The Two Major Causes of the Urban Underclass

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The Two Major Causes of the Urban Underclass

Today in the United States, as well as in many other affluent, industrialized nations, there exists an urban underclass, which is defined as a class of people that comprises members of low-income households who have little or no participation in the workforce (Gilbert 2003, p. 274). Currently there are predominantly two distinct, conflicting views of why the underclass exists. On one hand, there is the notion that the underclass is simply the result of its members, who lack values and morals, and advocate unemployment (Whitman and Thornton 1986). Some, on the other hand, believe that social institutions and injustices are to blame for the underclass.
According to Julia Rothenberg and Andreas Heinz (1998), “the current neoconservative discourse about the social behavior and problems of the poor centers around a notion of a morally corrupt underclass.” Charles Murray, a conservative, and one of the leading advocates of this notion, measures the underclass by things like criminality, dropout from the workforce among young men, and illegitimate births among young women. He writes of the members of the underclass as “people living outside the mainstream, often preying on the mainstream, in a world where the building blocks of a life—work, family and community—exist in fragmented and corrupt forms”(Murray 1999). Because this group of people, which is proportionately small, stays at a relatively constant level in terms of income with seemingly no ambition, Murray blames them for their own problems. Murray’s solution to the underclass is simply to lock up the criminals; he has no sympathy for them, as he believes that they are under complete control of their own actions (Murray 1999). He argues that inner-city poor people have opportunities in low-level jobs, but turn them down, in part because the fast life of the street makes it attractive not to work (Whitman and Thornton 1986).
Among people who take the conservative side, the underclass is seen as the scum of society, a class of people that is undeserving of any help. According to Sonia Martin (2004), conservative and non-conservative “observers frequently view the underclass as homeless, young, black, welfare-dependent, drug-dependent, intellectually disabled, physically disabled, criminals, sole parents (typically women), p...

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... some decent-paying employment opportunities.

References

Gilbert, D. (2003). The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality,
United States, Wadsworth.
Whitman, D. & Thornton, J. (March 17, 1986). A Nation Apart. U.S. News &
World Report. v100.
Rothenberg, J. & Heinz, A. (Summer 1998). Meddling with Monkey Metaphors
Capitalism and the Threat of Impulsive Desires. Social Justice. v25 n2.
Murray, C. (Nov. 1999). And Now for the Bad News. Society. v37 i1.
Martin, S. (Feb. 2004). Reconceptualizing Social Exclusion: A Critical Response to the
Neoliberal Welfare Reform Agenda and the Underclass Theseis. Australian
Journal of Social Issues. v39 i1.
Sanoff, A.P. (March 4, 1991). [Interview with Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised
Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America]. U.S. News &
World Report. v110 n8.
Massey, D.S. (Sept. 1990). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the
Underclass. American Journal of Sociology. v96 n2.
Pearson, R.W. (June 1991). Social Statistics and an American Urban Underclass:
Improving the Knowledge Base for Social Policy in the 1990s. Journal of the
American Statistical Association. v86. n414.

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