Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...body of Murray's speech dealt not with race, but with the growing dichotomy he said he perceives between the "cognitive elite" and the "cognitive underclass" in America. Transformations in higher education, centralization of power and occupations requiring high levels of intelligence have created this cognitive elite since the 1950s, he said...
Last fall Thomas Professor of Government Martin L. Kilson wrote an open letter to his classes criticizing the Black Students Association's seeming lack of commitment to helping "poor and underclass" Black communities outside of Harvard...
Kilson, who in the 1960s became the first Black tenured professor at Harvard, advised the leaders of the Black Students Association [BSA] that they should be "formulating week-by-week and month-by-month numerous projects to assist that long-haul task of outfitting the Black poor and underclass youth to read adequately, to manage math, to replace vulgarity with beauty, [and] to overcome hypermacho, anarchic and anti-humanistic values and personal identities...
Political strategists talk about "wedge issues," meaning issues that pry voters away from their traditional allegiances. Welfare is the classic wedge issue. Conservative welfare reformers may say their primary concern is to liberate the poor from the shackles of their underclass culture, and some of them may even believe it. But only the most naive or cynical among them would deny that the political potency of the welfare issue derives mostly from resentment of the poor as leeches on society, not from sympathy for their plight. This resentment may be justified or it may not, but encouraging and exploiting...
...cost could be larger still. The budget deficit is not only a grave problem in itself, a theft of resources from the next generation, but also one reason politicians feel too strapped for cash to earnestly confront the other leading contender for gravest problem: the existence of an urban underclass. This sort of predicament is what the Founders designed representative democracy to solve. "They saw the public interest as a transcendent thing that enlightened people would be able to see and promote. It wasn't just a question of adding up all the interests," says historian Gordon Wood, author...