Word: ghettoes
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Since the mid-1960s, the U.S. has enacted the most sweeping civil rights laws in its history, fought a costly war on poverty and aggressively pursued affirmative action to increase opportunities for blacks. Millions of them, as a result, have escaped the ghetto to join the mainstream middle class. But to the consternation of scholars, officials and blacks themselves, a seemingly ineradicable black underclass has multiplied in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by a self-perpetuating pathology of joblessness, welfare dependency, crime and teenage illegitimacy...
...Policy (University of Chicago Press; $27.50), William Julius Wilson challenges conservative social theorists who blame the excesses of the welfare state for the swelling of the underclass; civil rights leaders who attribute its existence to racism; and liberal social scientists who hypothesize an entrenched "culture of poverty" in the ghetto. Wilson may be guilty of understatement when he predicts that his new study, due out this fall, "will be controversial...
...book, Wilson challenges liberal orthodoxies by candidly exploring the social pathologies -- drug use, crime, teen pregnancies, welfare dependency and other destructive behavior -- evident in the inner cities. Discussion of these catastrophic ghetto problems by liberals has been stifled, he says, ever since black scholars raised a storm over the 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the breakdown of the black family. In the absence of forthright research from liberals and blacks, writes Wilson, right-wing scholars like Charles Murray (Losing Ground) gained influence with the Reagan Administration by asserting that welfare programs had become so lucrative that they provided...
Instead of viewing McDonald's jobs as a replacement for lost industrial work, other economists see the company serving a different but still valuable role as an employer of the marginal members of the work force: ghetto youths, undergrads working their way through college, displaced homemakers and retired people. What makes McDonald's attractive for those employees are the highly flexible work hours and on-the-job training. McDonald's is the biggest trainer of workers in the U.S., having employed at one time or another an estimated 7% of all current U.S. workers, or about 8 million people...
...ghetto may decide to go it alone. Local activists have proposed a $21 million property tax levied against South Central residents to pay for 300 additional city police officers. If the measure passes this June, it will mark the first time that residents within a section of any major U.S. city have taxed themselves to pay for more police for their own neighborhood...