Urban Underclass

The term urban underclass has been extremely controversial in the social sciences since its ascendancy in the early 1980s. The term, coined by Gunner Myrdal in 1962 to describe a stratum of the long-term unemployed population in American cities, tenaciously persists in academic and policy circles. At the core of all dominant definitions, the term references an urban population that is persistently low income and has difficulty obtaining suitable waged work to ensure a decent quality of life. Most also agree that there is a strong racial and class association that corresponds to this population—that is, they are disproportionately African American, Latino, and workers at the lowest end of the new postindustrial service economy. At the same time, this population is recognized as having relatively poor access to key goods and services, such as decent jobs and housing, well-funded schools, and suitable parks and open space.

But much disagreement persists about the urban underclass concept. First, scholars clash over the reasons behind the deployment and resonance of the notion. On the one hand, it is suggested that the term urban underclass is a simple, objective, and neutral descriptor for a stratum of the impoverished urban population. It supposedly helps clarify the specifics of a particular needy, service-dependent population. Analysts here dispassionately put truth and reality into an accurate, descriptive term. On the other hand, others explain the term's origin and longevity in its ability to target and stigmatize a population. Analysts here are said to contribute to a complex societal process whereby the poor (and particularly impoverished ethnic minorities) become singled out and differentiated as culturally problematic beings in need of social rehabilitation. Analysts, in the process, wittingly and unwittingly validate a pejorative “classing” and “racing” of society that pervades public thought. In the debate over the use and resonance of the urban underclass concept, these two contrasting positions dominate.

Scholars also differ on the causes for the rise and persistence of this population. Staking out a widely accepted notion, William Julius Wilson explains this phenomenon by reference to a changed city, national, and international economy. Wilson and adherents identify the rise of a service-based economy (supplanting a manufacturing economy) that has afflicted the poor, particularly impoverished minorities. This rise of service jobs, concentrating in two areas—low-wage, “McDonald's-type” jobs and high-wage, [Page 2998]education-intensive jobs—fails to provide meaningful employment opportunities for this population. Concomitant with the loss of decent-paying manufacturing jobs, the working-class and poor populations get devastated. Unlike Wilson and his adherents, a group of Marxist scholars have sought to explain the reasons for this economic transformation. David Harvey traces this economic transformation to the rise of two forces, neoliberalization and globalization. First, new labor-punishing rules and regulations and corporate labor-cutting practices across America have allowed unskilled, low-wage, dead-end jobs to proliferate. Second, a new global reality has dramatically shrunk the globe. In the process, a hyper-mobility allows production units to close or move an accelerated number of manufacturing plants out of America to lower-wage world regions.

This position contrasts with the still entrenched notion of the culture of poverty. This alternative, coalescing around the ideas of Ken Auletta, George Gilder, and Charles Murray attributes the origin of the urban underclass to the emergence of an antisocietal culture in inner cities. The rise of counternormative values, manifest in “underclass behavior,” purportedly send inner-city mothers, fathers, and children down paths of social dysfunction, with an inability to integrate into mainstream America. One structural factor is seen by many in this camp to shape this population: the individually damaging effects of a dysfunctional welfare state apparatus that ran roughshod over this population, beginning in the 1960s. Government programs inadvertently killed individual initiative to work and sacrifice, creating a service-dependent population now enslaved to government largesse.

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