42 pages • 1 hour read
William Julius WilsonMore Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Geopolitics and the Technological Age
Wilson cites Vivienne Henderson as saying, “racism put blacks in their economic place, but changes in the modern economy make the place in which they find themselves more and more precarious” (7). One of the biggest such changes has been the digital revolution, which has radically reshaped markets, including the employment market. Wilson argues that despite the nonracial nature of this macroeconomic trend, the onset of the technological age has disproportionately affected black workers. Wilson claims that African Americans historically have had less access to education and, therefore, less access to work that did not entail manual labor. As manufacturing is outsourced to the developing world, many low-skilled black males are left without employment. Outsourcing manual work to developing countries has also exerted a downward pressure on the minimum wage, which was until recently unprotected.
In parallel, the incarceration rate of black males has skyrocketed since the Clinton era, making returning to employment even more challenging. Disaffected by their inability to gain employment and provide for a family, Wilson asserts, many black males live a more short-term-focused lifestyle and resort to underground means to survive. Wilson builds a case that criminal and antisocial behavior associated with poor African American men are largely the corollary of a severe dearth of social mobility. Black males struggle to gain employment in the expanding service sector, Wilson argues, because stereotypes persist, and black males are perceived as “dangerous” and “threatening” (77). Wilson argues that the “cool pose” culture entertained by many black males is largely a response to their precarious position in society and the social injustices they face (80). Moreover, these injustices remain unrecognized across wider American society.
Societal blindness is a major contributor to the perpetuation of the plight of African Americans. Wilson argues that the cycle of dysfunction in which black males find themselves has become self-perpetuating. Even if African Americans do not face institutionalized racism today, they are still living with the legacy of racist policymaking a generation ago. This has driven an economic wedge between the poor black population and more affluent segments of the population that amounts to a modern form of segregation.
In examining the changes in the labor market and how these changes affect employment opportunities for black males, Wilson points out an important way in which the technological revolution has contributed to the isolation of low-income African American families.
Location and Isolation
Isolation is central to Wilson’s argument in More Than Just Race, which focuses on the inner city as the locus of poverty and other social problems. Wilson makes a convincing case that the ghettoization of low-income African Americans is the new racial segregation. In Chapter 2, Wilson connects the Federal Housing Association’s decisions to redline neighborhoods based on racial composition and deny mortgages to African American families to the creation of the social immobility that afflicts many African Americans today. Routing highways through majority black neighborhoods and impeding access to suburban neighborhoods isolated communities from the rest of society and from employment opportunities. The coincidence of the Wagner-Steagall public housing project with the mass migration of African Americans from the South trapped the poorest sector of the population in inner cities. Reagan’s spending cuts and Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased the economic pressures under which these inner-city neighborhoods were already foundering.
However, Wilson’s argument is twofold. It is not only structural contributors to inequality, he says, that are responsible for persistent segregation. Poverty has become self-perpetuating in the inner city, Wilson claims. Isolated from economic opportunity, inner-city communities’ chronic struggles go largely unperceived by the general population. Due to the lack of social support available, bonds of trust break down in these communities, leading to the fragmentation of families and the perpetuation of poverty across the generations. Criminal behavior that results from a lack of real economic opportunity sees this isolated population flow into the prison system. Poor African Americans are alienated by society and then perceived as antisocial, further compounding their struggle to integrate and develop social mobility.
Wilson also takes up the controversial influence of culture in his analysis of the social problem. Though there has been heated criticism of studies such as the Moynihan Report, Wilson agrees that intra-group socialization can inhibit inter-group socialization. Meaning making within these isolated and economically impaired neighborhoods can perpetuate negative ideologies, behavioral patterns, and identifications, even reducing verbal and cognitive ability by several points (133).
Hypocrisy and Laissez-faire Racism
Despite the many structural and cultural contributors to poor African Americans’ present lack of social mobility, the delusion that black people are wholly responsible for their plight lingers. Wilson cites studies indicating that 90% of Americans believed a lack of effort was a “highly important” factor in black underachievement. Denial of the legacy of racism and meritocratic idealism are attractive for those at the top of the social and economic hierarchy. The belief that black people are responsible for their socioeconomic plight also safeguards against one’s own fears of falling upon hard times through no fault of one’s own. Wilson builds a case for regarding the popular idea that poor African Americans are responsible for their marginalized status as a defensive strategy. This line of argument gives nuance to the concept of the American dream. The dream is a compensation for the lack of opportunities in reality.
Conservatives tend to emphasize personal responsibility over such structural issues as policymaking. However, it is not only conservative ideologies that engage in hypocrisy when it comes to the welfare of poor African Americans. Wilson points out that neoliberals are also guilty of overlooking the cultural contributors to black poverty. Meanwhile, individuals in deprived communities participate in self-deception. The “cool pose” culture that many black males participate in is, for Wilson, a response to chronic isolation and subordination (80). The antisocial behaviors valorized in this insular culture are, however, a Pyrrhic victory over a persistent lack of economic opportunity. Over time, these self-deceptions may in turn cause internal fragmentation within the psyche of an individual, compounding the distrust found in deprived inner-city neighborhoods. This dynamic can also, according to Wilson, deter poor African Americans from leveraging the contacts they do have to gain employment.
In large part, Wilson argues, this kind of inner-city culture represents the internalization of blame for economic underachievement that wider society is still largely unwilling to accept. Yet, Wilson claims, the idea that whites’ opposition to political and social support for these communities is “monolithic” is unfounded (139). Studies conducted by Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo show that white people do support such programs of reform.
