Word: underclass
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...city already beset by spiraling racial tensions. To many New Yorkers it symbolized a breakdown in racial civility that had no quick explanation or readily available cure. Some of the youths accused of killing Hawkins were jobless school dropouts with histories of drug abuse -- mirror images in whiteface of underclass young black males. The whites had armed themselves on the night of Aug. 23 because the former girlfriend of their alleged leader, Keith Mondello, had invited black and Hispanic guests to her birthday party. They mistook Yusuf and his comrades for those guests...
...their zeal to do the right thing, the architects of prime time are largely masking the strains in race relations and the social isolation of the black underclass. On most shows, blacks are portrayed either as work buddies or in comfortable middle-class roles like an art-gallery owner on Father Dowling Mysteries. As a result, prejudice becomes an abstraction to be preached against and overt bigotry all but limited to a bizarrely menacing alliance between American Nazis and skinheads on 21 Jump Street. So too does TV breezily dismiss the crisis of the black family. On Bagdad Cafe, Whoopi...
...pretends the tabloid atrocities on TV news shows are aberrations. It either closes its eyes to the human street litter -- the homeless, the junkies, the insane -- or blames them for not getting with the program of self-help economics. It largely ignores the ghetto, where the black underclass has built its own furious culture on the slag heap of Great Society failures. It discounts much of the young white working class, in tattered towns and trailer parks, who feel left out of bland, sitcom America...
...they created a huge new multibillion-dollar market -- of kids and the underclass -- to buy their product. Parents and other guardians of tradition are as concerned about the audience for X-rated pop as they are about the perpetrators. If pop weren't popular, fewer people would worry about its impact. No one has mounted a campaign against Randy Newman's songs about racial and sexual bigotry, for example, because Newman's audience is relatively small and well educated. The artful photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, some of which depict homosexual acts and sadomasochism, took a while to raise legal hackles...
Taylor urges an all-out war on the poverty, poor schooling, broken family structures and dire job prospects that make the urban underclass a seedbed for crime. Unfortunately, such prescriptions are not only familiar but also too expensive and time consuming to attract much political support. Detroit is already a case study of what happens when the conditions that produce gangs are allowed to fester. Warns Taylor: "We need to face up to the fact that there is a major crisis in this city...