Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...might consider Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which is based on the true story of a drug lord named Frank Lucas, who in the 1970s cornered the Harlem heroin market and thereby made millions upon millions. He is a black man, no less a member of a struggling underclass than his Italian and Irish movie predecessors, and he has a couple of gimmicks that they (who were never drug dealers) didn't have. For one thing, he eliminated the middle men; he bought his smack directly from sources in Southeast Asia and smuggled it into the country, often...
...growers and distributors, though, the situation is different entirely. They form the linemen of a vast American underclass of crime and poverty. Their entire lives are, by and large, extralegal. They do not donate to politicians and they do not vote. Their trade demands that they shed their citizenry, that they give up the privileges and protections of society for them and their families. The law does not demur to strip away their freedom, and they fill up the ranks of inmates in wild overproportion—over 55 percent of the federal prison population is incarcerated for drug offenses...
...liberally, as it were, missing among its innocent curls of smoke the sinister economic system that it sets up. One cannot sneer at the social irresponsibility of a Hummer driver and then return home to relax over a joint whose procurement demanded the subjection of an impoverished underclass on the fringes of society...
...President Fernandez presides over a country that is laudable for its advances in trade and tourism, its partnership with America and the improvements it has made for its own citizens. But President Fernandez also presides over a country that maintains a “permanent underclass,” confined to subhuman living conditions, unobtainable rights, and indentured servitude...
...extent, this discomfort is misplaced. The armed services are more socially diverse today than during Vietnam or even Gulf War I - even including several children of national politicians. The discomfort also may be misguided: if the military has, by historical accident, turned into an important path out of the underclass and into bourgeois society, used disproportionately by African-Americans, is that necessarily a bad thing? (Especially when the lifetime risk of dying on the job may be no higher in the military than in other dangerous careers like coal mining...