CHAPTER 1.
1. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Kenneth Thompson, A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: Culture and Society in Transition (Saint Paul, MN: Paradigm, 2008).
2. Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
3. I first discussed the concepts of indirect and direct forces of racial inequality in my contribution to a coauthored introduction to volume 1 of America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, eds. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001), 1–20.
4. Vivian Henderson, “Race, Economics, and Public Policy,” Crisis 83 (Fall 1975), 50–55.
5. Ray Marshall, “School-to-Work Processes in the United States” (paper, Carnegie Corporation/Johann Jacobs Foundation, Marbach Castle, Germany, November 3–5, 1994).
6. Based on an analysis of microdata—the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)—from the Current Population Survey (1962, 1970, 1980, 1990), as well as published data in US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings 48, no. 1 (2001), and 54, no. 1 (2007).
7. Sylvia Nasar, “The Men in Prime of Life Spend Less Time Working,” New York Times, December 1, 1994; and Stephen J. Rose, On Shaky Ground: Rising Fears about Incomes and Earnings, Research Report No. 94-02 (Washington, DC: National Commission for Employment Policy, October 1994).
8. US Bureau of the Census, Computer Use in the United States: October 1984, Current Population Reports, Series P-23, no. 155 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988), table 4; and US Bureau of the Census, Computer Use in the United States: 2003, Current Population Reports, Series P-23, no. 208 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), table D.
9. Alan B. Krueger, “How Computers Have Changed the Wage Structure: Evidence from Micro Data, 1984–1989,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1993, 32–60.
10. Alan B. Krueger, What’s Up with Wages? (Princeton, NJ: Mimeo, Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University, 1997); Lawrence Katz, Wage Subsidies for the Disadvantaged, NBER Working Paper No. 5679 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1996); and David Schwartzman, Black Unemployment: Part of Unskilled Unemployment (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).
11. Schwartzman, Black Unemployment.
12. James K. Galbraith, Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (New York: Free Press, 1998), 9.
13. Schwartzman, Black Unemployment. Alan Krueger remarks, “Whatever the role that trade has played in the past, I suspect that trade will place greater pressure on low-skilled workers in the future. The reason for this suspicion is simply that there are a great many unskilled workers in the world who are paid very little. One and a half billion potential workers have left schools before they reach age 13; half the world’s workers leave at age 16 or earlier. When these workers are brought into global economic competition (because of greater openness, more political stability, and greater investment in developing countries), the consequences are unlikely to be positive for low-skilled workers in developed countries.” Krueger, What’s Up with Wages?
14. See Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Black and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and Kathryn Neckerman, Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
15. Schwartzman, Black Unemployment.
16. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996).
17. US Department of Housing and Urban Development, The State of Cities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1999).
18. Wilson, When Work Disappears.
19. US Department of Housing and Urban Development, State of Cities.
20. A more detailed account of the transportation and networking problems of poor black workers is provided in Wilson, When Work Disappears.
21. See Frank Levy, The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change (New York: Sage Foundation, 1998).
22. According to sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, the recorded employment gains of low-skilled black men during the economic boom of the 1990s were the artifact of the major expansion of mass black imprisonment during this period. And according to their analysis, if the numbers of incarcerated blacks were added to the official employment statistics, the gains would disappear. Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, “Incarceration and Racial Inequality in Men’s Employment,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 54 (2000), 3–16. However, this position has been challenged by University of Wisconsin sociologist Felix Elwert, whose formal quantitative model suggests the opposite conclusion: that incarceration has likely increased rather than decreased low-skilled black unemployment rates. Felix Elwert, “The Effects of Incarceration on Aggregate Unemployment Rates” (unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin, 2008).
23. In 2007, a single person with an annual income of $9,800 and a family of four with an annual income of $33,600 were classified as poor.
24. In Chapter 5, however, I will discuss and explain why some legislation during the George W. Bush administration that can be tied to Clinton’s welfare reform policy actually benefited the working poor.
25. My discussion in this section on the concept of culture owes a great deal to the work of Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small. See their “How Culture Matters for the Understanding of Poverty: Enriching Our Understanding,” in The Color of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Exist, eds. David Harris and Ann Lin (New York: Sage Foundation, forthcoming).
26. For a review of the literature on school tracking, see Janese Free, “Race and School Tracking: From a Social Psychological Perspective” (paper, American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 14, 2004).
27. Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, eds. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 15–44.
28. Wilson, When Work Disappears.
29. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
30. There is mixed evidence for the outcomes of “acting white” as it applies to education. One of the best-known studies of this concept was published by Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu in 1986. They studied African American students at a high school in Washington DC and concluded that the fear of acting white was one of the major factors undermining student achievement. Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White,’” Urban Journal 18 (1986), 176–206. In contrast, Prudence Carter’s studies have not supported the idea that students who avoided “acting white” held lower educational aspirations. Prudence L. Carter, “‘Black’ Cultural Capital, Status Positioning, and Schooling Conflicts for Low-Income African American Youth,” Social Problems 50 (2003), 136–55; and Prudence L. Carter, Keepin’ It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Roland Fryer presents yet another perspective. He found that a high grade point average (GPA) presents a social disadvantage for Hispanics and blacks in integrated schools and public schools, but he saw no such effect in schools that were segregated (80 percent or more black) or private. He also noticed a marked difference in this effect among black boys and black girls; black boys in public, integrated schools were particularly susceptible to social ostracism as their GPAs increased, and were penalized seven times more than black students (including both genders) overall. Roland G. Fryer, “‘Acting White’: The Social Price Paid by the Best and Brightest Minority Students,” Education Next, Winter 2006, 53–59.
31. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
32. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
33. Anderson, Code of the Street, 34.
34. Venkatesh, Off the Books, 381.
35. Ibid, 377.
36. Ibid., 385. For another excellent study of how activities in the underground economy can adversely affect inner-city residents, see Loïc Wacquant, “Inside the Zone: The Art of the Hustler in the Black American Ghetto,” Theory, Culture, and Society 15 (1998), 1–36.
37. Orlando Patterson, “A Poverty of the Mind,” New York Times, March 26, 2006.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid. See also Orlando Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 202–18.
40. Neckerman, Schools Betrayed.
41. Ibid., 174.
42. Patterson, “Poverty of the Mind,” 13.
43. Ibid.
CHAPTER 2.
1. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996).
2. Paul Jargowsky, “Ghetto Poverty among Blacks in the 1980s,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 13 (1994), 288–310.
3. See the following chapters in The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993): Michael B. Katz, “Reframing the ‘Underclass’ Debate,” 440–78; David W. Bartelt, “Housing the ‘Underclass,’” 118–57; Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Structure of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in Three Periods of American History,” 85–117; and Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Black Poor and the Politics of Opposition in a New South City,” 293–333.
4. Katz, “Reframing the ‘Underclass’ Debate,” 462. See also Bartelt “Housing the ‘Underclass’” Sugrue, “Structure of Urban Poverty” and Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).
5. Raymond Mohl, “Planned Destruction: The Interstates and Central City Housing,” in From Tenements to Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, eds. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin Szylvian (University Park, PA: State University Press, 2000), 226–45; Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley—His Battle for Chicago and Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6. Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh.
7. Charles E. Connerly, “From Racial Zoning to Community Empowerment: The Interstate Highway System and the African American Community in Birmingham, Alabama,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 22 (1992), 99–114.
8. Connerly, “From Racial Zoning” Ronald H. Bayor, “Roads to Racial Segregation: Atlanta in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Urban History 15 (1988), 3–21.
9. Katz, “Reframing the ‘Underclass’ Debate” Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
10. Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson, “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality,” in Crime and Inequality, eds. John Hagan and Ruth Peterson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 37–54.
11. Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
12. Katz, “Reframing the ‘Underclass’ Debate,” 461–62. On the history of suburbs in America, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. For a good discussion of the effects of housing discrimination on the living conditions, education, and employment of urban minorities, see John Yinger, Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination (New York: Sage Foundation, 1995).
13. Mark Condon, Public Housing, Crime and the Urban Labor Market: A Study of Black Youth in Chicago, Working Paper Series, no. H-91-3 (Cambridge, MA: Malcolm Wiener Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1991).
14. Ibid., 3.
15. Ibid., 4.
16. Ibid., 4.
17. Sampson and Wilson, “Toward a Theory of Race.” See also Bartelt, “Housing the ‘Underclass’” Kelley, “Black Poor and the Politics of Opposition” Sugrue, “Structure of Urban Poverty” Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; and John F. Bauman, Norman P. Hummon, and Edward K. Muller, “Public Housing Isolation, and the Urban Underclass,” Journal of Urban History 17 (1991), 264–92.
18. Lincoln Quillian, “Migration Patterns and the Growth of High-Poverty Neighborhoods, 1970–1990,” American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999), 1–37.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Wilson, When Work Disappears; Quillian, Migration Patterns.
22. See Demetrios Caraley, “Washington Abandons the Cities,” Political Science Quarterly 107 (Spring 1992), 1–30.
23. Bruce A. Wallin, Budgeting for Basics: The Changing Landscape of City Finances, Discussion paper prepared for the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, August 2005).
24. Caraley, “Washington Abandons the Cities.”
25. US Department of Housing and Urban Development, The State of Cities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1999).
26. Caraley, “Washington Abandons the Cities.”
27. Iris J. Lav and Andrew Brecher, Passing Down the Deficit: Federal Policies Contribute to the Severity of the State Fiscal Crisis (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 12, 2004).
28. Bruce Katz, “Beyond City Limits: The Emergence of a New Metropolitan Agenda” (unpublished manuscript, Brookings Institution, 1999).
29. Economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz estimate that the final cost for the Iraq war will be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on how much longer U.S. soldiers remain in Iraq. See Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years after the Beginning of the Conflict” (paper, Allied Social Science Association, Boston, MA, January 6–8, 2006).
30. US Department of Labor, “Federal Minimum Wage Rates under the Fair Labor Standards Act” (2008), at www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/chart.pdf.
31. Radhika K. Fox and Sarah Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions: An Agenda for Rebuilding America’s Older Core Cities (Oakland, CA: PolicyLink, 2006).
32. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000, 238–62; and Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions.
33. Wilson, When Work Disappears.
34. Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions.
