Word: underclass
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Works of art about the underclass almost always entrap both creators and audiences in moral ambiguity. No matter how determined not to condescend, artists and spectators all but inevitably feel an anthropological distance from their subjects. This holds especially true in the theater, a medium the underclass is apt to avoid as alien and unaffordable. Certainly, few playgoers at Aven'U Boys, a violent and vivid series of vignettes set in Brooklyn, New York, that debuted off-Broadway last week, appear to share the despondent, nihilistic subliteracy of the title trio of Italian Americans in their late teens (played, with...
...Disadvantage Versus Symbolic Diversity. I think that everyone, especially the newly-formed Coalition for Diversity, should recall what happened to the issue of the growing Black underclass when it was first brought to the public's attention by the Moynihan Report on the Negro Family in 1965. Liberals like Moynihan who linked the plight of disadvantaged groups to broader problems in society suddenly found themselves silenced by a waves of critics on the Left who furiously objected to the stigma attached to terms like the "underclass" and "social pathology." Precursors to the multiculturalism of the 1990s, these critics rejected liberal...
This wave of revisionist (i.e. politically correct) arguments shifted the focus of the discussion on the underclass from the problems of racial isolation and economic class subordination to discussions of Black achievement and Black pride. Sociologists and policy-makers who attempted to link the life in the ghetto to broader social problems were criticized for holding to "white middle class" social and behavioral norms. This unfortunate turn in the debate squelched hard-headed, liberal proposals--proposals that might have solved the underclass problem--for more than two decades...
...poverty in the inner city. I live in a Black neighborhood, and who's lazy? The people who get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and go down looking for cans, or some guy in Washington who sits in a think-tank all day talking about the underclass? So I wish he'd stick with literary criticism and leave social policy...
Unfortunately, greedy Class of '93 officials bought out the original student night (March 4) at $5 a head, and are now peddling tickets at $8 each. So if you're an underclass student, you're stuck with the $20 general admission fare--unless you have a friend in the Pudding who'll let you usher...