LUMPING THE POOR: WHAT IS THE "UNDERCLASS"?
Kornblum, William
They are recidivist criminals, juvenile muggers, heroin addicts, adult winos in stumbling bottle gangs, welfare-dependent mothers of teen-age welfare mothers, homeless ex-mental patients,...
...I used to work on a truck with my father," Vincent continues...
...So I went back to my man and worked the streets until I was seven months along...
...He is a coeditor of Confronting Revolution: Security Through Diplomacy in Central America...
...Rudolf, too, is barely able to take care of himself and is sinking into chronic alcoholism and crime...
...He is known as one of Harlem's "super kids," a successful dealer in cocaine and heroin for nine years, and now the owner of two fully renovated brownstones...
...It's like a jungle sometimes," goes the refrain of a popular "rap" record, "It makes me wonder how I keep from going under...
...We'd drive all the way to Georgia and load up the truck with watermelons and then we'd sell 'em all in two or three days right here...
...and by age 19 the majority, about 52 percent, of young women from poor households have babies of their own...
...In The Other America, Michael Harrington identified the "entrapped" poor, be they stuck in urban ghettos or in rural "pockets of poverty," as the "poverty culture population," the people for whom survival without the hope of steady work had become a way of life...
...Ken Auletta also struggles with this problem of definition: In my interviews with experts and activists, I encountered a variety of terms—the "dependent poor," the "bottom of the barrel," the "acute poor," the "unreachables," the "dangerous class," the "disadvantaged...
...GIRLS who have lost their mothers owing to illness, to homicide, or prison are apt to spend their lives in and out of public institutions...
...Before immigrating to Israel in 1972, she taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara...
...And of this number perhaps 9 million would be considered part of the "underclass" because of chronic unemployment, longterm welfare dependency, criminal careers, and deinstitutionalized patient status...
...She was only 16...
...Yet as a teacher in the early days of the Peace Corps I taught physics to West African adolescents whose parents were tribal illiterates...
...Criminals from poverty areas or elsewhere should be thought of as part of the underworld, a shadow society that has its own class system, in which there are those who own or organize the means of production, those who sell their labor, and those who seem to remain small-time crookentrepreneurs...
...His reasons for leaving school are typical of a large number of dropouts who simply achieve so far below grade level that they feel it is useless to continue...
...the detention center is overcrowded...
...This may surprise some readers...
...298 There are, however, over 200,000 unemployed school dropouts in New York City alone...
...While still somewhat unclearly defined, and even thought by some not to be 299 deserving of serious attention, a permanently entrapped population of poor persons, unused and unwanted, accumulated in various parts of the country...
...That winter my girlfriend and I split from my man's place...
...In this way they are emulating the older, unemployed men who also hang out in front of the recreation center...
...They are working-class people for the most part, but the longer the society suffers depression in its manufacturing sector and in labor-intensive public-service work, the greater will be the growth of both the underworld and, much as we may dislike the term, the underclass...
...And if one conceives of the underclass as including poor people who supplement welfare payments with income through selling drugs, running numbers, or other "hustles" in the so-called underground economy, its size would increase from an estimated 9 million (as claimed by researchers from the Manpower Research and Demonstration Corporation) to an even more inflated 18 to 20 million...
...My mother didn't mind because I always let her know where I was and went by to see her when my stepfather was at work...
...But the distinction is continually made between those who are striving to stay afloat and those who already have slipped into the underclass...
...TED...
...Most educators know this to be true, just as they know there is a portion of the poor who are too troubled to make conventional gains in the best education or training programs...
...But for every young person like him there are thousands who get involved at a much lower level of retailing illegal goods and services...
...Edward Banfield and George Gilder, among others, view the longterm poor as superfluous, shiftless people, born into an economy that no longer needs their unskilled energies...