35. Ibid.
36. Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions; Wilson, When Work Disappears.
37. US Department of Housing and Urban Development, State of Cities.
38. Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions.
39. Ibid., 32.
40. Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions.
41. See, for example, Wilson, When Work Disappears; and Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, “We’d Love to Hire Them, but…: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in The Urban Underclass, eds. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 203–34; Kathryn M. Neckerman and Joleen Kirschenman, “Hiring Strategies, Racial Bias, and Inner-City Workers,” Social Problems 38 (November 1991), 433–47; and Harry Holzer, What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less Educated Workers (New York: Sage Foundation, 1996).
42. Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; Wilson, When Work Disappears; and Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions.
43. Fox and Treuhaft, Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions.
44. Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; and Wilson, When Work Disappears.
45. Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1992); Orlando Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and Afro-American Illustration,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 202–18; Orlando Patterson, “A Poverty of the Mind,” New York Times, March 26, 2006.
46. James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, “Affirmative Action Attitudes, Effects of Self-Interest, Racial Affect, and Stratification Beliefs on Whites’ Views,” Social Forces 61 (1983), 797–824. See also James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, Beliefs about Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be (New York: de Gruyter, 1986).
47. Lawrence Bobo and Ryan A. Smith, “Antipoverty Politics, Affirmative Action, and Racial Attitudes,” in Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change, eds. Sheldon H. Danziger, Gary D. Sandefur, and Daniel H. Weinberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 365–95.
48. Blacks See Growing Values Gap between Poor and Middle Class: Optimism about Black Progress Declines (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, November 13, 2007), 33.
49. Ibid.
50. Commission of the European Communities, The Perception of Poverty in Europe (Brussels: European Commission, 1990).
51. Commission of the European Communities, Poverty and Exclusion (Brussels: European Commission, 2007).
52. For a summary of some of the important studies on neighborhood effects, see Mario L. Small and Kathryn K. Newman, “Urban Poverty after The Truly Disadvantaged: The Rediscovery of the Family, the Neighborhood, and Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001), 23–45.
53. John Quigley and Steven Raphael, “Neighborhoods, Economic Self-Sufficiency, and the MTO,” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, 2008, 3.
54. See, for example, William N. Evans, Wallace E. Oates, and Robert M. Schwab, “Measuring Peer Group Effects: A Study of Teenage Behavior,” Journal of Political Economy 100, 966–91; and Robert Plotnick and Saul Hoffman, “Using Sister Pairs to Estimate How Neighborhoods Affect Young Adult Outcomes,” Working Papers in Public Policy Analysis and Management, No. 93-8 (Seattle, WA: Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, 1993). For a good discussion of the issue of self-selection bias, see Paul Jargowsky, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (New York: Sage Foundation, 1997).
55. James E. Rosenbaum and Susan Popkin, “Employment and Earnings of Low-Income Blacks Who Move to Middle-Class Suburbs,” in The Urban Underclass, eds. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 342–56; James Rosenbaum, Stefanie DeLuca, and Tammy Tuck, Moving and Changing: How Places Change People Who Move into Them, Institute for Policy Research Working Paper, WP-02-09 (Evanston, IL: IPR, 2002); J. E. Kaufman and J. Rosenbaum, The Education and Employment of Low-Income Black Youth in White Suburbs, Institute for Policy Research Working Paper, WP-91-20 (Evanston, IL: IPR, 1991), published in Educational Evaluation & Policy Analysis 14 (1992), 229–40; James E. Rosenbaum, Susan J. Popkin, Julie E. Kaufman, and Jennifer Rusin, Social Integration of Low-Income Black Adults in White Middle-Class Suburbs, Institute for Policy Research Working Paper, WP-91-06 (Evanston, IL: IPR, 1991), published in Social Problems 38 (1991), 448–61; and J. Rosenbaum and S. Popkin, Economic and Social Impacts of Housing Integration: A Report to the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (Evanston, IL: IPR, Northwestern University, 1990).
56. Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Douglas S. Massey, “Neighborhood Effects on Economic Self-Sufficiency: A Reconstruction of the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (2008), 109–45.
57. Micere Keels, Greg J. Duncan, Stefanie DeLuca, Ruby Mendenhall, and James Rosenbaum, “Fifteen Years Later: Can Residential Mobility Programs Provide a Long Term Escape from Neighborhood Segregation, Crime, and Poverty?” Demography 42 (2006), 51–73.
58. Jeffrey R. Kling, Jeffrey B. Lieberman, Lawrence F. Katz, and Lisa Sanbonatsu, Moving to Opportunities and Tranquility: Neighborhood Effects on Adult Economic Self-Sufficiency and Health from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment, Princeton IRS Working Paper, No. 481 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, April 2004, revised October 2004), 31.
59. Robert J. Sampson, “Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiments Meet Social Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (July 2008), 191–233.
60. Sampson, “Moving to Inequality” Clampet-Lundquist and Massey, “Neighborhood Effects.”
61. Stefanie DeLuca, “All over the Map: Explaining Educational Outcomes of the Moving to Opportunity Program,” Education Next, Fall 2007, 25.
