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When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. - book reviews
Washington Monthly, Nov, 1996 by David Whitman
Twenty years ago this month, I sat in a University of Chicago classroom as an obscure sociologist in horn-rimmed glasses droned on about American race relations. The professor, a man named William Julius Wilson, was speaking with all the animation of a metronome to about a dozen students. Wilson methodically explained that he was going to teach from the manuscript of his book, which would come out the following school year, The Declining Significance of Race. Pipe in hand, wearing a natty sweater vest, Bill Wilson then proceeded to discourse at length about "structural barriers" and the "shifts in economic life chances" that were altering the system of "racial stratification."
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- When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. - book reviews
- When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
- When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. - book reviews
- When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. - book reviews
- When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. - book review
Over the course of the semester, Wilson's elocution failed to improve a whit. Yet for all his sociological jargon, one couldn't help but be provoked by Wilson's then-unorthodox ideas. He believed the liberal establishment was wrong to attribute the plight of impoverished blacks simply to racism. He warned that shifts in the job market were opening a destructive gap in the black community between the middle class and those left behind in the ghetto. And he thought that civil rights leaders should look beyond affirmative action programs toward social programs that benefited disadvantaged whites as well.
Wilson's class changed my life. I went on to a career of covering race, welfare reform, and urban policy. But of far more consequence, Wilson went on to change almost singlehandedly the national debate over why the urban underclass exists and what can be done about it. He is now the nation's best-known expert on race, the left-wing sociologist whom Bill Clinton regularly consults and whom Ted Koppel invited to appear on "Nightline" to critique the new welfare reform bill. An excerpt from his new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, has made the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Other accolades, including an admiring profile in the New Yorker, are stacking up, even though Wilson is still sound-bite challenged.
The unique contribution of Wilson's book is that it provides the first attempt in three decades to marry evidence from large-scale scientific surveys in the ghetto with information culled from "ethnographic" interviews of ghetto residents. To appreciate the reasons for that research hiatus--and its profound influence on Wilson's book--one needs to look back both to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on the black family and the firestorm Wilson himself ignited with the 1978 publication of The Declining Significance of Race.
Ever since the release of the Moynihan report, the all-important question in the mind of almost every reporter and scholar who writes about the plight of the ghetto poor is this: Do you "blame the victim" or do you blame society for the presence of the underclass? The phrase "blaming the victim" was itself coined by a white sociologist named William Ryan as a means of denouncing the Moynihan report, even though, ironically, Moynihan explicitly blamed white America and its discriminatory policies for the "tangle of pathology" that was at the heart of the breakdown of ghetto families. Nonetheless, Moynihan's blunt talk about out-of-wedlock childbearing--and the links he drew to unemployment, crime, and welfare--provoked the ire of civil rights leaders and the black intelligentsia. Within a matter of weeks of publication of the Moynihan report, the study of family breakdown in the ghetto became verboten. Largescale research in the ghetto vanished, most white academics stopped examining questions of race and family breakdown, and for a decade or so numerous black scholars even penned paeans to the adaptive virtues of single-parent families.
When Wilson published The Declining Significance of Race, he too was denounced. The book's title infuriated many black scholars who thought race and race alone was a sufficient explanation for the plight of the ghetto poor. His critics claimed that Wilson's de-emphasis of modern-day racism provided ammunition for conservatives intent on blaming the poor for their misery, even though Wilson was then a social democrat who favored Western European-style social policies and central planning. Critics organized a conference at the University of Pennsylvania to present research rebutting the book; after the book won a prestigious award from the American Association of Sociologists, the Association of Black Sociologists filed a formal protest. Wilson, who was a mentor of sorts at the time, told me that a number of sociologists who signed the protest later confessed that they had never read his book.
Still, Wilson was scalded by the nasty, personal attacks. He was infuriated that some Republicans and members of the press thought he was a conservative, and he set out in his next book, The Truly Disadvantaged, to repair his image and offer his own analysis of ghetto poverty. Only after The Truly Disadvantaged appeared in 1987 did Wilson become a darling of the left. In the book, Wilson articulated what would become the liberal antidote to Charles Murray's and Ronald Reagan's claims that welfare programs were fostering dependency and illegitimacy in the ghetto. The urban underclass, Wilson argued, resulted from structural changes in the economy that were, among other things, driving low-wage manufacturing jobs from urban to suburban areas, leaving millions of men in the inner city without work. And as the comparatively well-paid manufacturing jobs moved away from the ghetto, so too did upwardly mobile blacks, leaving poor blacks more isolated than before.
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