William Julius Wilson’s new book, When Work Disappears (322 pages. Knopf. $26), lends Jackson a hearty “amen.” Indeed, the president’s favorite sociologist, renowned for his sober analysis of the urban underclass, ultimately abandons any pretense of scholarly dispassion. Instead, the Harvard professor reveals the soul of a romantic warrior who damns the odds and exhorts the troops to fight on. His aim, writes Wilson, is “to galvanize and rally concerned Americans to fight back with the same degree of force and dedication displayed by those who have moved us backward… i therefore do not advance proposals that seem acceptable or ‘realistic’ given the current political climate.” Wilson’s “unrealistic” prescriptions in-elude universal health-care legislation, massive government spending on job creation and access to a computer for every schoolchild.
Wilson’s book is not a great or ground-breaking work, but it has at its core an extremely powerful insight. Work, Wilson argues, has largely vanished from urban ghettos, leaving crime, family breakdown and a life-destroying emptiness that welfare, punitive social policy and self-help rhetoric cannot begin to fill. In any given week more adults in slums are unemployed than working, notes Wilson. Since jobs for people with little education and few skills are vanishing, he says, it makes little sense to demand that people get off welfare and go to work unless government is prepared to be an employer of last resort. Wilson’s proffered solution is a massive ‘WPA style" jobs program.
Evidence for his basic thesis is not hard to find. To stroll through the Henry Horner housing projects, a few blocks from the Democratic convention site, is to enter an area that has been in steady decline for decades. Many businesses destroyed (and jobs lost) during the riots of the 1960s simply never came back. One elderly woman wistfully told Wilson that years ago her now largely desolate South Side community had “drug stores. We had hotels. We had doctors… and I would like to see it come back.”
Some of those left behind, as even Wilson acknowledges, need much more than just a job. In a new book based on his’ Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper series, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash delves deeply into the lives of one such family. Rosa Leo (279 pages. Basic Books. $23) is an unflinching, often unpleasant look at a Washington grandmother and heroin addict, crippled by illiteracy, who teaches her grandchildren to shoplift, turns her daughter into a prostitute and works off her daughter’s drug debt by selling drugs herself. Obviously the Rosa Lees of the world need help in putting their lives back together.
Wilson argues that such people are far from the norm. Nonetheless, as the recent welfare debate made clear, the nonworking poor have a serious image problem. Many are seen as immoral freeloaders disdainful of work. And it doesn’t help matters, in the mainstream political arena, that so many of them are nonwhite. Though Wilson, in the interest of political palatability, proposes targeting not only the inner city but those in need of work throughout society, the racial subtext is unavoidable. The problem of the urban underclass, in large measure, is the problem of the black underclass, for the simple reason that the white poor do not generally have to live in conditions of such concentrated poverty. Martha Van Haitsma, a University of California research associate who worked with Wilson, noted that nearly two thirds of blacks in Chicago live in neighborhoods that are 95 percent or more black. As long as blacks remain so “incredibly segregated,” observed Van Haitsma, putting together effective interracial coalitions will be difficult.
Wilson hopes that “race-neutral” policies to assist all poor people can get around the problem of racial antagonism. But that won’t be easy. Indeed, an “Un-Convention” in Chicago devoted to racial issues last week was largely ignored by the delegates and the press. Sen. Bill Bradley, who hosted the discussion, acknowledged that he was disappointed, but attributed that largely to the fact that political conventions attract political junkies, not to any general unwillingness on the part of Americans to make “racial healing” a priority.
The news isn’t all bad. On Chicago’s South Side, there is some change for the better. With the help of more than $2 million in grants from the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation and a patchwork of loans, grants and government programs, the nonprofit Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization has put up market-rate housing, for the first time in four decades, in some of the poverty-scarred South Side areas where Wilson conducted his research. The fund, led by executive director Victor Knight, is also developing commercial space and subsidized housing and has spurred interest from private developers. Wilson’s implicit message, however, is that such efforts, laudable though they may be, will not be enough-that ultimately Americans will have to face the fact that the problems of the ghetto cannot be contained behind ghetto walls, and that solving them is in the nation’s self-interest. It is an old message, delivered by an admittedly quixotic messenger, who also happens to be right.