62. Quigley and Raphael, “Neighborhoods, Economic Self-Sufficiency.”
63. Patrick Sharkey, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Context,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (January 2008), 931–69.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 963.
66. Robert J. Sampson, Patrick Sharkey, and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability among African-American Children,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (2008), 845–52.
67. Ibid., 846. Sampson and his colleagues created a composite measure of verbal ability based on results from two widely used tests given to their subjects: the Wide Range Achievement Test reading examination and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children vocabulary test.
68. Ibid., 852.
69. Ibid., 845.
70. Ibid., 852.
71. Ibid., 852.
72. Ibid.
73. Sharkey, “Intergenerational Transmission of Context.”
74. Erik Olin Wright, private communication, May 7, 2008.
75. Ibid. As Wright points out, this argument on enduring dispositions is consistent with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus.” See Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Also see Aurora P. Jackson, “The Effects of Family and Neighborhood Characteristics on the Behavioral and Cognitive Development of Poor Black Children: A Longitudinal Study,” American Journal of Community Psychology 32 (2003), 175–86.
76. Jargowsky, Poverty and Place, 186.
77. Paul Jargowsky, Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003).
78. Ibid., 9.
79. Ibid., 9.
80. Ibid., 4.
81. Ibid.
CHAPTER 3.
1. Elliot Liebow. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Street Corner Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1967).
2. Ibid., 50–51.
3. Ibid., 51.
4. Part of what follows in this chapter is based on field research that my colleagues, graduate students, and I conducted in Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. One of these research projects was the Urban Poverty and Family Life Study (UPFLS), conducted in 1987 and 1988, which included a random sample of nearly 2,500 poor and nonpoor African American, Latino, and white residents in Chicago’s poor, inner-city neighborhoods. As part of this broad project, the UPFLS included data from three sources: (1) the Social Opportunity Survey, a subsample of 175 UPFLS participants who answered open-ended questions concerning their perceptions about their opportunities and life chances; (2) a 1988 survey of 179 employers—in most cases the information came from the highest-ranking official in the firm—selected to reflect the distribution of employment possibilities across industry and firm size in the Chicago metropolitan area; and (3) comprehensive ethnographic research—that is, participant-observation research and life history interviews—conducted during the period 1986 to 1988 by ten research assistants in a representative sample of inner-city neighborhoods. Other projects included a 1993 survey of a representative sample of 500 respondents from two high-joblessness neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side and six focus group discussions involving the residents and former residents of these neighborhoods.
5. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996).
6. Ibid.
7. Allison K. Rodean and Christopher H. Wheeler, “Neighborhoods That Don’t Work,” Regional Economist (April 2008), at www.stls.frb.org/publications/re/2008/b/pages/neighborhoods.html.
8. Floyd Norris, “Many More Are Jobless Than Are Unemployed,” New York Times (April 12, 2008), at www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/business/12charts.html?ex=1365739200&en=90c9b2f19824f964&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=per malink.
9. Ibid.
10. The figures in this paragraph were calculated from data provided by economist David Ellwood of Harvard University, based on data from the US Department of Labor.
11. Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin, and Paulo Tobar, “The Educational Attainment of the Nation’s Young Black Men and Their Recent Labor Market Experiences: What Can Be Done to Improve Their Future Labor Market and Educational Prospects?” (paper prepared for Jobs for America’s Graduates, Alexandria, VA, February 2007).
12. Ibid., 2–3.
13. Ibid.
14. Lawrence Katz, Wage Subsidies for the Disadvantaged, Working Paper 5679 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1996); and David Schwartzman, Black Unemployment: Part of Unskilled Unemployment (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).
15. John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, The Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and Manufacturing, 1979–2007 (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2008).
16. John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, The Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and Manufacturing, 1979–2006 (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research Report, March 2007).
17. Ibid.
18. Jean Anyon. Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
19. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Sage Foundation, 2006).
20. Ibid., 79.
21. Ibid., 31. These figures on incarceration of black males were originally published in Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in US Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004), 477–98.
22. Western, Punishment and Inequality, 79.
23. Ibid.
24. Harry J. Holzer, Paul Offner, and Elaine Sorensen, “What Explains the Continuing Decline in Labor Force Activity among Young Black Men?” (paper, Color Lines Conference, Harvard University, August 30, 2003).
25. Wilson, When Work Disappears. See also two other studies based on this research by members of our research team: Kathryn Neckerman and Joleen Kirschenman, “Hiring Strategies, Racial Bias, and Inner-City Workers,” Social Problems 38 (November 1991), 433–47; and Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, “We’d Love to Hire Them, but…: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in The Urban Underclass, eds. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 203–34. Another relevant study is Harry Holzer, What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (New York: Sage Foundation, 1995); and see also Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America (New York: Sage Foundation, 2001).
26. Wilson, When Work Disappears.
27. Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (New York: Sage Foundation, 2007).
28. Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (2003), 937–75.
29. Erik Olin Wright, private communication, May 7, 2008. I am indebted to Wright for the insights expressed in this paragraph.
30. Holzer, Offner, and Sorensen, “What Explains the Continuing Decline?”
31. Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Contingent Chicago: Restructuring the Spaces of Temporary Labor,” International Journal of Urban Research 25 (2001), 492.
