Word: stratum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Education will have to emanate from the top directed specifically toward the lower economic stratum of the community, who were never great economic beneficiaries of the advances made by the movement. The alternative is the perpetuation of an endless cycle of a selectively small percentage who are able to go on to higher education while the vast majority languishes uneducated...
Bush has touched every stratum of leadership in American society. Former Urban League president Vernon Jordan and IBM's chairman John Akers huddled with him. Country singer Crystal Gale and Alabama fishing guide Ray Scott were houseguests; Scott was sighted next morning in fatigues, appraising the South Lawn's fountains and pool. Previous Presidents have had profiles jagged with talents and flaws. Bush seems not to have those striking peaks and valleys...
...legacy of institutional racism and generations of discrimination. But during the Reagan era, the Zeitgeist shifted. Now poverty is often blamed on the poor and on the system of government support created to help them. Glenn Loury, a black Harvard professor and neoconservative, reflects this sensibility. "The bottom stratum of the black community," he writes, "has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society." The problems of the ghetto, he says, "have taken on a life of their...
...likely be denounced for creating comic characters who accurately reflect familiar and self-important fixtures in New York life. At the top of the heap are "social X rays," rumpless women of a certain age who believe one cannot be too rich or too thin. Sixtyish men of this stratum are frequently accompanied by "lemon tarts," sleek, young blonds. Sherman McCoy is a decent well-bred sort, neither more nor less lustful than most confident 38-year-old males and particularly amusing when he gives facts and figures about how one can go broke in Manhattan on $1 million...
...poor are the not-quite-homeless, forced to live in garages, automobiles, even tool sheds and converted chicken coops. The Los Angeles Times estimates that as many as 200,000 stay in some 42,000 garages that rent for $200 to $600 a month. Constituting a new, anomalous demographic stratum, this group is made up mostly of Hispanic working poor, many of them illegal immigrants fresh from the Mexican border. Says William Baer, associate professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California: "We've got a squatters' settlement in the backyard of the city...