Word: underclass
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Concerned officials from the White House to the humblest city hall are grappling with questions about the underclass. How big is it? Who is in it? What motivates its members? Most important, how can this minority within a minority be reduced...
...unemployed for less than 26 weeks. But the underclass is made up of people who lack the schooling, skills and discipline to advance, and who have succumbed to helplessness?a feeling of being beaten...
Long-term unemployment is a factor in that. Many members of the underclass come from the ranks of the 1,061,000 workers who are listed as "discouraged" because they have given up even looking for jobs. To that number can be added the entrenched welfare mothers: at least 2.4 million have been enrolled for one year or longer. Then there are their many children, a few million kids who are growing up without a heritage of working skills or of employed society's values. In addition, many of the chronically unemployed in the 18-to-21 age group have...
Though this subculture is predominantly black, many Hispanics and more than a few poor whites belong to the underclass. Among the most glaring subgroups: the Appalachian migrants to dilapidated neighborhoods of some cities, the Chicanos of the Los Angeles slums, the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem. But the Hispanics appear to be moving ahead somewhat faster; 55% of the nation's blacks, v. 49% of the Spanish-speaking minorities, still live in the mostly depressed areas of central cities. The black concentration in the cities seems fated to increase because the birth rate among blacks is 51% higher than among...
...weakness of family structure, the presence of competing street values, and the lack of hope amidst affluence all around that make the American underclass unique among the world's poor peoples. Reports TIME Atlanta Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch, who until recently was stationed in Latin America: "Almost anyone who has lived in or near the crowded barrios of South America knows that looting on the scale that occurred in New York could almost never happen there?and not because the army would be standing by to shoot looters. Family structure has not broken down in South America...