Re-Examining America's Underclass

By Jack E. White/Chicago

Since the mid-1960s, the U.S. has enacted the most sweeping civil rights laws in its history, fought a costly war on poverty and aggressively pursued affirmative action to increase opportunities for blacks. Millions of them, as a result, have escaped the ghetto to join the mainstream middle class. But to the consternation of scholars, officials and blacks themselves, a seemingly ineradicable black underclass has multiplied in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by a self-perpetuating pathology of joblessness, welfare dependency, crime and teenage illegitimacy.

Now a distinguished black sociologist has produced a provocative analysis of the black underclass and a radical proposal for easing its plight. In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner-City, the Underclass and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press; $27.50), William Julius Wilson challenges conservative social theorists who blame the excesses of the welfare state for the swelling of the underclass; civil rights leaders who attribute its existence to racism; and liberal social scientists who hypothesize an entrenched "culture of poverty" in the ghetto. Wilson may be guilty of understatement when he predicts that his new study, due out this fall, "will be controversial."

It would not be the first time that Wilson, who is chairman of the sociology department at the University of Chicago, had set the fur flying. Almost a decade ago his first study of the underclass, The Declining Significance of Race, outraged militant black scholars by claiming that the victories won by the civil rights movement had made racial discrimination less important than economic class in determining the "life chances" of individual blacks. The Association of Black Sociologists condemned the book for omitting "significant data regarding the continuing discrimination against blacks at all class levels" and warned that it might be used "as a basis for the further suppression of blacks."

In his new book, Wilson challenges liberal orthodoxies by candidly exploring the social pathologies -- drug use, crime, teen pregnancies, welfare dependency and other destructive behavior -- evident in the inner cities. Discussion of these catastrophic ghetto problems by liberals has been stifled, he says, ever since black scholars raised a storm over the 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the breakdown of the black family. In the absence of forthright research from liberals and blacks, writes Wilson, right-wing scholars like Charles Murray (Losing Ground) gained influence with the Reagan Administration by asserting that welfare programs had become so lucrative that they provided greater economic incentive for poor families to go on the dole than to get a job.

The primary reason for the worsening plight of the black underclass, Wilson argues, is not present-day discrimination or a lazy dependency on welfare or the entrenchment of destructive values into the ghetto culture. Rather, he places most of the blame on two factors that have little to do with racism. The first involves a change in the structure of the national economy: the decline in the number of well-paid industrial jobs available to low-skilled workers and the increase in the number of service jobs that either require white-collar skill or provide little chance for advancement. This had a disastrous impact on young black males, whose unemployment rate is more than double that of their white counterparts, and it leads to other social problems. Because there are only 60 or so stably employed marriageable men for every 100 women in numerous ghettos, black females often elect not to marry if they become pregnant.

The other major factor Wilson cites is the widening class division between blacks who have escaped the ghetto and those who have not. In what may be the book's most contentious section, he argues that the easing of discrimination against middle-class blacks has contributed indirectly to the desperate plight of the underclass. Once, he says, segregation forced middle-class, working- class and poor blacks to live together in "vertically integrated" communities with thriving churches, small businesses and schools. But desegregation laws allowed blacks with stable jobs to flee the ghettos in great numbers, knocking the props from local institutions. Those left behind formed an increasingly homogeneous underclass whose members suffered from the "concentration effects" of isolation from mainstream education, job and social networks.

This thesis is already under attack by some black social scientists. Says Harriette Pipes McAdoo, professor of social work at Howard University: "It blames ghetto people who got out rather than external forces. It sounds good, but there is no empirical data to support it. It's rather ridiculous."

Wilson is skeptical of "race-specific policies" designed to help blacks, like affirmative action, which he says does little to assist unskilled ghetto youths while benefiting middle-class blacks who are better prepared to take advantage of education and job opportunities. Because of the low number of available jobs in inner cities, the author is wary of widely heralded welfare reforms designed to wean recipients from the dole by requiring them to accept training and jobs. Says Wilson: "If you do create some jobs for those on welfare, you're just going to take them away from the working poor. You have a kind of underclass musical chairs here. You give jobs to one and the other slides down into the underclass."

Instead, he advocates "programs to which the more advantaged groups of all races can positively relate." Most important is to stimulate the national economy so there is greater demand for new workers. He would replace "means- tested" programs -- like welfare -- aimed at the black poor with programs for job training, child care and education that are "available to all members of society who choose to use them." By making these available to all citizens, he contends, enough political support will be generated to sustain the effort. In Wilson's view, special treatment cannot help the underclass. In the long run, only by extending more opportunity to all Americans, regardless of class, will its problems be solved.