Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Warning: Intended for seniors. Underclass students may not understand...
...presidency to empower progressive social movements. The organizing drive of labor's [John] Sweeney is vital as the voice of the worker. Civil rights leaders like [Kweisi] Mfume at the N.A.A.C.P. deserve Clinton's help to focus on the problems of the inner cities and the permanent underclass. Young people should be empowered by the President to get into public service, teaching and combatting poverty and discrimination...
Based on a 1994 series that won Dash the Pulitzer Prize, Rosa Lee is an unflinching portrait of underclass pathology in Washington's ghetto. The protagonist, Rosa Lee Cunningham, was a 57-year-old chronic welfare recipient, petty thief, drug addict and prostitute who died from aids earlier this year. Her worst failing may have been passing along her self-destructive traits to most of her offspring; she was even capable of recruiting one of her daughters into prostitution at age 11. Of her eight children by six different fathers, only two managed to escape to the mainstream world, through...
Unlike such other recent works on the underclass conundrum as William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, Rosa Lee proffers neither theories nor proposals. Instead, Dash allows Cunningham's life story to speak for itself in all its depressing complexity. Cunningham's case was extreme even by the standards of the underclass, but it speaks volumes about the devastating combination of circumstance and personal flaws that condemns them to misery. By refusing to be judgmental, Dash illuminates the simplistic limitations on the far ends of the welfare debate. It is a problem, he strongly implies, for which neither side...
...welfare reform: that changing the nature of the system requires large investments in changing both the opportunities and the incentives that millions of Americans face; that such changes will inevitably produce some harsh consequences; and that welfare, however reformed, cannot solve all the problems of the nation's underclass any more than welfare, unreformed, is to blame for all of them...