Word: underclasses
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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...
...When you're making between $65 and $80 per week, spending $6 on a play and $5 for a concert does become a chore," says Joshua D. Bloodworth '97, a New Yorker who describes himself as halfway between working and middle class. ("I identify with the black underclass, my parents identify with the working class," he explains...
...when, according to Cowles Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson, "the bottom third of the African-American population--some 10 million persons--live in dire poverty," and "the bottom 10 per cent or so--the so-called underclass--exist in an advanced stage of social, economic, and moral disintegration," seizing opportunity, making use of programs like affirmative action for example (as both men admit was part of the reason they made it to the Ivy League as students), is an integral part of success. A Yankelovich Partners, Inc.--New Yorker survey (the results of which were published in the special issue...
Black economist Glenn C. Loury makes a powerful case for the rediscovery of black racial honor. He believes progress toward racial equality depends on acknowledging and rectifying the dysfunctional behaviors in the black community. This is usually taken to mean the underclass must clean up its act before it can move into the mainstream. But there are dysfunctional behaviors outside the ghetto that could also stand re-examination: the white notion that the country has already done enough to secure racial equity, and black middle-class complicity in the deterioration of inner-city schools. In both cases, honor depends...