32. In addition to exacerbating the problem of joblessness, incarceration impairs the chances of successful participation in society in other ways. As Christopher Wildeman and Christopher Muller point out, “incarceration poses formidable legal barriers to political participation, the retention of parental rights, and the receipt of welfare, public housing, and financial aid (Travis 2002). In all but two states, incarcerated individuals are not allowed to vote, and ex-felons are not allowed to vote in many states. The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act speeds the termination of parental rights for children who have been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months—a duration far shorter than the median prison sentence. An often-overlooked provision of welfare reform permanently prohibits individuals with drug-related felony convictions from receiving federal assistance and food stamps. Statutes enacted in the 1990s give public housing agencies the authority to deny housing to individuals with a wide array of criminal convictions. And the Higher Education Act of 1998 renders any individual convicted of a drug-related offense ineligible for student loans. Together, these legal barriers present formidable challenges to individuals seeking to return safely from prison—particularly given their diminished pre-incarceration resources.” Christopher Wildeman and Christopher Muller, “Incarceration: Adulthood,” in Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development, ed. Deborah Carr (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, forthcoming). See also Jeremy Travis, “Invisible Punishment: An Instrument of Social Exclusion,” in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, eds. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: New Press, 2002).
33. Wilson, When Work Disappears.
34. See, for example, the collection of research papers in Ronald B. Mincy, ed., Black Males Left Behind (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2006).
35. Orlando Patterson, “A Poverty of the Mind,” New York Times, March 26, 2006.
36. Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African–Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
37. Patterson, “Poverty of the Mind.”
38. Ibid.
39. See Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1992); and Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
40. Patterson, “Poverty of the Mind.” Elijah Anderson supports this view on the basis of research in inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He argues that many young black males fail to take advantage of employment opportunities in the formal labor market when they become available because “the draw of the street [is] too powerful.” Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999; paperback 2000).
41. Orlando Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and Afro-American Illustration,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 204.
42. Lee Rainwater, “Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower-Class Family,” Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966), 176–216.
43. Anderson, Streetwise; Majors and Billson, Cool Pose; and Carl Nightingale, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
44. Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously.”
45. Lawrence M. Mead, The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
46. Ibid., 149.
47. Mead makes reference to “comments by black scholars” to support this contention, including Orlando Patterson, “The Moral Crisis of the Black American,” Public Interest no. 32 (Summer 1973), 43–69; Anne Wortham, The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981); and Glenn Loury, “The Moral Quandary of the Black Community,” Public Interest no. 79 (Spring 1985), 9–22. However, none of these writers provides any empirical evidence that would support Mead’s claim. Mead is not citing their field research, but their thoughtful essays.
48. Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Knopf and Sage Foundation, 1999).
49. Alford Young Jr., The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
50. See also Young, Minds of Marginalized Black Men.
51. Wilson, When Work Disappears. See also Roberta Iversen and Naomi Farber, “Transmission of Family Values, Work and Welfare among Poor Urban Black Women,” Work and Occupations 23 (1996), 437–60; and Rachel Jones and Ye Lou, “The Culture of Poverty and African-American Culture: Empirical Assessment,” Sociological Perspectives 42 (1999), 439–58.
52. Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
53. Smith, Lone Pursuit, 167.
54. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream, 218.
55. Patterson, “Poverty of the Mind” Waldinger, Still the Promised City?
56. Mead, New Politics of Poverty.
57. Waldinger, Still the Promised City?
58. See Harry J. Holzer, “Black Youth Nonemployment: Duration and Job Search,” in Black Youth Employment Crisis, eds. Richard Freeman and Harry Holzer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 23–73.
59. Smith, Lone Pursuit, 12.
60. Ibid.
61. Mary Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
62. Stephen Petterson, “Are Young Black Men Really Less Willing to Work?” American Sociological Review 62 (August 1997), 605–13.
63. Ibid., 606.
64. Ibid., 606.
65. See, for example, Holzer, “Black Youth Nonemployment” and Harry Holzer, “Reservation Wages and Their Labor Market Effects for Black and White Male Youth,” Journal of Human Resources 21 (1986), 157–77.
66. Petterson, “Are Young Black Men Really Less Willing?” 207.
67. See, Holzer, “Black Youth Nonemployment” Holzer, “Reservation Wages” Stephen R. G. Jones, “The Relationship between Unemployment Spells and Reservation Wages as a Test of Search Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 103 (1988), 741–65; and Peter Jensen and Niels C. Westergard-Nielson, “A Search Model Applied to the Transition from Education to Work,” Review of Economic Studies 54 (1987), 461–72.
68. Petterson, “Are Young Black Men Really Less Willing?” 609.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 612.
71. Stephen Petterson, “Black-White Differences in Joblessness among Young Men: The Limits of Cultural Explanations” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1994).
72. Ibid., 612.
73. The willingness of low-skilled workers with few options to accept menial employment is perhaps most clearly revealed in Katherine Newman and Chauncy Lennon’s study of fast-food restaurants in New York City, in which they found that there were fourteen applicants for every job vacancy. Katherine S. Newman and Chauncy Lennon, Finding Work in the Inner City: How Hard Is It Now? How Hard Will It Be for AFDC Recipients? Working Paper 76 (New York: Sage Foundation, 1995).
