Word: underclass
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Meantime, Badillo estimates the Puerto Rican school-dropout rate at 85%. Discouraged youngsters are almost natural prospects for membership in the city's underclass, quickly contributing to the ghetto plagues of violent crime, drug use and arson. Says one Lower East Side youngster: "A lot of kids want an education to get out of here. But in order to survive, they're dealing [drugs]. Kids ten and eleven make more money than their old man in the factory." Says another: "I saw some pictures of this place 20 years ago, and it had benches and trees. We took...
...message to underclass blacks is that they must learn not to rely on help from the outside, that they must take responsibility for their own upward mobility and the quality of their lives. "Too many of our schools are infested with a steady diet of violence, vandalism, drugs, intercourse without discourse, alcohol and television addiction," says he. "The result has been to breed a passive and superficial generation...
...winners and losers in their ledgers, the names of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds reliably turn up in ink as black and shiny as the latter's hairpiece. Across the land?in drive-ins and shopping-center triplexes, even in the big cities, where action pictures still provide the underclass with the same kind of escape they always have?Eastwood and Reynolds draw people to theaters in astonishing numbers...
...horror stories come out of big-city ghetto schools, where the problems ?racial, financial, educational?are the worst. The problems are real enough, but in many ways they are so special as to be part of the larger society's difficulties in improving the lot of America's underclass, rather than crises of education...
...expedition provided a spontaneous display not only of the ruins but also of the needs and hopes of the American underclass. "Tell him we need money. Send us money!" people at street corners shouted as the caravan wound through often semideserted streets. "Give me a job, man, I need a job!" one person yelled. At his second stop, Carter told Mrs. Harris, "I would like to see what can be salvaged and what can't be salvaged, and take these buildings down and start turning it around...