The Politics of the Estranged Poor

Question: What do ostriches and too many commentators on the urban underclass have in common? Answer: they hide their heads in the sand to avoid facing certain unpalatable facts. Ostriches differ from commentators, of course, in what they are hiding from. Ostriches fear lions. Commentators fear evidence that challenges their assumptions about how the world works or their prescriptions for how to improve it. For obvious reasons I will not further consider ostriches; instead, I will use William Julius Wilson's recent powerful book, The Truly Disadvantaged, to show how politically disparate commentators systematically attend to and ignore different features of the urban underclass. That analysis will provide the context for discussing the philosophy and politics of apportioning blame and assigning responsibility for improving the situation of the urban poor. First a note on terminology. The Truly Disadvantaged gives the best possible justification for the term "underclass." In Wilson's view, its pejorative connotations are a useful corrective to liberals' ostrich act of the 1970s and early 1980s-their refusal to recognize publicly that the behaviors and presumably attitudes of many black inner city residents have sharply deteriorated in recent years. "It is . . . true that certain groups are stigmatized by the label underclass, . . . but it would be far worse to obscure the profound changes in the class structure and social behavior of ghetto neighborhoods by avoiding the use of the term underclass. "1 Obscuring unpalatable changes is a mistake. But so is needless stigmatization. The term "underclass" offends enough poor (and middleclass) blacks, and encourages enough well-off whites to distance themselves from the problems of inner cities, that its defects outweigh its virtues.