Word: underclass
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...children who are eligible for it) begins at three and four -- but that is already too late. Cognitive abilities start forming as soon as the child perceives the buzzing confusion of the world. An earlier version of Head Start would allow the child to break out of the Underclass environment while permitting the mother a chance to find work...
...Underclass has less of everything -- and that includes the services others take for granted: police protection, clean streets and decent schools. Families struggling to escape the undertow of ghetto life cannot succeed if their children are unable to go outside and play, if their streets are war zones, and if the schools are relegated to being holding pens. The government cannot surrender; it must provide the same services to Underclass neighborhoods as to the rest of society...
Jobs are vital, as both candidates assert. But they need to be pressed to ! say how they would produce them. Economic growth is not enough: even in times of general prosperity, large pockets of Underclass poverty persist. A new agency is needed, a revitalized Jobs Corps along the lines of a Work Projects Administration, targeted exclusively at the inner-city unemployed. One cause of the widespread unemployment in inner cities is deindustrialization: the dying out of smokestack industries and their replacement by service industries often located in the suburbs. In the cities, there is a mismatch between skills and opportunities...
...insidious one. Racism still flourishes, not just in Yonkers, N.Y., and the Howard Beach section of Queens, but in every segregated neighborhood in the nation, which means pretty much everywhere. In addition, discrimination based on class distinctions is no less noxious than that based on racial ones. The Underclass reels under a double hit: covert racial biases and overt class ones...
Nowadays many whites seem to be saying to blacks, particularly the conspicuously successful black middle class: It's your problem now. There is no doubt that the predicament of the Underclass would be mightily helped by the strenuous participation of middle-class blacks, but that does not mean it is theirs to solve. The state of the Underclass is not a black or a white problem, a middle-class or a lower-class problem, but an American problem that requires a national solution. In the White House, a new President will have to create a genuine sense of community that...