Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...beyond the era of self-congratulation and beer-commercial patriotism. America cannot afford stupidity. It costs too much in the world. Education therefore must have a priority, and not just through more money; it needs discipline and imagination. America can no longer afford racism and a neglect of the underclass. They also cost too much. These are problems that must be solved not only as a matter of social justice (which they are) but as a question of America's long-term economic survival...
...least 14 films. At heart, the novel's conflict is metaphysical: Valjean believes in the forgiving God of the New Testament, Javert in the retributive God of the Old Testament. The story resounds with images of Christian redemption. Yet it is by turns a panorama of the underclass, a Gothic romance about love at first sight threatened by family secrets, a psychological study and a radical tract. The novel's scale and complexity seemingly defy adaptation to a musical, especially one that in the fashion of opera, sets every word to song. The stage version's triumph is that...