...The mass of blacks and Hispanics and poor whites in America's cities are there because of the rapid automation of agriculture earlier in the century and the "pull" of blue-collar employment associated (for them) with 20th-century wars...
...The Reagan administration reversed these initiatives by gutting CETA and terminating the most ambitious youth employment demonstrations...
...Largely because of urging by liberal Democrats and Republicans, the Administration has pushed for a $2.5 billion a year Jobs Training and Partnership program...
...I didn't have to worry about supporting myself then...
...Today the marginal poor who crowd urban slums and squalid "hollers" of rural America are likely to be thought of as our "underclass," even when they are not criminals or social deviants...
...I kept moving in and out until I was 15...
...The population of adolescents and young adults seeking work will decrease significantly between 1980 and 1990...
...This Reaganite approach develops the local Private Industry Councils that were started under Carter into the centerpiece of local job creation...
...I stayed there ten days and then went to a child-care center for three weeks until I turned 17...
...Today's generation of young job-seekers, and especially those from minority communities, are prime candidates for the underclass if their record-high unemployment rates continue over the decade...
...They smoke some pot and drink as much wine or beer as they can...
...These are individuals who are most "at risk" of joining the underclass as I wish to limit the term...
...My social worker took me down and got me on welfare...
...When I was 15 my mother died...
...He speaks in monosyllables and evades eye contact...
...JUAN E. CORRADI, who was educated in Argentina and in the U.S., teaches sociology at New York University...
...Differential marriage rates, on the other hand, have always been more parsimoniously explained by racially unequal distributions of work and income rather than by cultural differences...
...While a life of poverty does create deep psychic scars and social isolation, which are difficult to remedy, the overly deterministic "culture of poverty" thesis is too easily used by conservatives as a rationalization for inaction and neglect...
...Bag women, homeless alcoholics, and narcotics addicts obviously cannot benefit from employment opportunities without prior treatment and rehabilitation, but this is not true for the poor more generally...
...RUDOLF L. lives in the same neighborhood as Vincent...
...My argument that career criminals and the poor in general should not be included in a definition of the underclass is countered by such social scientists as Douglas Glascow, who writes (on p. 7) in his important book, The Black Underclass: The term underclass has slowly, almost imperceptibly, eased its way into the nation's vocabulary, subtly conveying the message that another problematic group is emerging that needs society's help...
...By the recession of 1974 almost all of these workers were back on the street...
...The differences occur in marriage rates...
...We moved from place to place after that...
...Indeed, Glascow sees underclass people as "failures or dropouts of the lower class, persons who because of disability, age, race, or ethnicity have been able to obtain only marginal or part-time work for many years, or often no work at all...
...Rudolf is quite certain that he "ain't goin' 296 nowhere 'cept from the playground to the steps in front of the rec' center" over the next few years...
...A full review of the "culture of poverty" thesis is not possible here (see Charles Valentine, Culture and Poverty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974...
...It seems unlikely that any job-creating strategies will induce successful juvenile hustlers like Darryl to trade their "businesses" for minimumwage jobs or training opportunities...
...On the street again, Rose and her baby move from one "friend" to another...
...The 1980 census, for example, reveals that about 47 percent of all black families with children were headed by unmarried or divorced females...
...At age 17 the proportion increases to about 24 percent...
...Contrary to common stereotypes, there are no significant racial differences among poor, young women in rates of childbearing...
...At the time these case studies were being gathered, a full 80 percent of Cleveland's poor black adolescents (age 16-19) were enrolled in school, while only 52 percent of the city's poor white youth were enrolled for the entire year...
...His articles and reviews have appeared in a number of journals...
...at age 18 it leaps to 35 percent...
...But the result so far has been a shortfall (compared to 1980 levels) in most major urban centers of about 15 percent in the number of jobs available for needy youth...
...White teen-agers more frequently marry (with extremely high probabilities of separation and eventual divorce), while black and Hispanic women are more likely to remain single parents and, therefore, to appear in the illegitimacy statistics...