74. Smith, Lone Pursuit.
75. Ibid.
76. Sophie Pedder, “Social Isolation and the Labor Market: Black Americans in Chicago” (paper, Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Conference, Chicago, IL, October 10–12, 1991).
77. Ibid., 37.
78. Ibid., 23.
79. Ibid.
CHAPTER 4.
1. Adam Clymer, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan Is Dead; Senator from Academia Was 76,” New York Times, March 27, 2003.
2. Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Office of Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, 1965), 30.
3. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 144.
4. Ibid., 154.
5. See, for example, Robert H. Hill, The Strength of Black Families (New York: Emerson Hall, 1972); Abdul Hakim Ibn Alkalimat (Gerald McWorter), “The Ideology of Black Social Science,” Black Scholar 1 (December 1969), 28–35; Nathan Hare, “The Challenge of a Black Scholar,” Black Scholar 1 (December 1969), 58–63; Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” Black Scholar 2 (February 1970), 9–16; Robert Staples, The Black Family: Essays and Studies (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971); and Joyce Ladner, ed., The Death of White Sociology (New York: Random House, 1973).
6. As the sociologist Robert K. Merton points out, “when a once powerless collectivity acquires a socially validated sense of growing power, its members experience an intensified need for self-affirmation. Under such conditions, collective self-glorification, found in some measure among all groups, becomes a predictable and intensified counter response to long-standing belittlement from without.” Robert K. Merton, “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (July 1972), 18–19.
7. See, for example, Hare, “Challenge of a Black Scholar” and Alkalimat, “Ideology of Black Social Science.” This rejection even included the thoughtful argument, so clearly articulated by Kenneth Clark and Lee Rainwater in the latter 1960s, that the logical outcome of racial isolation and class subordination is that individuals are forced to adapt to the realities of the ghetto community and are therefore seriously impaired in their ability to function in any other community. See Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); and Lee Rainwater, “Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower-Class Family,” Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966), 176–216.
8. US Department of Health and Human Services, Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, 1940–1999, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 48, No. 16 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000); Brady E. Hamilton, Joyce A. Martin, and Stephanie J. Ventura, “Births: Preliminary Data for 2005,” NCHS Health E-Stats, at www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/prelimbirths05/prelimbirths05.htm (accessed September 20, 2007).
9. US Bureau of the Census, Household and Family Characteristics, Current Population Survey, Series P20-495 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March 1996), table 1; and US Bureau of the Census, Population Division, “Current Population Survey, 2006 Annual Social and Economic Supplement,” table F1, at www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2006/tabF1-all.xls (accessed September 20, 2007).
10. Greg J. Duncan, Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1984).
11. US Bureau of the Census, “American Community Survey” (2006), table B02001, at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPageServlet?_program=ACS&_submenuId=datasets_2&_lang=en&_ts=.
12. Kathryn Edin, “The Myths of Dependence and Self-Sufficiency: Women, Welfare, and Low-Wage Work,” Focus 17 (1995), 203–30.
13. For married couples, this information comes from US Bureau of the Census, “American Community Survey” (2006), table B19126 (“Median income”) and table B17006 (“Poverty status of children”), at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMain PageServlet?_program=ACS&_submenuId=datasets_2&_lang=en&_ts=; for single-mother families, from an analysis of microdata in US Bureau of the Census, “American Community Survey” (2006).
14. For a review of this research, see Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill, “For Richer or Poorer: Marriage as an Antipoverty Strategy,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 15 (2002), 587–99.
15. David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane, The Impact of AFDC on Family Structure and Living Arrangements, Research in Labor Economics, Vol. 7 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1985); June E. O’Neill, Douglas Wolf, Laurie Bassi, and Michael Hannan, An Analysis of Time on Welfare, US Department of Health and Human Services Report, Contract No. HHS-100-83-0048 (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1984).
16. Mollie A. Martin, “Family Structure and Income Inequality in Families with Children,” Demography 43 (2006), 421–46; Paul Amato, “The Impact of Family Formation Change on Cognitive, Social and Emotional Well-Being of the Next Generation,” Future of Children 15 (2005), 75–96; Sara McLanahan, “Diverging Destinies: How Children Are Faring under the Second Demographic Transition,” Demography 41 (2004), 607–27; Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Helps, What Hurts (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Sara McLanahan and Irwin Garfinkel, “Single Mothers, the Underclass, and Social Policy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501 (January 1989), 130–52; Sara McLanahan and Larry Bumpass, “Intergenerational Consequences of Family Disruption,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988), 130–52; and Sheila Fitzgerald Krein and Andrea H. Beller, “Educational Attainment of Children from Single-Parent Families: Differences by Exposure, Gender and Race,” Demography 25 (May 1988), 221–24.
17. Deborah Roempke Graefe and Daniel T. Lichter, “Marriage among Unwed Mothers: Whites, Blacks and Hispanics Compared,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 34 (2002), 286–92.
18. Marcia Carlson, Sara McLanahan, and Paula England, “Union Formation in Fragile Families,” Demography 41 (2004), 237–61.
