Word: underclasses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Trainspotting" provides several very big laughs and perhaps hits just as much as it misses in depicting a certain breed of underclass, heroin-addicted youth in Scotland. Of course, the parents watch TV far too much yet keep on struggling, as those dang kids keep getting into trouble...
...Bribery Starts Here." While it is illegal in the U.S. to bribe a police officer, influencing a politician by using so-called soft money seems to be perfectly O.K. Why should I bother to vote, knowing that elected officials are like tools bought by giant corporations to manipulate the underclass? On Election Day, I'm going to stay in my small shop, where I make barely enough money to survive. Maybe by working those hours instead of wasting them going to the polls, I will be able to buy a Senator who can get to the White House. BERGE WASSILIAN...
William Julius Wilson's books, says Bill Clinton, "made me see race and poverty and the problems of the inner city in a different light." Indeed, no thinker has done more than the 60-year-old sociologist to explain why the black underclass sank into such misery and isolation at the same time millions of other African Americans were escaping from the ghetto to create a vibrant middle class...
...widely read and controversial studies, The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), Wilson rejected both the liberal claim that the underclass owed its existence to entrenched racial discrimination and the conservative charge that its impoverishment was due to cultural deficiencies and dependence on welfare. Instead Wilson pointed to sweeping changes in the global economy that pulled low-skill industrial jobs out of the inner city, the flight from the ghetto of its most stable residents for a better life elsewhere, and the lingering effects of past discrimination. All these, he theorized, doomed inner-city blacks...
Wilson, who will begin teaching at Harvard this fall after 24 years at the University of Chicago, believes the problem of the underclass can be attacked only by "race neutral" programs such as government-financed jobs and universal health care. "The growing gap between the haves and have-nots in our society does not just include blacks, but a lot of Hispanics and even lower-middle-class whites," says Wilson. "In this sort of economic climate, people are not receptive to messages that address the problems of other groups and ignore theirs...