...Then I moved out and quit school...
...As a result of structural changes in the economy, Michael Harrington notes in a recent review of Ken Auletta's very helpful book, The Underclass, "It may even be that a growth of the underclass lies ahead...
...As he explains it, entering this "field" was as natural to him as hoeing beans had he been born in rural Mississippi...
...They are all candidates for the "underclass" label...
...During the 1960s there was an increase of 45 percent in the number of persons aged 20-24...
...EZEKIEL J. EMANUEL, a student at the Harvard Medical School, is working on a Ph.D...
...He would like to grow up to be a longdistance truck driver or a "steel-mill man like my uncles were before their mill shut down...
...Young women from poor families sense in the same way that having babies may be a way out of a tough girlhood...
...Were this number of troubled people spread evenly through the population, it is likely that by now we would have more humane and effective ways of reducing its size...
...A long-term effect of the depressed 1980s is that the ranks of the criminals and deviants will be enlarged by hundreds of thousands of young Americans who could have become productive citizens...
...At 17, he has been out of school for over a year...
...This can be said not because she is a welfare mother but because of the drug addiction that she tends to deny and not see as the reason she "hustles tricks" on the street...
...They tried to help, but I was used to being on my own...
...The opposite is true...
...I just wasn't used to getting money only once a month so I still went out on the street...
...The dope only made the baby small...
...q 302...
...the city's two small runaway shelters can only accommodate emergency cases...
...At 18 she is already a drug addict, prostitute, and welfare mother...
...ALAN TRACHTENBERG teaches English and American Studies, and chairs the American Studies program, at Yale University...
...JANET AVIAD, a lecturer in the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of Return to Judaism: Religious Renewal in Jerusalem...
...The different enrollment rates are a good reflection of the realities of the labor market for white and black adolescents...
...The girl I was staying with worked the streets...
...He is an example of pure American mythology...
...At age 16 approximately 12 percent of females from poverty households have children...
...This situation has vastly increased the frustration of local activists who see youth problems escalating in their cities yet feel powerless...
...They are the people who are outside both the class system of capitalist production and any local community...
...I grew up very fast in the streets...
...In designing policies, we need to avoid quickfix schemes that appeal so much to politicians...
...For all its shortcomings, the Carter administration initiated some of the most important federal youth policies since the Kennedy-Johnson years...
...MARVIN ROZEN teaches economics at the Pennsylvania State University and is the author of a book on the economics of work organization...
...The so-called Hard Core employment programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s subsidized jobs for about 70,000 long-term unemployed people in the steel and auto industries and in related supply companies...
...I stayed with my stepfather until the baby was born...
...Social programs to deal with underclass adults necessarily stress treatment and rehabilitation...
...And these households were almost twice as likely to exist below federal poverty standards than were two-parent black families...
...For these reasons I prefer to narrow the definition...
...An "objective social class," that is, one without class consciousness or institutions, they would include the homeless indigent, severe alcoholics, drug addicts, runaway children, and at-large psychotics who are not stable criminals...
...But to regard the big housing projects as underclass jungles as, for example, Saul Bellow does in The Dean's December, is a grave disservice to the majority of parents there who are keeping their children in school and striving to find paths out of the welfarepoverty trap...
...He has never had a real job...
...In black popular culture today the immense problems of maturing in poverty neighborhoods become a dominant theme...
...He also writes on aspects of socialist politics, is a former chair of the Fabian Society and an active member of the British Labour party...
...As Elliot Liebow showed so vividly in Tally's Corner, the stigma attached to habitual criminals also spreads to unemployed, "street-corner" men...
...Although he is in the eighth grade, appropriate for his age, his school performance has slipped from quite good in the earlier grades to well below average in the past year...
...HAROLD MEYERSON, a Los Angeles-based writer and political consultant and a member of the national executive committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, was the labor liaison for Alan Cranston's presidential campaign...
