Word: underclass
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...history, fought a costly war on poverty and aggressively pursued affirmative action to increase opportunities for blacks. Millions of them, as a result, have escaped the ghetto to join the mainstream middle class. But to the consternation of scholars, officials and blacks themselves, a seemingly ineradicable black underclass has multiplied in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by a self-perpetuating pathology of joblessness, welfare dependency, crime and teenage illegitimacy...
...distinguished black sociologist has produced a provocative analysis of the black underclass and a radical proposal for easing its plight. In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner-City, the Underclass and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press; $27.50), William Julius Wilson challenges conservative social theorists who blame the excesses of the welfare state for the swelling of the underclass; civil rights leaders who attribute its existence to racism; and liberal social scientists who hypothesize an entrenched "culture of poverty" in the ghetto. Wilson may be guilty of understatement when he predicts that his new study, due out this fall, "will...
...would not be the first time that Wilson, who is chairman of the sociology department at the University of Chicago, had set the fur flying. Almost a decade ago his first study of the underclass, The Declining Significance of Race, outraged militant black scholars by claiming that the victories won by the civil rights movement had made racial discrimination less important than economic class in determining the "life chances" of individual blacks. The Association of Black Sociologists condemned the book for omitting "significant data regarding the continuing discrimination against blacks at all class levels" and warned that it might...
...primary reason for the worsening plight of the black underclass, Wilson argues, is not present-day discrimination or a lazy dependency on welfare or the entrenchment of destructive values into the ghetto culture. Rather, he places most of the blame on two factors that have little to do with racism. The first involves a change in the structure of the national economy: the decline in the number of well-paid industrial jobs available to low-skilled workers and the increase in the number of service jobs that either require white-collar skill or provide little chance for advancement. This...
...Wilson cites is the widening class division between blacks who have escaped the ghetto and those who have not. In what may be the book's most contentious section, he argues that the easing of discrimination against middle-class blacks has contributed indirectly to the desperate plight of the underclass. Once, he says, segregation forced middle-class, working- class and poor blacks to live together in "vertically integrated" communities with thriving churches, small businesses and schools. But desegregation laws allowed blacks with stable jobs to flee the ghettos in great numbers, knocking the props from local institutions. Those left behind...