Urban Underclass

Over the past 2 decades, the urban underclass has become one of the most controversial topics in the social sciences. As a sociological construct, the notion of an underclass can be traced to Marx's lumpenpro-letariat, which he identified as occupying the lowest rung of the social hierarchy, beneath the working class. However, journalist Ken Auletta first popularized the term underclass in the early 1980s in writing about criminals, hustlers, and welfare dependents. This modern conceptualization involved two interlocking elements of the underclass: poverty and self-defeating or pathological behavior.

One of the more controversial aspects of the “underclass debate” is whether the existence of this group was a new phenomenon or simply another term to describe the persistently poor. For William Julius [Page 987]Wilson, the underclass was the ideal way to characterize the emergence of a disenfranchised class of individuals resulting from changing labor market conditions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to Wilson, the sociologist who has advanced the clearest articulation of the underclass, U.S. cities experienced an economic transformation characterized by the disappearance of jobs that paid well but required little education (i.e., manufacturing), the division of the economy into high- and low-wage sectors, and the shift from a goods-producing to a service-producing economy. The tenuous position of central-city blacks in the labor market, he argued, made them particularly vulnerable to these changes. The new economy, heavily reliant on technology and information processing, created a “skills mismatch,” whereby poor blacks did not meet the educational criteria for well-paid work. The decentralization of jobs into nonurban areas also generated a “spatial mismatch,” whereby inner-city blacks were further disadvantaged by losing their proximity to jobs.

Moreover, as the black middle class flowed out into the suburbs, they removed an important social buffer that may have lessened the effects of these transformations. Their absence further concentrated the effects of poverty as the ghetto poor became socially isolated, losing the social ties needed to hook them into job networks. Finally, without working role models, a milieu developed in which joblessness prevails and work is no longer a defining feature of life. This environment fosters behavior, such as tardiness or absenteeism, which hinders success in the formal economy, making the underground economy a more attractive alternative for many inner-city men of color. In this way, the concentrated disadvantage that characterizes poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods tends to reinforce pathological behavior.

A secondary concern of Wilson's work addressed changes to family structure that grew out of these economic shifts, particularly a dramatic increase in female-headed families and the related tendency of the ghetto poor not to marry. For example, between 1960 and 1980, marriage rates among black women ages 14 to 24 declined by half (26 percent to 13 percent), and among those ages 25 to 44 it declined from 65 percent to 45 percent. Wilson attributed these changes to the labor market, arguing that the marriageable pool of employed black men had shrunk. In sum, Wilson's conceptualization of the underclass is primarily structural, but one that contains a cultural component. Joblessness is the key to understanding urban poverty, but he also seeks to explain ghetto-specific behavior that reinforces poverty. His treatment of the topic re-appropriated both culture and family as legitimate avenues of theory and research by liberal scholars.

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