Word: underclass
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been a revolution without much fanfare, but a revolution nonetheless. While the nation's attention focused on the plight of the urban underclass, millions of black Americans marched quietly into the mainstream, creating a vibrant middle class with incomes, educations and life-styles rivaling those of its white counterpart. For them, the passions and suffering of the civil rights struggle have culminated, as they were meant to, in the mundane pleasures and pangs of middle-class life. Theirs is the infrequently told success story of American race relations...
Such affronts may seem insignificant to whites, but they are reshaping the racial agenda for the next decade and beyond. The problems of the urban black underclass -- unemployment, drugs, teenage pregnancy, hopeless schools -- are more urgent than ever. But for the black middle class, there are new preoccupations. Not just job-creation programs, but job promotions. Not just high school diplomas, but college tuition. Not just picket lines, but picket fences. An agenda, in short, for a full partnership in the American Dream...
...problem deserves to be seen realistically--as a disease that feeds on all levels of society. To see the influence of crack as a minority or underclass dilemma is a partial and unaceptable view of this problem. The problem, needless to say, touches...
...trade deficits, produced the economic expansion now in its seventh year. Today, with unemployment at a 14-year low of 5.3% and inflation at a tolerable 4.4%, Reagan has a shield against charges that his economic accomplishments rest on quicksand. When asked about the intractable pathology of the underclass, he sometimes replies, accurately but irrelevantly, that the newspapers are full of help-wanted ads. That a booming economy cannot match the chronically unemployed with available jobs is an irony Reagan chooses to ignore...
...with her message, but it would be refreshing if people stopped praising it as if it were prophetic, because it's not. It's just the product of a privileged Black woman who went to boarding school and Tufts University and now wants to draw on her long-extirpated underclass roots...