Underclass
According to sociologist Herbert Gans, while Myrdal's structural conceptualization of the underclass remained relatively intact through the writings of William Julius Wilson and others, in several respects the structural definition was abandoned by many journalists and academics, and replaced with a behavioral conception of the underclass, which fuses Myrdal's term with Oscar Lewis's and others' conception of a "culture of poverty".
Marxian sociologist Erik Olin Wright sees the underclass as a "category of social agents who are economically oppressed but not consistently exploited within a given class system".
Wright argues his highly doctrinaire opinion of class malevolence that: The material interests of the wealthy and privileged segments of American society would be better served if these people simply disappeared…The alternative, then, is to build prisons, to cordon off the zones of cities in which the underclass live.
William Julius Wilson's books, The Declining Significance of Race (1978)[7] and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987),[8] are popular accounts of the black urban underclass.
Wilson defines the underclass as "a massive population at the very bottom of the social ladder plagued by poor education and low-paying jobs.
"[7] He generally limits his discussion to those trapped in the post-civil-rights ghetto in the American rust belt (see "Potential Causes and Proposed Solutions" section of this entry for a more detailed summary of Wilson on the underclass).
In this context they lose perspective and lack an outlook and sensibility that would allow them to negotiate the wider system of employment and society in general.
He provides the following definition in his 1986 book, Beyond Entitlement, The underclass is most visible in urban slum settings and is about 70 percent nonwhite, but it includes many rural and white people as well, especially in Appalachia and the South.
[10]Ken Auletta, often credited as the primary journalist who brought the underclass term to the forefront of the American consciousness, describes the American underclass as non-assimilated Americans, and he suggests that the underclass may be subcategorized into four distinct groups: (1) the passive poor, usually long-term welfare recipients; (2) the hostile street criminals who terrorize most cities, and who are often school dropouts and drug addicts; (3) the hustlers, who, like street criminals, may not be poor and who earn their livelihood in an underground economy, but rarely commit violent crimes; (4) the traumatized drunks, drifters, homeless shopping-bag ladies, and released mental patients who frequently roam or collapse on city streets.
As evident with Mead and Auletta's framing, some definitions of the underclass significantly diverge from the initial notion of an economic group beneath the working class.
Joel Rogers and James Wright identify four general themes by which these characteristics are organized within academic and journalistic accounts of the underclass: economic, social-psychological, behavioral, and ecological (spatial concentration).
The underclass experiences high levels of joblessness, and what little employment its members hold in the formal economy is best described as precarious labor.
Among underclass youth, achievement motivation is low, education is undervalued, and conventional means of success and upward mobility are scorned.
There is widespread alienation from society and its institutions, estrangement, social isolation, and hopelessness, the sense that a better life is simply not attainable through legitimate means.
Some believe that the underclass concept was meant to capture the coincidence of a number of social ills including poverty, joblessness, crime, welfare dependence, fatherless families, and low levels of education or work related skills.
From this point of view, members of the underclass embody a distinct set of thoughts, perceptions, and actions – a "style of life" - that are transmitted across generations.
A few of these propositions are outlined below, including those developed by William Julius Wilson, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, Lawrence M. Mead, and Ken Auletta.
The work by these authors' certainly do not compile an exhaustive list of suggested causes or solutions for the underclass, but they are arguably the most read proposals among social scientists.
In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson highlights a conglomerate of factors in the last half of the twentieth century leading to a growing urban underclass.
Wilson proposes a comprehensive social and economic program that is primarily universal, but nevertheless includes targeted efforts to improve the life chances of the ghetto underclass and other disadvantaged groups.
[8] Wilson lists multiple examples of what this universal program would include, such as public funding of training, retraining, and transitional employment benefits that would be available to all members of society.
[29]In their 1993 book, American Apartheid, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton concur with much of Wilson's suggested causes and proposed solutions, but introduce racial residential segregation (as an outcome of both institutionalized and individual-level discrimination) as an explanatory factor.
[26] Massey and Denton argue that racial residential segregation is primarily an outcome of institutionalized racism in real estate and banking, coupled with, and significantly motivated by, individual-level prejudice and discrimination.
[31]Given the prominent role of segregation in the construction and maintenance of the urban underclass, Massey and Denton call for policies that promote desegregation.
[32] In doing this, the authors call upon the federal government to dedicate more resources to the upholding of the Fair Housing Act, including speedy judicial action against violators (to strengthen deterrent effects of the legislation).
According to Auletta, left-wing wholesale proponents call for increased public aid while right-wing wholesale proponents call for government to reduce taxes to increase jobs (inspired by trickle-down economic theory) and charge the government to "get tough" on underclass crime and welfare dependency.
Proponents of this perspective call for a drastic withdrawal of public aid for the underclass and are concerned with "quarantining the patient" instead of hunting for what they believe is an imaginary cure.
Another notable journalist is Nicholas Lemann who published a handful of articles on the underclass in the Atlantic Monthly during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[45] For example, Hilary Silver highlights a moment when David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, campaigned for Louisiana Governor by complaining about the "welfare underclass".
[4] Loïc Wacquant deploys a relatively similar critique by arguing that underclass has become a blanket term that frames urban blacks as behaviorally and culturally deviant.