19. Martha Van Haitsma, “A Contextual Definition of the Underclass,” Focus 12 (Spring-Summer 1989), 27–31.
20. Lena Lundgren-Gaveras, “Informal Network Support, Public Welfare Support and the Labor Force Activity of Urban Low-Income Single Mothers” (paper, Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Conference, Chicago, IL, October 10–12, 1991).
21. Ibid.
22. The proportion of nonmarital births among whites and Latinos reached 24.5 and 46.4 percent, respectively, in 2005. Hamilton, Martin, and Ventura, “Births.”
23. Thomas and Sawhill, “For Richer or Poorer.”
24. See, for example, Greg J. Duncan’s testimony before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Ways and Means Hearing on Early Childbearing, Washington, DC, July 29, 1994; and Saul D. Hoffman, Gregory J. Duncan, and Ronald B. Mincy, “Marriage and Welfare Use among Young Women: Do Labor Market, Welfare and Neighborhood Factors Account for Declining Rates of Marriage among Black and White Women?” (paper, American Economics Association, New Orleans, December 1991).
25. Duncan, testimony, July 29, 1994.
26. For a thorough discussion of shifting marriage norms over time, see Andrew Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004), 848–61.
27. These figures are based on an analysis of microdata from US Bureau of the Census, “American Community Survey” (2006), at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPageServlet?_program=ACS&_submenuId=datasets_2&_lang=en&_ts=.
28. Christopher Jencks, “Is the American Underclass Growing?” in The Urban Underclass, eds. Christopher Jencks and Paul Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 28–102.
29. For a good review of these studies, see David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, “The Uneven Spread of Single Parent Families in the United States. What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?” in Social Inequality, ed. Kathryn Neckerman (New York: Sage Foundation, 2004), 3–78.
30. Mark Testa and Marilyn Krogh, “The Effects of Employment on Marriage among Males in Inner-City Chicago,” in The Decline in Marriage among African Americans: Causes, Consequences and Policy Implications, eds. M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (New York: Sage Foundation, 1995), 59–95.
31. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Pantheon, 1971).
32. Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” in On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, ed. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 188. See also Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez (New York: Random House, 1961); and Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966).
33. See, for example, Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1970).
34. Moynihan, Negro Family, 93.
35. Alice O’Connor, Poverty and Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
36. Orlando Patterson, “Culture and Continuity: Causal Structures in Socio-Cultural Persistence,” in Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, eds. Roger Friedland and John Mohr (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–109.
37. Ibid., 71.
38. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
39. Ibid., 80.
40. Samuel H. Preston, Suet Lim, and S. Philip Morgan, “African-American Marriage in 1910: Beneath the Surface of Census Data,” Demography 29 (February 1992), 1–15; S. Philip Morgan, Antonio McDaniel, Andrew T. Miller, and Samuel H. Preston, “Racial Differences in Household and Family Structure at the Turn of the Century,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (January 1993), 798–828.
41. Preston, Lim, and Morgan, “African-American Marriage,” 1.
42. Ibid.
43. Morgan et al., “Racial Differences,” 822.
44. See, for example, St. Clair Drake, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (Chicago: Third World Press, 1970); and George E. Simpson, Black Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
45. Morgan et al., “Racial Differences,” 823.
46. For my critical discussion of the cultural continuity thesis in this chapter, I am indebted to Tommie Shelby, private communication, July 10, 2008.
47. Morgan et al., “Racial Differences,” 824.
48. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Books, 1998).
49. Ellwood and Jencks, “Uneven Spread,” 52.
50. Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small, “How Culture Matters for the Understanding of Poverty: Thickening Our Understanding,” in The Color of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Exist, eds. David Harris and Ann Lin (New York: Sage Foundation, forthcoming).
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Mark Testa, “Male Joblessness, Nonmarital Parenthood and Marriage” (paper, Chicago Urban and Family Life Conference, Chicago, October 10–12, 1991), 16.
54. Ibid.
55. Our survey—the Urban Poverty and Family Life Study (UPFLS), conducted in 1987 and 1988—included a random sample of nearly 2,500 poor and nonpoor African American, Latino, and white residents in Chicago’s poor, inner-city neighborhoods and is discussed in Chapter 3. Inner-city neighborhoods were defined in this study as those with poverty rates of at least 20 percent.
56. Testa, “Male Joblessness” Testa and Krogh, “Effects of Unemployment” and Martha Van Haitsma, “A Contextual Definition of the Underclass,” Focus 12 (Spring–Summer 1991), 27–31.
57. Richard P. Taub, “Differing Conceptions of Honor and Orientations among Low-Income African-Americans and Mexican-Americans” (paper, Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Conference, Chicago, IL, October 10–12, 1991), 6.
58. Ibid.
59. Julie A. Phillips and Megan M. Sweeney, “Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Disruption among White, Black, and Mexican American Women,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67 (May 2005), 296–314. See also R. S. Oropesa, Daniel T. Lichter, and Robert N. Anderson, “Marriage Markets and the Paradox of Mexican American Nuptiality,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 56 (1994), 889–907.
