Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Spacek's husband, teetering between propriety and principle. But no actor's art can disguise the simplemindedness of this tract or the stodginess with which it is dramatized. What are audiences to learn about today's racial antagonisms from a long-ago tug of war between saints (the black underclass) and demons (the Alabama plutocracy)? The movie plays like a Christmas card whose sentiment is noble but whose poetry is doggerel...
...problems tearing apart America's inner-cities. In the face of rampant crime, drug use and teen pregnancy, many Black leaders simply turn up the rhetoric and make excuses for these social diseases and--most recently--for Marion Barry. In doing so, they seem intent upon driving the Black underclass into further turmoil...
...face it, the plight of the Black underclass grows more uncontrollable every day. What's worse, the most helpless victims of ghetto crime and violence are not white or middle-class, but Black and poor. Yet rather than confront this breakdown in civilized behavior, many Black leaders continue to search for an oppressor...
...Chicago, for example, Operation PUSH--Jackson's old civil rights organization--is busy organizing a boycott of Nike shoes because of that company's failure to appoint a Black to its board of directors. Seriously folks, the closest relationship between Nike and the problems of the underclass is the alarming frequency with which young teens are shot and stabbed for a $125 pair of Air Jordans...
Conventional government intervention has largely failed, notably in the chaotic and counterproductive welfare system, which is at once too lax and too rigid. We have been more successful than is often realized in ending or alleviating certain kinds of poverty. The underclass, with its devastated family life, its single mothers and routine teenage pregnancies (among black teenagers, nearly 90% of babies are born out of wedlock), is a nightmare reproach to America. But it is also a relatively isolated phenomenon -- far more so than the poverty that festered behind the proud facades of Victorian England, for example. It requires separate...