Beyond "Race vs. Class": The Politics of William Julius Wilson

...Fr all the energy spent debating Wilson's theories, research, and rhetoric, the key issue to look for in his upcoming book is his politics...

...Some liberal scholars have unfairly labeled the socialdemocratic Wilson a neoconservative...

...The liberals stress the historical and sociological sources of black poverty and call for a revived New Deal plus broad affirmative action...

...Wilson neglects the fact that the real benefits of affirmative action are likely to be seen in the stable working-class jobs that have been declining so drastically over the last several years...

...As a black social scientist, his critics argue, Wilson has the responsibility to remind the public that racism has left a deep scar on American social life and remains a major barrier to the black poor and middle class...

...Wilson does not write as clearly as earlier 364 • DISSENT public intellectuals, and he hardly seems comfortable in the role of political actor, but a quick look at the narrow academic research in the major social science journals will make clear how valuable his work has been...

...Wilson's Contributions Nonetheless, Wilson has made major contributions to our understanding of race and class in America...

...I think Wilson does underestimate racism, but he has never argued that it does not exist...

...The conservatives see the problem as the behavior of blacks...

...Yet the intellectual debates have focused on the professions, proof that backlash begins at home...

...Finally, Wilson writes as if the timidity of liberals were the major reason for the decadelong ideological and political victories of the right...

...With a technocratic neoliberal in the White House, however, some of the inadequacies of Wilson's approach will become evident...

...A universal agenda is a first principle for any serious attempt to deal with poverty among blacks...

...But Wilson has not, until recently, given enough attention to the kind of evidence of racism in employment marshalled, for example, by Roger Waldinger and Thomas Bailey's work on the New York construction industry, a study that stresses the racist consequences of ethnic nepotism in construction unions...

...Wilson's argument is that we can fight racism only if we also speak to the economic interests and aspirations of the white working and lower middle class...

...rather, they suffer from segmentation into low-wage employment in growth industries...

...As Thomas and Mary Edsall's Chain Reaction has made clear, it is with regard to blue-collar occupations that the political backlash against affirmative action has been most acute...

...Young black men had the lowest rate of suicide in the nation in the early seventies and now have the highest...

...At the same time, Wilson's defenders have failed to acknowledge some inadequacies in his approach and thus helped to blur the complexities of the debate...

...Wilson's Critics Despite Wilson's structural explanation of urban decay, the most vocal criticisms of his work have come from left-liberal scholars...

...the first round of the debate has largely been conceptual and methodological...

...This threat of nihilism is the result, for West, of centuries of racism, the terrible economic prospects for the black poor and working class, and the dominance of corporate institutions that have laid black civil society to waste...

...The single major obstacle to progressive social policy continues to be the way corporate priorities determine investment decisions and dominate the American political process...

...According to West, the debate about the condition of blacks in contemporary America has been distorted by the dominance of both "liberal structuralists" and "conservative behaviorists...

...We need to separate Wilson's programmatic contributions from his theoretical and strategic flaws...

...The recent publication of a spate of meanspirited books attacking the poor should end the silly arguments over whether William Julius Wilson is a closet conservative...

...The interviews in sociologist Robert Blauner's Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America (1990) provide evidence that white racism did decline from the late 1960s to the late 1970s (although the racial climate deteriorated again during the last decade...

...1991) and Alphonso Pinkney, The Myth of Black Progress (New York: 1984...

...The central theoretical question Wilson must grapple with is how to deal seriously with the role of personality and culture in urban poverty without losing sight of the structural factors he himself has played such an important part in establishing...

...Not only do our major cities continue to be racially segregated, but, says Massey, the degree of black segregation does not fall even when education and income rise...

...6 Barbara Schmitter Heisler, "A Comparative Perspective on the Underclass: Questions of Urban Poverty, Race and Citizenship," Theory and Society (August 1991...

...For West, both these views overlook "the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair" in black America...

...The real question social scientists should be examining is the relationship between race and class...

...One of the most articulate defenders of Wilson's work was the late Michael Harrington...

...Could it really be argued that in the middle 1970s (when Wilson wrote the book) racism had not declined in the United States...

...Some fifteen years ago, in his book The Declining Significance of Race, the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the destruction of Jim Crow in the American South and the changes brought about by the civil rights movement had given rise to a new pattern of American race relations...

...This critique of affirmative action, however, concentrates almost exclusively on professional and middle-class jobs...

...Calling this a hidden agenda, however, is sure to alienate black and left intellectuals who quite By SUMMER • 1993 365 rightly sense a certain timidity in Wilson's reluctance to say what he means...