60. This general distrust has also been documented by Kathryn Edin and by Christina Gibson-Davis and her colleagues. They note that women are wary of getting married in part because they are afraid that their partners will try to take more control of the household and start ordering them around. See K. Edin, “What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?” Social Problems 47 (2000), 112–33; and Christina Gibson-Davis, Kathryn Edin, and Sara McLanahan, “High Hopes but Even Higher Expectations: The Retreat from Marriage among Low-Income Couples,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67 (2005), 1301–12. The concerns over infidelity have also been documented in Paula K. England, Kathryn Edin, and K. Linnenberg, “Love and Distrust among Unmarried Parents” (paper, National Poverty Center Conference on Marriage and Family Formation among Low-Income Couples, Washington, DC, September 4–5, 2003).
61. Taub, “Differing Conceptions,” 9.
62. Robert Laseter, “Young Inner-City African American Men: Work and Family Life” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1994), 195.
63. Although marriage behavior varies by racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups, support for the institution of marriage is relatively evenly widespread. Indeed, 70 percent of welfare recipients say they expect to marry. Low-income and minority women voice doubts about marriage to their current partners but nonetheless show a high level of support for the institution of marriage overall. See D. T. Lichter, C. D. Batson, and J. D. Brown, “Welfare Reform and Marriage Promotion: The Marital Expectations and Desires of Single and Cohabitating Mothers,” Social Service Review 78 (2004), 2–24; R. Kelly Raley, “Recent Trends and Differentials in Marriage and Cohabitation: The United States,” in The Ties That Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation, ed. Linda J. Waite (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), 19–39; Jane G. Mauldon, Rebecca A. London, David J. Fein, Rhiannon Patterson, and Steven Bliss, What Do They Think? Welfare Recipients’ Attitudes toward Marriage and Childbearing (Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates, 2002).
64. Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., “Fathering in the Inner City: Paternal Participation and Public Policy” (unpublished manuscript, University of Pennsylvania, 1994).
65. Laseter, “Young Inner-City African American Men,” 40.
66. Furstenberg, “Fathering in the Inner City,” 29.
67. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
68. Diana Pearce, “Feminization of Poverty: Work and Welfare,” Urban and Social Change Review 11 (1978), 146–60.
69. Douglas J. Besharov, Measuring Poverty after Katrina (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2006).
70. Eugene M. Lewit, “Children in Poverty,” Future of Children 3 (Spring 1993), 179.
71. Ibid., 180.
72. Greg J. Duncan. “The Economic Environment of Childhood,” in Children in Poverty, ed. Althea C. Huston (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–50.
73. See, for example, Lewit, “Children in Poverty.”
74. I would like to thank Mario Small for this insight.
75. Daniel Breslau, “Reciprocity and Gender in Low-Income Households” (paper, Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Conference, Chicago, IL, October 10–12, 1991).
76. See Ellwood and Jencks, “Uneven Spread.”
CHAPTER 5.
1. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996).
2. Loïc Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (May 2002), 1501.
3. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
4. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
5. Deirdre Bloome, “The Interplay of Structure and Culture in Perpetuating Black Urban Poverty” (unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, May 2008).
6. Patrick Sharkey, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Context,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2008), 931–69; and Robert J. Sampson, Patrick Sharkey, and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability among African-American Children,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (2008), 845–52.
7. I thank Eva Rosen for this insight (private communication, July 4, 2008).
8. Bloome, “Interplay of Structure and Culture.”
9. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
10. Other social scientists have reached similar conclusions in their critique of The Bell Curve. For a discussion of these reactions, see Orlando Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 202–18.
11. Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
12. Robert Asen, private communication, May 7, 2008. Readers interested in Asen’s work should consult his book Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and the Political Imagination (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002).
13. Lawrence Bobo, “Race, Interests, and Beliefs about Affirmative Action,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (1998), 986.
14. Lawrence Bobo and Ryan A. Smith, “Antipoverty Politics, Affirmative Action, and Racial Attitudes,” in Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change, eds. Sheldon H. Danziger, Gary D. Sandefur, and Daniel H. Weinberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 365–95.
15. Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson, Greater Boston in Transition: Race and Ethnicity in a Renaissance Region (New York: Sage Foundation, 1999).
16. Lawrence Bobo and James R. Kluegel, “Opposition to Race Targeting: Self-Interest, Stratification Ideology, or Racial Attitudes?” American Sociological Review 58 (1993), 446.
17. Comments by Ronald Haskins at a conference titled “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, September 27, 2007. I used the words “in the years immediately following passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill” deliberately. With the subsequent drain on the budget caused by Bush’s regressive tax policy, the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, and the fight against terrorism, all of these programs have suffered deep cuts.
18. Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; and Wilson, When Work Disappears.
19. “Transcript: Senator Barack Obama’s Speech on Race” (March 18, 2008), at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88478467.
20. Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged.
21. See Leon Litwack’s amazing history of Jim Crow: Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998).
22. Patterson, “Taking Culture Seriously.”
23. Sharkey, “Intergenerational Transmission of Context” and Sampson et al., “Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage.”
24. Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (New York: Sage Foundation, 2007).
25. Ibid., 37.
26. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
27. Bloome, Interplay of Structure and Culture.
28. Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Anti-Black Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, eds. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 15–44.
29. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Sage Foundation, 2006).