Originally published in 1987, The Truly Disadvantaged is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. It has been praised as “the most important publication in urban poverty over the past twenty-five years” (Small & Newman 23). In the Afterward of the 2012 edition, Wilson argues that the book is still relevant, describing it as “one of the most widely cited books in the last half century” (Wilson 252). Google Scholar corroborates this point, listing The Truly Disadvantages as having been cited an impressive 17,995 times (As of November 27, 2017). The fundamental argument of The Truly Disadvantaged is that structural changes in the economy, particularly the departure of manufacturing industries, have increased the jobless rates of Black Americans, serving to concentrate extreme poverty among Black neighborhoods in the inner-city. This poverty has been further aggravated by the flight of middle and working class Black Americans out of the inner-city, and by the migration of Black youths into the inner-city. To prove his thesis, Wilson draws heavily from an array of secondary studies and data collected from the United States census.
One of the most important contributions that Wilson makes to the study of poverty is the concept of an underclass. Wilson introduces the term as a way to refer to members of the Black urban community who live in high concentrations of long-term poverty, who experience a lack of job training and education, who have high rates of female-headed families, and who suffer from high rates of male joblessness. He uses this understanding of the term as a theoretical framework to explain the social transformation of the inner city. However, some scholars have objected to the way the underclass labels a subgroup of the urban poor as a culture that differs from larger society. For example, Christopher Jencks argues that the underclass is simply a new term for the lower class and that no such subclass exists (As cited by Small & Newman). Due to the negative implications of the term, Wilson himself has abandoned underclass for “the ghetto poor” (Wilson 259). Nevertheless, most scholars have come to accept the term as a way to describe a subgroup of the poor that exists in the inner-city.
Wilson’s analysis of inner-city poverty begins with the findings of the Moynihan Report. Written in 1965, this study found that antidiscrimination legislation hinders equality because the cumulative effects of systemic discrimination have made it impossible for the majority of Black Americans to take advantage of civil rights laws. The study also observed a growing divide between middle and working class Black Americans and lower class Black Americans. Wilson describes the backlash to this report by liberal thinkers as virulent. He paints them as cowards who avoid describing behavior that can be seen as “unflattering or stigmatizing to ghetto residents,” who ignore the existence of the underclass, who fixate on racism as an explanation for poverty, and who instead focus and emphasize the strengths of the Black community (Wilson 6). In particular, Wilson rails against the simplicity of racism as an explanation for the plight of the Black underclass. An example of this theory of racism can be found in the works produced by psychologist Kenneth B. Clark who argues that poverty in Black American urban communities is more pronounced because “Negroes begin with the primary affliction of inferior racial status” (Clark 27). Wilson counters by arguing that to use race as a basis of explaining the problems of the inner-city “is to ignore a set of complex issues that are difficult to explain with a race-specific thesis,” including the class divisions between the underclass and the Black middle class (Wilson 11). As a result of this negligence on the part of liberals, the deteriorating social and economic conditions of the inner-city in the 1970s was not addressed, and therefore leftists were unprepared to counter the oncoming conservative narrative.
The leading conservative narrative on the topic of poverty during the 60s and 70s was the thesis of a “culture of poverty” presented by Oscar Lewis in 1968. Lewis argued that the “culture of poverty” is “both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society,” and that the culture of poverty persists by perpetuating itself “from generation to generation because of its effect on the children” (Lewis 187). In other words, children have absorbed the culture of poverty and are not psychologically prepared to take advantage of economic opportunities. Although Wilson adamantly argues against this theory, he claims that it gained traction because the theories and policy proposals presented by liberals were viewed as fragmented and ineffective.
More damaging that the “culture of poverty” is Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which Wilson argues has done more than any other source “to promote the view that federal programs are harmful to the poor” (Wilson 16). Murray links poverty to programs of the Great Society, rates of joblessness, crime, out-of-wedlock births, female-headed families, and welfare dependency. As a result, Murray’s book is used as the philosophical base for the cuts to social welfare programs in the Reagan budget. Wilson calls Murray’s approach a “laissez-faire social philosophy” and counters Losing Ground by claiming that it overemphasizes the role of welfare and overlooks joblessness as a factor in “female-headed families” (Wilson 160).