...Fainstein argues that the persistence of extreme poverty among blacks is best explained in terms of employment segmentation and racial segregation...

...Fainstein writes, "Urban blacks are not particularly dependent on a declining manufacturing sector...

...He has also played an important role in pushing academics to engage with the world outside the university...

...In addition, as Stephen Steinberg writes, "[B]lack workers are being discriminated SUMMER • 1993 . 363 against directly, to a far greater extent than Wilson acknowledges...

...Class was now more important than race...

...In an interview with the New York Times last year, Wilson indicated that his forthcoming book will deal with cultural factors, which he had previously avoided because of the "culture of poverty" debacle of the late 1950s and early 1960s...

...All this is akin to Jesse Jackson's call for moving from the racial battleground to the economic common ground and to Robert Kuttner's populist proposals...

...To be sure, racism can decline while remaining pervasive...

...He has modified his thesis about the emergence of highly concentrated ghetto poverty by arguing that this is largely a regional phenomenon, pointing out that of the ten American cities most responsible for the national increase in concentrated poverty, nine are in the Northeast and Midwest...

...In response to criticisms, Wilson has abandoned the term underclass and now refers to the "ghetto poor...

...Sociologist William Kornblum has written the most sensible piece on the underclass (Dissent, Spring 1991...

...See The Long Distance Runner (Henry Holt, 1988...

...Building on the work of black social scientists such as W.E.B...

...Wilson's Limitations and Beyond Wilson bears some responsibility for the misunderstandings surrounding his work...

...As Wilson has pointed out, a liberal stress on ending racism simply through affirmative action can blur the fact that having more black doctors, lawyers, and professors will not in itself increase the living standards of the black poor...

...Although blacks suffer disproportionately from poverty, it is important to remember that large numbers of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] are white...

...Where The Declining Significance of Race had been criticized for painting an excessively optimistic picture of middle class blacks, this book, in the view of many critics, presented too bleak a picture of urban "pathology" among the black poor...

...Yet we need protest and politics—a creative combination of the protest strategy of the 1960s with an electoral coalition approach based on economic populism and universal programs...

...Yet, Wilson at least has had the courage to discuss the crisis of our inner cities, while liberal intellectuals, in an attempt to avoid blaming the victim, have suffered from a failure of nerve in dealing with poverty, crime, and social decay...

...According to the Association of Black Sociologists, Wilson was guilty of "omit[ting] significant data regarding the continuing discrimination against blacks at all class levels...

...In the Winter 1990 New Politics there is a lively exchange on Steinberg's piece among Robert Blauner, Philip Kasinitz, Susan MacGregor, Erol Rickets, Harold Cruse, and myself...

...Unlike affirmative action, such programs can appeal to a majority of Americans and thus would be politically sustainable...

...In his stress on the relative advantages of the black middle class and the misery of the "truly disadvantaged" Wilson has tended to neglect concrete discussion of the problems of the black working class...

...Wilson has always been on the side of the democratic left...

...This is an important step forward for Wilson, but a move not without its intellectual dangers...

...Although the Moynihan debate had some Notes influence on Wilson's recent work, Bayard Rustin was the major source of Wilson's politics in The Declining Significance of Race...

...However, like many academic intellectuals, Wilson underestimates the importance of social movements...

...Wilson's speculations about the origins of the "underclass" have stimulated a massive debate on urban poverty among social scientists...

...and Charles Willie, Caste and Class Controversy on Race and Poverty: Round Two of the Willie/ Wilson Debate (New York: 1989...

...Wilson's political writings can be understood as his attempt to provide an academic version of Rustin's famous 1965 call to move "from protest to politics...

...Some left and liberal thinkers applauded Wilson for highlighting the dynamics of class and the structure of the economy,' but others charged him with betraying the interests of African Americans...

...Moreover, Wilson has articulated a fairly coherent programmatic agenda for the democratic left, arguing that those concerned about black poverty must campaign for full and meaningful employment and an expansion of the American welfare state...

...Wilson maintains that Moynihan was treated unfairly and that since then liberals have been intimidated from discussing these issues in a serious way...

...Norman Fainstein, "The Underclass/Mismatch Hypothesis as an Explanation for Black Economic Deprivation," Politics and Society (15:4, 1986-87...

...But his goal of an expanded welfare state is inconceivable without a serious change in the balance of political forces...

...A single-payer national health care system, a Canadian-style family allowance, universal day care, an expansion of unemployment benefits, and federal job-creation programs would make an immense difference in the life chances of millions of blacks, especially the most poor and vulnerable...

...In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson offers a major empirical proposition to help explain black poverty...

...He has not always presented his views lucidly...

