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Underclass Debate

The underclass debate refers to a scholarly and public debate during the 1970s through the 1990s about the origins, character, and appropriate response to the problems of concentrated urban poverty in the United States, particularly among African Americans. The sociologist William Julius Wilson brought attention to this issue in the 1970s and became a central figure in the debate that ensued between those who emphasized the values and choices of low-income people and those who emphasized economic conditions and government policy. This debate helped shape three major policy changes in the United States: the cutback in funding for federal social programs in 1984, the 1996 reform of welfare policy, and the initiation of the HOPE VI mixed-income housing policy by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1992. This debate also spurred a substantial body of empirical research that showed how national and metropolitan-wide processes affect the lives of inner-city residents.

Origins of the Underclass Debate

The word underclass first appeared in English in a 1963 book by Gunnar Myrdal, who adapted the Swedish term for lower class (underklass) to loosely describe people who were underprivileged and poor. At the time, the term was largely ignored in the U.S. press, in favor of language from a report written by New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the “tangle of pathologies” associated with the conditions of urban “female-headed black families,” as well as language about the “culture of poverty” from the writings of Oscar Lewis about families in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Although Lewis only presented case studies, he made strong claims that children growing up in slums become psychologically incapable of taking advantage of opportunities for upward mobility that might occur later in life.

Meanwhile, the achievements of the civil rights movement and the federal War on Poverty in thel960s led many Americans to expect that racial inequities would decline substantially and rapidly. They did not anticipate that class inequalities might simultaneously increase. In 1978, Wilson argued that middle-class blacks benefited more from the new opportunities than did underclass blacks, who remained persistently poor. His use of the word underclass touched off controversy. Some people felt that it deflected attention from an unfinished agenda of institutional reform, whereas others felt that brought needed attention to a new agenda of personal responsibility. Nonetheless, the term quickly gained currency. For instance, in August 1977, Time magazine featured a cover story on poor urban blacks titled, “The American Underclass: Destitute and Desperate in the Land of Plenty.”

Intensification of Underclass Debate

Following the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, author Charles Murray crystallized a conservative critique of federal social programs. He argued that public assistance to single mothers had undermined traditional norms about work and marriage, and largely created the problems of the urban poor. His book, used to justify deep cuts in anti-poverty programs in the 1984 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, was called “the Reagan budget-cutter Bible” in a New York Times editorial. In a similar critique, Lawrence Mead compared the experience of immigrants, women, and native-born blacks in the labor market. He reasoned that blacks were more likely to be unemployed because they were more likely to refuse the available, low-wage jobs accepted by others.

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