Word: underclass
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...same idea is echoed forcefully by Bayard Rustin, the civil rights veteran, who condemns the "self-righteous, elitist neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth. The policies of these elitists would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat and rural blacks, to permanent poverty." Rustin contends that the curtailment of construction projects, factory expansions and farm ventures for environmental reasons already has cost many potential jobs for blacks. The only way that unemployed blacks can join the work force in a significant way, he argues, is for the economy to grow vigorously...
Meantime, Badillo estimates the Puerto Rican school-dropout rate at 85%. Discouraged youngsters are almost natural prospects for membership in the city's underclass, quickly contributing to the ghetto plagues of violent crime, drug use and arson. Says one Lower East Side youngster: "A lot of kids want an education to get out of here. But in order to survive, they're dealing [drugs]. Kids ten and eleven make more money than their old man in the factory." Says another: "I saw some pictures of this place 20 years ago, and it had benches and trees. We took...
...message to underclass blacks is that they must learn not to rely on help from the outside, that they must take responsibility for their own upward mobility and the quality of their lives. "Too many of our schools are infested with a steady diet of violence, vandalism, drugs, intercourse without discourse, alcohol and television addiction," says he. "The result has been to breed a passive and superficial generation...
...winners and losers in their ledgers, the names of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds reliably turn up in ink as black and shiny as the latter's hairpiece. Across the land?in drive-ins and shopping-center triplexes, even in the big cities, where action pictures still provide the underclass with the same kind of escape they always have?Eastwood and Reynolds draw people to theaters in astonishing numbers...
...horror stories come out of big-city ghetto schools, where the problems ?racial, financial, educational?are the worst. The problems are real enough, but in many ways they are so special as to be part of the larger society's difficulties in improving the lot of America's underclass, rather than crises of education...