...2 Since the publication in 1982 of Ken Auletta's book The Underclass, discussions of poverty have been dominated by the "underclass debate"—the notion that there is a permanent group of poor people who have fallen out of the class structure...

...The fierce debates surrounding Wilson's work have not always furthered the larger discussion about race and class...

...Wilson will be able to transcend the limitations of the "liberal structuralism" that Comel West cautions against only if he maintains a commitment to this comparative perspective...

...Yet the problems go much deeper than economic inequality and racial discrimination and require cultural analysis as well...

...Wilson's approach shares the limitations of what Cornel West called in these pages a "liberal structuralist" perspective (Dissent, Spring 1991...

...Fainstein is off the mark when, with his reference to "the continuing significance of race," he implies that Wilson believes racism has disappeared from American life (a charge made by many of Wilson's critics...

...3 Wilson's defenders hold that he has made a major contribution toward establishing the historical roots of black poverty...

...SUMMER • 1993 • 367...

...New controversies were touched off by Wilson's next book, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), which focused on the economic decline of the poorer segments of the black working class...

...He argues that there is an urban underclass of poor blacks left out of the modern economy largely because of a shift in the U.S...

...William Julius Wilson does not have all the answers, but the prominence and quality of his work have helped create space for social democratic ideas...

...He downplays factors of some importance: the probusiness bias of the mass media, the massive funding of right-wing intellectuals, the economic instability of the 1970s and 1980s, which created insecurities that were tapped by the right, the power of antisocialist and antistatist ideologies in the United States, pervasive cultural individualism, and deepseated popular racism...

...He argues that we should think of the underclass as part of the working poor rather than as a separate class...

...5 Because of this racist bias, Wilson should have been more alert to the danger that conservatives would use his work to criticize the traditional civil rights establishment, just as they have used the naive liberal writings of Shelby Steele...

...Massey points out that although the income gap between the black poor and the black middle class increased throughout the 1970s, the degree of geographic separation between the rich and poor remains lower among blacks than among any other ethnic group...

...Sociologists Alphonso Pinkney and Charles Willie were right to point out that the black middle class suffers from racism more severely than is allowed for by Wilson...

...Although Wilson glosses over problematic aspects of Moynihan's writings, he has done the left a major service by helping focus a large amount of intellectual energy on the poverty, violence, and hopelessness in American cities...

...This compelling argument for an American version of social democracy may be Wilson's most important contribution...

...In addition, unskilled and semiskilled jobs have moved out of the inner city in massive numbers in the last twenty years...

...Educated, upwardly mobile blacks do encounter barriers to advancement simply because of their race— while ambitious blacks of earlier generations were more likely to suffer the combined disadvantages of race and class...

...2 See Charles Willie, "Rebuttal to a Conservative Strategy for Reducing Poverty," Policy Studies Review (Summer, 1988...

...The urban sociologist Norman Fainstein claims that Wilson's skills-mismatch thesis is an inadequate explanation for African-American economic disadvantages...

...It seems clear, however, that Wilson has been right to stress a serious deterioration in the life circumstances of the black inner-city poor...

...Many liberal scholars and activists, both black and white, argue that by taking part in this debate Wilson has played into the hands of conservatives, who focus on the pathology of inner-city crime, drugs, and single-parent families instead of the structural and racial sources of black poverty...

...occupational structure from industrial labor to the postindustrial service sector...

...Finally, he has recently conceded that race remains more of a factor in the life chances of the black working class than he had allowed for...

...This view "stresses the continuing disadvantages suffered across the black class structure—albeit in a variety of forms—thereby the continuing significance of race...

...He largely ignores firefighters, bus drivers, police, and construction workers as well as civil-service and health-care workers, precisely the kinds of occupations that have served as ladders for impoverished immigrants...

...3 Stephen Steinberg is a good representative of this position...

...Moreover, conservatives are hardly likely to allow Wilson's "hidden agenda" to remain hidden for long...

...For Franklin, this can be explained largely by the effects of housing segregation, because it is through housing that middle-class and stable working-class people accumulate wealth...

...4, August 1990...

...This is an inept way of presenting a profound truth...

...Housing markets, geographic segregation, and a "skills mismatch," as well as the lack of decent public transportation, have combined with overt job discrimination to create high levels of black unemployment...

...Wilson's attempts to distance himself from "culture of poverty" arguments as well as his reliance on quantitative aggregate data and split-labor-market theory has led him to an analysis that underplays the cultural roots of racism...

...Whether this situation justifies a new social category that can be explained by the new social isolation of the poor or by a "skills mismatch" is an unresolved matter...

...Sociological research shows that although explicit racist ideologies have declined in influence, whites still interpret the gap between white and black success in individualistic terms that stress an alleged "lack of will or effort" on the part of blacks...