...Fortunately, the demographics of American age cohorts offers hope that were we to develop a comprehensive array of education, training, counseling and on-the-job opportunities for the youthful poor we could reverse the grim prospects of another generation swelling the ranks of the underclass...
...He is now director of Information for the AFL—CIO in Washington, D.C...
...Thus a New York judge tells a Times reporter after the 1983 summer mayhem in Central Park that "at least two of the five arrested suspects, maybe three, were definitely clean-cut, high school or college kids, not kids who have been described as underclass, feral creatures...
...JOHN A. GLUSMAN an editor at a New York publishing house...
...Among his books are Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol and The Incorporation of America.- Culture and Society in the Gilded Age...
...I didn't have to but I started working with her...
...Sometimes we'd load up with junk and things out in the country and sell it to the usedfurniture stores...
...When he is not shooting desultory baskets, Rudolf "hangs out" with a few other boys his age...
...From 1978 to 1980 the Department of Labor's Office of Youth Programs, directed by economist Robert Taggart, significantly improved federal supervision of the Summer Youth Employment Program and embarked on an ambitious legislative campaign to raise funding levels for youth training and employment to $5 billion a year...
...Labor-force participation rates (including all types of employment) among youth from poverty areas are half as high for black adolescent females as they are for black males (age 16-19) and only about one-third as high as the rate for white males from poverty backgrounds...
...The theory applied here is that jobs created through the initiatives of private business, using federal training funds as a form of subsidy, will develop more permanent jobs for low-income youth...
...KENNETH E. SHARPE teaches political science at Swarthmore...
...The mobile bands have such names as the "Cigar Mob" or the "Dead Boys...
...He has completed a book entitled "The Fitful Republic: Economy, Civil Society, and Politics in Argentina," and is now preparing a new one on the culture of fear under repressive political regimes...
...Her building is entirely populated by young people who have been in trouble and were placed there by the Ohio Youth Commission because there are simply not enough supervised residential facilities to accommodate needy teen-agers...
...And while President Reagan makes a distinction between "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, his attacks on welfarestate institutions make it clear that to be poor in America today is almost to be undeserving by definition...
...The experience under Nixon of allowing corporations to take the lead in developing jobs for the chronically unemployed suggests a poor prognosis for the Reagan efforts...
...The conservatives are at their most obvious worst on these issues: to punish the teen-agers and their parents by attacks on social welfare programs has them, in effect, punishing the babies...
...on medical ethics...
...And in the heady days of President Johnson's Great Society programs I learned that many young people, who like their parents were urban illiterates, could make remarkable educational strides under the right conditions...
...Admittedly, any term that segregates a group of people risks oversimplification...
...they produce all sorts of troubles and violence...
...But all poor, adolescent females fare worse than poor males in the labor market, especially during the teen-age years...
...Nor is this situation unique to Harlem...
...To some writers on the right, the concept of the underclass carries the added implication that social policies directed at improving the conditions of the poor are necessarily doomed...
...Let us work to expand cooperative education, community-based job creation, day-care centers, residential job-training centers like the Job Corps, and all the many avenues of inter301 vention that have had real but limited successes in the past...
...I was getting a Social Security check from my mother, so I had money...
...By these definitions, Darryl is a successful criminal whose career may even take the classic turn from underworld to legitimate business, while Rose in her apartment "dumping ground" is part of the underclass...
...It is impossible to have unemployment rates of 50 percent among teen-age Americans in low-income, minority communities without pushing thousands of young people into lives of hustling and crime, which many are likely never to leave...
...The specter of unsocialized teen-age masses and their depressed "welfare-dependent" mothers dominates popular versions of what the underclass is, but the facts are always more complicated...
...Soon Rose's building becomes a center for drug traffic and is closed as a result of community protest...
...Out of the approximately 60 million Americans who would be considered poor by most middle-class standards, the U.S...
