Word: underclass
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...year. A largely white exodus to the suburbs has left blacks with a 65% majority and reduced the city's population from 557,000 in 1980 to 497,000 today. The shrinkage has intensified a rolling budget crisis that has forced severe cutbacks in social services to a growing underclass of jobless and low-income blacks: 54% of African-American families earn less than $15,000. "Agencies are all overwhelmed," says Julius Wilkerson, who runs a private outreach effort for high-risk youths. "We need a dozen programs for every one we've got if we're going to give...
...problem for a broad range of American blacks, who rightly fear that his anti-Semitic rhetoric erodes the moral authority of his appeals against racism and who are chagrined that his Nation of Islam, long an angry voice of the underclass, now enjoys a following among college students...
...Calcutta remark was grimly amusing to Alex Kotlowitz, who wrote There Are No Children Here, the 1991 best seller about two children in a Chicago housing project. Kotlowitz notes that Mother Teresa has visited Chicago's underclass -- and was honestly shocked. "We're talking about second and third generations of children growing in communities like this. It's breaking the spiritual back of the people," he says. And each time that particular wheel is rediscovered, he notes, "we say, 'Oh, my God.' And then nothing is done...
Given the fiscal and social costs of institutionalizing an underclass from cradle to grave, it may be worth calculating the cost of such support. For now, however, there is a symbolic triumph in preventing children from being written off the moment their umbilical cords are cut. And something more than symbolism is occurring in Holland's apartment in Washington's dangerous Northeast neighborhood. A crib stands by the front door; its tenant is holding out her little arms and smiling widely, eyes as big as chestnuts. Holland scoops her up. "I love being a mother now," she says...
...Mother Teresa does more for the poor in one hour than Johnson, Carter, and Clinton, with all their programs and initiatives, have done in all their careers. Humane commitment and deep compassion cannot be replaced by a faceless government bureaucracy whose primary effect has been to create a permanent underclass dependent upon the state...