Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wolf family, like its adopted city, is in an advanced state of decline. Along with thousands of other families in dying inner cities, the Wolfs have become mired in a morass of welfare, crime and self-destruction. In a generation, they have descended from proud working class to demoralized underclass. Nine of the 13 children have never held a meaningful job, nor do they care to. Only one of the boys finished high school. Two of the girls became teenage mothers and live on welfare. One of the girls lived a fast life that came to a crashing...
...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...
...widely heralded welfare reforms designed to wean recipients from the dole by requiring them to accept training and jobs. Says Wilson: "If you do create some jobs for those on welfare, you're just going to take them away from the working poor. You have a kind of underclass musical chairs here. You give jobs to one and the other slides down into the underclass...
...programs for job training, child care and education that are "available to all members of society who choose to use them." By making these available to all citizens, he contends, enough political support will be generated to sustain the effort. In Wilson's view, special treatment cannot help the underclass. In the long run, only by extending more opportunity to all Americans, regardless of class, will its problems be solved...