Word: underclass
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Members of the Underclass are not the same as the traditional poor. About 30 million Americans live below the poverty line, but the Underclass constitutes only about one-quarter of that figure. The number is imprecise because the term itself is vague. It refers to the poor who are more than just temporarily down and out, the ones caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and despair. For the most part they are black and live in the decayed hearts of major cities. But the Underclass is defined less by income than by behavior. Members are prisoners of a ghetto...
Thus the Seven Ages of Underclass Man and Woman...
After two decades of efforts to erase poverty, the ranks of the Underclass, "the truly disadvantaged," as they have been called, are growing and hardening. Their impact exceeds their numbers, for their plight is both a cause and an effect of America's most persistent problems: crime, drugs, homelessness and AIDS. But as the Underclass has increased, the willingness to help has decreased. In the War on Poverty, it seems, poverty won, creating a sense that the problem defied solution...
...many, the very existence of the Underclass constitutes a disturbing repudiation of liberalism. In the '60s and '70s, poverty was considered a responsibility of society as a whole, the 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...
Ironically, the success of the civil rights movement contributed to the continuance of the Underclass. The removal of many racial barriers allowed blacks who had made it to get out of the ghetto. This out-migration gutted the social structures of inner-city society, leaving neighborhoods bereft of a functioning middle class -- a middle class that once provided the neighborhood with shops and businesses and, more important, offered a model of workaday values that bound the society together...