Among Wilson’s critics are Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, authors of American Apartheid. These scholars disagree with Wilson’s emphasis on class as an explanation for the existence of the underclass, and instead argue that systemic residential segregation based on race is the primary factor in explaining the existence of the underclass. They claim that “in the absence of segregation, these structural changes would not have produced the disastrous social and economic outcomes observed in inner cities” (Massey & Denton 8). Additionally, Massey and Denton do not agree with the importance that Wilson places on black middle-class migration, claiming that “concentrated poverty would have happened” regardless (8). They also point out that even those Black Americans who escape the inner-city to the suburbs experience more poverty than their white counterparts due to racial segregation. In the afterward of the 2012 edition, Wilson confronts Massey and Denton’s critique of middle-class Black flight, claiming that the instruments they used to measure this migration was inaccurate, and by citing additional studies that corroborate Wilson’s original findings. Moreover, Wilson (briefly) acknowledges the impact of public housing, but glazes over the importance that institutionalized racism plays. Although he lists eight sources in his notes on this issue, none of them are Massey and Denton. In short, Wilson completely ignores Massey and Denton’s primary criticism that race has and continues to play an important role in the development and maintenance of the underclass.
Another work that diverges from Wilson’s analysis is Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Wilson argues that Black Americans have been “severely hurt by deindustrialization because of their heavy concentration in the automobile, rubber, steel, and other smokestack industries,” and that this process has more to do with class than race (Wilson 12). However, Sugrue makes it clear that, due to discriminatory practices, Black Americans were designated to “the meanest and dirtiest jobs,” if they were employed at all (91). Although Sugrue’s study is specific to Detroit, it shows that race did indeed play a role in developing the urban underclass. Frank Levy also points out that low wage earners and newly hired workers, which were disproportionately Black, suffered more from the slack economy created by the fall of manufacturing industries. Wilson uses this as evidence to prove that economics play a bigger role in harming the underclass, but by doing so he is overlooking discriminatory hiring practices.
Another flaw in The Truly Disadvantaged is the way the poor Black family is portrayed. Wilson frequently uses the expression “female heads of family,” a term that is inherently sexist as it assumes that the head of a family should be male. Using the term “single mothers” would be more appropriate. This raises another question: are men present in families with “female heads”? If a family consists of a man, a woman, and one or more children, and the man is jobless, would the female be considered the head of the family? Wilson needs to clarify this. A similar issue is found when examining Wilson’s approach towards unwed mothers. Does this include family units where men are still active participants? Wilson does not address the fact that a family unit can include men and women without marriage. He also assumes that in order for a man to be marriageable he must have a job. Since jobs come and go, do divorces go up when men are laid off? How does the employment of women fit into this equation? One final gnawing aspect of The Truly Disadvantaged is that there are no people in the book; only broad statistical data.
Despite the holes in Wilson’s thesis, his book convincingly demonstrates that the problem of urban poverty is far more complex than many have acknowledged. Not only that, but The Truly Disadvantaged does something remarkable by not only identifying the underclass as a problem, but by also offering methods to solve that problem. In his final chapter, Wilson argues for a holistic approach to solving poverty that can be accessed by all, regardless of race. This book should be seen as an important contribution in our understanding of poverty, and will be most effectively utilized when paired with other remarkable works, such as Massey and Denton’s American Apartheid. In the words of one reviewer, “a great deal of the literature pits these explanations against one another as if they were mutually exclusive when in fact they are not” (Small & Newman 26). In other words, despite its flaws, The Truly Disadvantaged has a lot to offer, and should be built upon in order to understand and improve society.
Other Works Cited
Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
Levy, Frank. “The Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 8, no. 2 (January 1, 1989): 341–44.
Lewis, Oscar. “The Culture of Poverty.” In On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, edited by Daniel P. Moynihan. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Moynihan, Daniel P. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965.
Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Small, Mario Luis, and Katherine Newman. “Urban Poverty after The Truly Disadvantaged: The Rediscovery of the Family, the Neighborhood, and Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 23–45.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
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