...Since it seems that we will have the term "underclass" in common parlance, let us restrict it to people who are clearly "below" the poor in that they cannot survive unharmed for any length of time by themselves, because they lack both material resources and the ability to organize their lives...
...These initiatives under CETA and the Youth Employment Demonstration Projects Act stressed a major role for the federal government, and also for community organizations and private industry, in local job creation...
...Darryl became heavily involved in drug-dealing at the age of nine and soon thereafter was in charge of a "crew" of children who sold joints at the schools...
...At 16 I was pregnant and left my man...
...Among blacks, the exhortations from parents and community leaders to stay in school are part of the reason for higher attendance rates, but the strongest reason is that black youth who live in poverty generally have few legitimate alternatives to school...
...RON H. FELDMAN, who has lived in Israel, has edited The Jew as Pariah, a collection of essays by Hannah Arendt on Jewish identity and politics...
...Young Vincent, by contrast, represents the great majority of poor, ghetto youth who are failing in school and yet, with some help and resources sent their way, have the potential of becoming productive citizens...
...But most of the time, at the age of 14, Vincent feels like "just another little nigger, out here scuffling around...
...In painful fragments he goes on to describe how his father was shot to death in a senseless family dispute when he was 13 years old...
...I love driving trucks and loading 'em up with stuff...
...My son has never had a stable home and he'll be two next month...
...DARRYL'S CAREER, on the other hand, raises the question as to what we mean by the "underclass," if a segment of its members are earning sums of money that make them affluent by anyone's standards...
...ROSETTE C. LAMONT teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York...
...Between 1980 and 1990, however, there will be a decrease estimated at about 15 percent in young adults aged 20-24, and there will be a reduction of approximately 20 percent in teen-agers aged 16-19...
...I n this essay I have purposefully chosen to emphasize the problems of young people growing up in poverty...
...She is the author of two books on Eugene Ionesco...
...Lack of opportunities in the larger society and lack of appropriate care at critical periods in their adolescence increase the chance that poor youth will end up in the true underclass of wasted, burnt-out cases...
...The concept of the "underclass" tends to lump together too many disparate types of people...
...When I get older, I want to drive a big steelhauling rig like you see coming out of the mills...
...When I was 14 I got put on probation for not going to school...
...they dream of making it someday, the way Darryl has...
...The Reaganauts naturally continued the Summer Youth Employment Program, although at somewhat reduced levels and with far less direct federal monitoring of the quality of summer jobs...
...VINCENT P is a 14-year-old black who lives in the poorest section of Cleveland's East Side...
...The key question, it seems to me, about the approximately 9 million Americans counted in the underclass is the degree to which its diverse population actually forms a cohesive social group with its own institutions and its own "culture of poverty...
...A second question, related to how one regards the first, is: what are the appropriate policies a wise state would adopt toward this population...
...DOUGLAS C. BENNETT, director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at Temple University, is at work on a book about "Democracy and Public Policy...
...Bureau of the Census estimates that in 1980 some 32 million persons actually qualified as impoverished by federal standards...
...It was scary, but it was a living...
...Then my stepfather put me in a detention home and tried to take my baby...
...Community organizations in low-income areas now find that they must plead with local Chamber of Commerce leaders in order to sustain a role in developing local employment...
...The distinction between the poor and the underclass, on the other hand, should not be taken as a denial that conditions of life in urban poverty areas are made much worse by the actions of underclass predators...
...MURRAY SEEGER reported from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the Los Angeles Times 1972-81...
...Since then his mother has remarried...
...Darryl's flash creates the dream that other street adolescents could succeed the way he has...
...Roving bands ("crews") of teen-agers terrorize thousands during a hit-and-run rampage in Central Park...
...His reading and math scores are now below grade level...
...I didn't like my father, so I came back to Cleveland to stay with a friend...
...Hispanic patterns are generally more like those of blacks, except in the Southwest...
