“Truly Disadvantaged”

The Concept of the Truly Disadvantaged

The term truly disadvantaged originated in the work of William Julius Wilson. Wilson is known for his book, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, in which he addresses the issue of the poor who, as a class, have become socially isolated into certain geographic areas. Inevitably, this has had an effect on the continuance of and increase in the incidence of poverty. While in Wilson's research the truly disadvantaged were primarily African American, the term also refers to members of any ethnic group with high levels of poverty. The growth of this underclass has resulted chiefly from economic decisions that have adversely affected the unemployment opportunities of urban residents over the past half century.

In the 1950s and 1960s African American males began to experience higher unemployment rates as a result of agricultural jobs that they once performed in the South being increasingly taken over by mechanical labor. This led many to travel to the North in search of work. However, in the 1970s the labor market was flooded with White women, and by members of the baby boom generation who were entering the workforce for the first time with more skills and education than most of these men possessed. The same period also witnessed the closing of manufacturing plants in the North, where many Black men had worked, for example, in steel and automobile manufacturing.

As time went on, the number of jobs that required formal education increased, and Black men were unable to catch up. Jobs that required less education were moving away from the inner city, so Black men had fewer job opportunities. This affected, in turn, the family structure in primarily African American neighborhoods. Women did not want to marry men who were unemployed and unable to support themselves. This led to the increase in female-headed households; women had fewer options for marrying men in their neighborhood, who lacked the means necessary to start a family.

The pattern of loss of jobs helped to create the underclass seen in inner cities, but there were also other factors. In these neighborhoods there existed working-class and middle-class Blacks, living side by side. But as middle-class Blacks began to prosper, many moved out of the neighborhood. This was detrimental to working-class families, who now were without positive role models, or “social buffers,” as Wilson calls them, for the neighborhood children and other adults in the neighborhood. At times, these residents had acted as a stabilizing influence. With their departure, all that remained were the families who were too poor to leave the neighborhood. This further increased the gap between middle-class African Americans and those poor families who have stayed. Policies such as affirmative action tend to benefit middle-class Blacks more so than the underclass, who lack the education and job skills that they might otherwise use to get ahead through affirmative action initiatives.

...