Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 147]

December 20, 1987:

Social scientists are focusing new energies on an ‘underclass’ of Americans who live in nearly total isolation from mainstream society. Scholars are now trying to learn more about the deteriorating inner-city areas where not working is the norm, crime is a commonplace and welfare is a way of life. As middle-class Americans move back into the cities and gentrify crumbling neighborhoods, people are confronting problems they once commuted past. Research into the cause and spread of persistent poverty and social division is intensifying as policy-makers struggle toward reshaping a welfare system that has failed to halt poverty's growth. Americans have long been reluctant to suggest that their society is stratified by class, but the under-class label, although variously defined, is increasingly accepted as a tool in trying to understand the small but highly visible part of society that lies outside societal norms. Overwhelmingly poor, but characterized by more complex factors than the arbitrary income levels of government-defined poverty, these people account for a disproportionate share of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug abuse to homicide. ‘This is one of the most important issues of the remainder of the 20th century,’ said Dr William J Wilson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago who is also author of the book The Truly Disadvantaged. ‘It will be increasingly difficult to have a healthy environment in these large, central cities when a substantial segment of the population is socially isolated,’ he said.

Just what constitutes the under-class is not a settled matter, but researchers are looking beyond poverty to analyse its many problems. ‘Either the term “under-class” is a new pejorative label for the poor or something real is going on here that involves more than just low income,’ said Dr Isabel V Sawhill, senior fellow at the Urban Institute.^185.

185. The New York Times, from a report by Isabel Wilkerson