William Julius Wilson (born December 20, 1935) is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues.
[7] Wilson is the author of Power Racism and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (1973, 1976), The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978, 1980, 2012), winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award; The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987, 2012), which was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best books of 1987,[8] and received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award, the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award and the American Political Science Association's Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award; When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996), which was selected as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and received the 1997 Hillman Prize and the American Political Science Association's Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award; and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.
[9] In Wilson's most recent book, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (2009), he directs his attention to the overall framing of pervasive, concentrated urban poverty of African Americans.
In response, he traces the history and current state of powerful structural factors impacting African Americans, such as discrimination in laws, policies, hiring, housing, and education.
He tries "to demonstrate the importance of understanding not only the independent contributions of social structure and culture but also how they interact to shape different group outcomes that embody racial inequality."
Wilson's goal is to "rethink the way we talk about addressing the problems of race and urban poverty in the public policy arena.
African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York, Roger Waldinger, a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, provides a critique of arguments advanced by Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged.
In particular, Waldinger challenges Wilson's argument that the labor market problems African Americans face today are largely due to deindustrialization and consequent skills mismatches.
[13] Waldinger argues that, on one hand, African Americans never were especially dependent on jobs in the manufacturing sector, so deindustrialization in itself has not had a major impact on African Americans, and that, on the other hand, the relative labor market success of poorly educated immigrants suggests that there is no absence of jobs for those with few skills in the post-industrial era (see Anthony Orum's review of the book).