More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

Wilson cites his Harvard colleague Bobo throughout More Than Just Race, particularly in Chapter 5, where Wilson makes recommendations for policy reform based on his exploration of structural and cultural contributors to race. Wilson also uses the term “laissez-faire racism,” coined by Bobo and co-authors James R. Kluegel and Ryan A. Smith.

Wilson observes that President Bush’s tax cuts for wealthy citizens and freeze on minimum wage reduced the support available for disenfranchised inner-city neighborhoods (14; 37). So, too, did the economic pressures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that took place during Bush’s 2001-2009 presidency (38).

William Julius Wilson served during the Clinton administration as Social Policy Advisor to President Clinton. In More Than Just Race, Wilson laments that incarceration rates of African Americans nonetheless “soared” during Clinton’s 1993-2001 tenure (72).

“Jim Crow” was a racist theater character created and popularized by Thomas Rice in the 1850s. The character was based on an earlier folk myth invented by African American slaves. The segregation laws of the 1870s became associated with this white fantasy of African Americans and their culture. Wilson first makes reference to Jim Crow segregation on page 2.

Between 1994 and 1998, the HUD “Moving to Opportunity” pilot program subsidized Chicago housing in an effort to remedy earlier segregation. Suburban families experienced higher rates of employment and college attendance and lower school dropout rates, though employment rates did not improve. Wilson argues in Chapter 2 that longitudinal studies would offer a more accurate picture of the social impacts of the trial. 

In the mid-20th century, the FHA was responsible for redlining neighborhoods, primarily on the basis of race. Public housing, tax subsidies, and highway routing encouraged wealthier whites to move to the suburbs, transforming inner-city neighborhoods into social islands. These policy decisions coincided with mass migration of African Americans from the South. The Fair Housing Amendment Act of 1988 improved social mobility. Wilson discusses FHA policies in Chapter 2.

Wilson builds his argument in Chapter 5 of More Than Just Race on several criticisms of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class in American Life. In this book, Wilson argues, the authors disregard the interactions between cultural and structural factors in their claim that blacks are genetically “inferior” to whites (137). This controversial idea was, Wilson contends, based on an “incredibly weak measure of the social environment” (137).

Wilson contends with Mead’s theories of “subcultures of defeatism and resistance” in Chapter 3 (82). Wilson asserts that Mead has no empirical evidence to support his contention that African Americans are apathetic in applying for work, which Mead argues is due to the internalization of historical slavery experiences. 

Wilson cites Barack Obama’s speech of March 18, 2008 (prior to his 2009-2017 presidency) as an example of the reframing that must occur if the legacy of inequality is to be dismantled (142). Without ignoring individual responsibility, Obama spoke about the structural racial inequality and “legacy of discrimination” that Wilson addresses in this book (142).

Wilson notes that Reagan’s supply-side macroeconomic policy during his 1981-1989 presidency, geared toward combatting inflation, produced a slack labor market in which discrimination increased. Spending cuts in inner cities reduced support for disadvantaged inhabitants. For Wilson, this is an example of superficially nonracial policies contributing to the crystallization of the inner-city ghetto (14).