...Rose is a prime candidate for being lumped in the underclass...
...Once they are so lumped, their numbers are inflated...
...Short and somewhat underweight, Vincent is easily overlooked in a crowd of exuberant, chattering teen-agers...
...Poor families would appear to be beyond redemption after the first generation in poverty if one takes the "poverty culture" thesis seriously...
...Thus Rudolf knows at some intuitive level that he must get into trouble before he even has a chance of getting some help out of his dead end...
...These 300 programs have been cruelly cut by the Reagan administration, but even if they were adequately funded, the key issue would be how to prevent more young people from developing into dependent, helpless underclass adults...
...How can we prevent greater numbers of the more numerous poor from falling into the lifeways of the 9 million...
...Unemployment rates of 50 percent or more among minority youth are a grave threat to an entire generation of young Americans...
...The people were real nice...
...I went to —, a runaway shelter...
...RICHARD W. KROUSE teaches political theory at Williams College...
...They are recidivist criminals, juvenile muggers, heroin addicts, adult winos in stumbling bottle gangs, welfare-dependent mothers of teen-age welfare mothers, homeless ex-mental patients, prostitutes and their pimps...
...In the face of these contradictions, they tend to retreat to exhortations to "morality" or rationalizations for further neglect...
...I also shot dope while I was pregnant...
...This "feminization" of poverty, and the centralization of so many poor households in central-city, publichousing ghettos creates new ecological obstacles to economic mobility that were not as prevalent in lower-density, industrial-tenement neighborhoods...
...Higher black school enrollment rates mean, conversely, that there are large numbers of students in the schools who are achieving far below grade level and whose spotty attendance makes them effective dropouts...
...DARRYL C. is a young prince of Harlem's drug economy...
...Between 1970 and 1980, as the last of the "baby boom" generation moved into early laborforce status, persons 20-24 increased by 20 percent while persons aged 25-34 increased by 37 percent...
...Underclass people are said to be trapped in a "culture of poverty...
...Some of the most violently self-destructive young people I have interviewed are from poor white communities that have lost their manufacturing base in the past ten years...
...Auletta continues to assert that while hustlers and criminals are often not poor, they should be considered part of the "underclass" because of their "bad habits" or "deviant, antisocial behavior...
...Now Rudolf spends his time playing basketball in school yards...
...G. GOERTZEL, who teaches sociology at Rutgers University, Camden, N.J., is working on a study of militarist and antimilitarist movements...
...My stepfather sent my sister and me down South to live with my real father...
...Her apartment is a "dumping area" for teen-agers and young adults who have no access to other, more regular, facilities...
...It is a tragedy of our time that the microelectronic revolution and a sharp decline in traditional blue-collar employment do threaten to make the unskilled young superfluous...
...He also considered them dangerous because of their propensity to sell their criminal skills to the forces of reaction...
...In talking with Vincent, we hit on a subject that immediately sparks his interest—work and his experiences attempting to make money...
...to press for antiabortion measures and the elimination of birth control clinics and day-care centers has them, in effect, promoting more babies...
...The stepfather is kind and helps him as best he can, but Vincent misses his father and that truck...
...They were often more frustrated and embittered than ever, and more likely candidates for the underclass than had they been able to be employed in some kind of work to take them through the recession...
...The court placed me in custody of the county...
...Around Harlem's towering housing projects there are "crews" of tough 12- and 13year-olds who terrorize their more studious and sheltered peers...
...Whatever money he has comes from petty hustles, favors for older men, and small pot deals...
...COLIN CROUCH is a reader in sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializing in the comparative study of industrial relations in Western Europe...
...Vincent continues to describe how his one close friend, Eugene, and he often take long walks into the industrial areas of Cleveland where they discuss the big machinery and the work men do with these machines...
