Word: urbane
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...looters or arsonists or violent criminals. But the underclass is so totally disaffected from the system that many who would not themselves steal or burn or mug stand by while others do so, sometimes cheering them on. The underclass, says Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, "in a crisis feels no compulsion to abide...
...Urban League director...
...1960s, it has become a rather common description of people who are seen to be stuck more or less permanently at the bottom, removed from the American dream. Though its members come from all races and live in many places, the underclass is made up mostly of impoverished urban blacks, who still suffer from the heritage of slavery and discrimination. The universe of the underclass is often a junk heap of rotting housing, broken furniture, crummy food, alcohol and drugs. The underclass has been doubly left behind: by the well-to-do majority and by the many blacks and Hispanics...
...nurtures values that are often at radical odds with those of the majority?even the majority of the poor. Thus the underclass minority produces a highly disproportionate number of the nation's juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay and demand for social expenditures. Says Monsignor Geno Baroni, an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development: "The underclass presents our most dangerous crisis, more dangerous than the Depression of 1929, and more complex...
...farther behind?and more and more angry. While the number of blacks earning more than $10,000 is expanding and the number earning $5,500 to $10,000 is shrinking, almost a third of all black families are still below the poverty line, defined as $5,500 for an urban family of four (only 8.9% of white families are below the line). Says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman: "The awareness that many blacks have been successful means that the underclass is more resentful and more defiant because its alibi isn't there...