Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...World society within a First World nation. Theirs is a Hobbesian universe where life is nasty, brutish and often cut short by violence, disease and drugs. They live lives without: mothers without husbands, men without work, families without homes, days without structure, neighborhoods without hope. They are America's Underclass, a disturbing daily reminder that American Democracy has not measured out liberty and justice...
Members of the Underclass are not the same as the traditional poor. About 30 million Americans live below the poverty line, but the Underclass constitutes only about one-quarter of that figure. The number is imprecise because the term itself is vague. It refers to the poor who are more than just temporarily down and out, the ones caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and despair. For the most part they are black and live in the decayed hearts of major cities. But the Underclass is defined less by income than by behavior. Members are prisoners of a ghetto...
Thus the Seven Ages of Underclass Man and Woman...
After two decades of efforts to erase poverty, the ranks of the Underclass, "the truly disadvantaged," as they have been called, are growing and hardening. Their impact exceeds their numbers, for their plight is both a cause and an effect of America's most persistent problems: crime, drugs, homelessness and AIDS. But as the Underclass has increased, the willingness to help has decreased. In the War on Poverty, it seems, poverty won, creating a sense that the problem defied solution...
...book doesn't claim to have solutions to the problems of growing up Black and poor in the ghetto, and doesn't join the current debate over whether the rising Black underclass is the product of cultural pathology in the Black community, or the lack of economic opportunity for Blacks. Instead it proceeds on the worthwhile premise that not enough people on the outside even know that these problems exist, or, more significantly, know that people exist behind the problems, and behind the traditional stereotypes...