...The problem with these terms is their inelasticity: the street criminal or hustler may not be poor, the "bottom of the barrel" is a blanket insult, many of the poor are not "unreachable," a mother dependent on welfare is rarely dangerous, and the [term] "disadvantaged" does not distinguish between a cold killer and a frightened teen-age mother...
...These estimates take into account the persistently high birth rates among low-income teen-agers...
...But, of course, it is concentrated in large urban centers or scattered in pockets of suburban misery and Appalachian backroads...
...They strongly suggest that efforts to break the cycle of school failure and prolonged joblessness, because of the demographic changes, have a better chance of success than has been true for the past 20 years...
...Poor white adolescents are much more likely than blacks to leave school because they have, or believe they have, a labor-market alternative to school attendance...
...The Jobs Corps Centers are full...
...So it comes as no surprise that youth gangs are on the rise again in urban America...
...Rather than deal with these questions in abstract terms, allow me to introduce a few young Americans from poor neighborhoods whom I have come to know in the course of research on youth, employment, and the problems of class stratification among the poor...
...But I came to believe that "underclass" was the most flexible term...
...q AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS ANDREW ARATO, who teaches sociology on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Plank Institut in Starnberg, West Germany, 1980-81...
...My stepfather and I couldn't get along anymore...
...As he talks, a sadness overtakes him...
...For Glascow the "entrapment" of the poor, and especially of poor blacks in "the rotting cores of nearly every major city" distinguishes the underclass from the more mobile "lower class...
...These broader conceptions of the underclass group too many persons in what should be at best a carefully restricted category...
...At the age of 19 he has become rich...
...By this reasoning, however, the underclass might include the entire American underworld, from Mafia privates to computer thieves...
...the 297 group homes are completely booked...
...Of course, Harrington 295 and Auletta recognize that the poor are a much larger and more diverse class than those troubled souls counted as the "underclass...
...The pain Vincent is experiencing is clearly affecting his schoolwork, but he is such a quiet and easily forgotten child that no one outside his immediate family pays much attention to him...
...Opportunities to work and learn, especially when these are effectively combined, are the only practical means to decrease early childbearing and welfare dependency...
...But this population at least is available for training and other forms of help— if and when these are ever made available...
...These figures are only slightly different from overall national proportions showing that among adolescents from poverty households, white school enrollment is far lower than black enrollment...
...Here is an excerpt from Rose's description of her life so far: Things were okay at home until I turned 13...
...In the frenetic world of the city's afterhours clubs, Darryl sports silk shirts, diamond rings, a mink coat, and a Mercedes Benz— among other fancy cars...
...Only the smallest fraction of this population makes enough money in illegal hustles so that legitimate employment comes to seem unattractive...
...I shot dope but never got hooked...
...They can no longer be taught to work hard for future goals...
...And in providing opportunities for training in electronics and computers, let us not forget that the future of the poor in America depends on the fate of working-class employment in the public and the private sector...
...I love trucks and driving," he says...
...JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN, who has edited a new edition of Anatoly Marchenko's book My Testimony (now out of print) and is writing a biography of the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, is the Northeastern regional director of Amnesty International in the United States...
...Since uptown Manhattan remains one of the world's major wholesale and retail centers for drugs, and as a result of laws that establish maximum penalties for adults convicted of selling cocaine and heroin, juvenile involvement in the drug world creates bizarre patterns of entrepreneurism...
...The elderly poor in sweltering Saint Louis die in tenement rooms rather than leave their unattended possessions to marauding teen-agers and young adult criminals...
...Marx would have counted them among the lumpenproletariat, a class of dropouts from the capitalist stratification system...
...Broad definitions of the underclass also become mired in the debate over the "culture of poverty" thesis with its rather negative implications for social policy...
...When children like Rudolf do drop out, therefore, they are often troubled, low achievers who have little chance of developing constructive lives when left alone in the streets...
...ROSE E is a young woman of 18 who lives in a large apartment building just outside Cleveland's Hough community...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