...Wilson argues that the situation of the black poor has deteriorated in the last twenty years neither because of an increase in racism nor, as conservatives say, because of the decline of the family and the work disincentives of the welfare state...

...This group of people is relatively small (although growing), is concentrated in central cities and segregated ghettos, and is characterized by some combination of addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and destitution...

...5 See James R. Kluegel, "Trends in Whites' Explanations of the Black-White Gap in S.E.S.," American Sociological Review (Volume 55, No...

...Because the underclass is a problem almost exclusive to the United States, Wilson needs to frame his research agenda in a broader context that grapples with the issues of American exceptionalism and comparative welfare states...

...He maintains that a race-specific policy based on some combination of affirmative action and economic programs for the black poor is insufficiently broad to capture popular support...

...In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson dates this abdication to the controversy that followed Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family in the 1960s...

...for this he was denounced as a racist by many black activists and white liberals...

...writing about "the declining significance of race" and the "underclass," Wilson does, at times, play into the hands of neoconservatives...

...Race had declined in significance, Wilson argued, because there was now a sizable black middle class whose life chances were not determined solely by skin color...

...4 For critiques that unfairly attack Wilson on this point, see Charles Willie, "The Inclining Significance of Race," Society (July/August, 1978), Joe R. Feagin, "The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places," American Sociological Review (Feb...

...Unskilled blacks thus have fewer opportunities for upward mobility than did earlier unskilled European immigrants...

...4 Wilson's thesis, as his title makes clear, is the declining significance, not the insignificance of race...

...The empirical results are not yet in...

...1 Michael B. Katz gives a balanced and fairly positive assessment of Wilson's work in The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (Pantheon, 1989...

...Economist Ray Franklin points out that the gap between blacks and whites is significantly larger in terms of wealth than in terms of income...

...their solution relies on "a cultural revival of the Protestant ethic in black America...

...Professor Charles Willie accused Wilson of taking "the perspective of the dominant people of power" and ignoring the role that racism plays in the experience of middle-class blacks...

...DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Kenneth Clark, Moynihan argued that the black family had been destroyed by slavery, leaving blacks trapped in a culture of poverty...

...Stephen Steinberg, "Color Blindness: Left and Right," New Politics (Fall, 1989...

...The best single example of the problems faced by middle-class blacks is that of housing markets, a subject Wilson refers to only briefly in The Declining Significance of Race...

...He tends to write about social programs as if what is at stake is simply a battle 366 • DISSENT of ideas, a struggle between well- and badly designed policy options...

...Wilson has been far too reticent in challenging corporate power and must be pushed on this by the socialists among us...

...As sociologist Barbara Schmitter Heisler has argued, Wilson's perspective on contemporary urban poverty lacks an adequate comparative framework...

...The end of strict segregation and the opportunities available to the black middle class have left the inner-city black poor socially isolated—much more so than earlier generations of blacks and the immigrant poor, who lived near the middle class and a 362 • DISSENT stable working class...

...Yet the government-promoted job creation that Wilson advocates would make it easier to address black demands—in good economic times it's easier to ask white workers to make sacrifices for the sake of racial justice...

...Not since the days of An American Dilemma, The Lonely Crowd, and The End of Ideology has a sociologist played such a prominent role in public intellectual life...

...It is this "public intellectual" Wilson, however, who most angers some black and left intellectuals...

...Moreover, a 1991 Urban Institute study on racism in hiring for entry-level jobs shows how black workers face discrimination because of race and not, in this case, a "skills mismatch...

...Wilson can be faulted for his argument that the attempt to eliminate black poverty must be smuggled in as a "hidden agenda" within a universalistic program...

...But if journalists, policy makers, and academics insist on keeping the term, it should refer to "those people who are trapped in a netherworld at the bottom of both the legal and illegal class systems...

...Racism in American politics must be confronted directly...

...Wilson must offer us an analysis of race, class, and poverty that is structural, comparative, and deals sensitively with issues of family, gender, community, and psychology...

...6 For Heisler, Wilson's predominantly atheoretical, policy-oriented approach, although carefully reasoned, fails to place poverty in America in a context that directly challenges recent conservative attacks on the citizen rights of social inclusion that should be at the core of the modern welfare state...

...A growing body of sociological research, especially the work of demographer Douglas S. Massey, documents how Wilson's stress on changing occupational structures and the new urban poverty needs to be supplemented by more attention to housing segregation...

...The decline of stable two-parent families, the disintegration of inner-city communities, and the rise of crime and homelessness are, for Wilson, directly related to large-scale economic changes...