professor of social work at Howard University: "It blames ghetto people who got out rather than external forces. It sounds good, but there is no empirical data to support it. It's rather ridiculous...
Wilson is skeptical of "race-specific policies" designed to help blacks, like affirmative action, which he says does little to assist unskilled ghetto youths while benefiting middle-class blacks who are better prepared to take advantage of education and job opportunities. Because of the low number of available jobs in inner cities, the author is wary of widely heralded welfare reforms designed to wean recipients from the dole by requiring them to accept training and jobs. Says Wilson: "If you do create some jobs for those on welfare, you're just going to take them away from the working poor...