The great divide
By Diane Lewis
 | William Julius Wilson, who began teaching at Harvard this academic year, has been studying race and joblessness in Chicago for the past 25 years. Now his laboratory will include some of Boston's most troubled neighborhoods. |
Just days after one of the worst snowstorms in Boston's history, Harvard professor William Julius Wilson has come to Roxbury Community College to talk about the disappearance of jobs in poor, urban neighborhoods. And despite the inhospitable conditions on this April evening, 200 or so people have braved the slush to hear Wilson speak: For some of them, joblessness is a subject of very real concern.
Wilson's manner is usually reserved and formal. But tonight he sounds a bit like a preacher as he tells the crowd that public and private job-creation efforts are needed if we hope to move people out of poverty and stem the problems - crime, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, high dropout rates - that are often associated with poor neighborhoods.
``Right now, many in the larger society have turned a deaf ear, because they feel the problem is confined to poor rural areas or inner-city neighborhoods such as yours,'' Wilson says. ``What they do not realize is that we could be facing a real catastrophe in our small towns and inner cities, including the increase of homeless families. That is why new strategies must be found.''
It is no coincidence that Wilson, a sociologist, is speaking in Roxbury about his own strategies for dealing with these problems. After more than 25 years of studying the issues of race and joblessness on Chicago's South Side, Wilson is expanding his laboratory to include such neighborhoods as Roxbury, Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park, and South Boston. Beginning next month, he and a team of researchers from several universities will begin a five-year study of the impact of welfare reform on 4,500 low-income workers and welfare recipients in Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston.
It also is no coincidence that Wilson has chosen the Boston area for his upcoming research. Last fall, in a widely publicized move, he left the University of Chicago for Harvard, becoming one of the latest additions, and perhaps the most controversial, to Harvard's so-called dream team of African-American scholars.
Controversial because Wilson, widely credited with setting the standard for urban-poverty research in the United States, also has been the target of sometimes venomous criticism. It started with his 1978 book, The Declining Significance of Race, in which Wilson enunciated for the first time one of his central ideas: that issues of class, as well as race, underlie the problems facing urban blacks.
``It is clear that economic divisions now exist among blacks, divisions which show every sign of deepening and which have profound implications,'' Wilson wrote. ``Race relations in America have undergone fundamental changes in recent years, so much so that now the life chances of individual blacks have more to do with their economic class position than with their day-to-day encounters with whites.
At the same time, Wilson noted, ``It would be shortsighted to view the traditional forms of racial segregation and discrimination as having essentially disappeared in contemporary America; the presence of blacks is still firmly resisted in various institutions and social arrangements. However, in the economic sphere, class has become more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power. ... It is equally clear that the black underclass is in a hopeless state of economic stagnation, falling further and further behind.''
That conclusion sparked a firestorm among liberal critics, both black and white, who said that it offered people an excuse to ignore the problem of racism in America.
But Wilson, who is black, has continued to gain clout over the years. Now, as an unofficial adviser to President Clinton and Vice President Gore, he is a frequent guest at the White House. He was listed by Time magazine last year as one of the 25 most influential Americans. His most recent book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, apparently was in such demand at the White House that aides began poring over galleys before its release last fall.
Wilson was dismayed, then, when President Clinton, just before publication, signed a welfare reform bill that will force people off public assistance after five years but doesn't create jobs for them to step into. ``Yes, the welfare system needs restructuring,'' Wilson tells the Roxbury audience. ``But if we pull the net from under people without providing jobs and some financial supports, then, in five years, we're going to look up and find whole families living on the streets.''
It is late when Wilson leaves the podium. A line has formed in the lobby, where copies of When Work Disappears are stacked on tables, awaiting Wilson's autograph. Inside the auditorium, Wilson makes his way up a ramp from the stage to back doors leading to the lobby. Along the way, he is stopped several times. A twenty-something student pumps Wilson's hand and calls him ``brother.'' Wilson responds by urging the student to contact him for lunch. ``I want to hear from you,'' he says.
In the lobby, Wilson signs copies of his book and chats with members of the audience. As the evening winds down, he appears much younger than his 61 years, buoyed by the crowd's enthusiastic reception.
The warm response to his plan for revitalizing poor urban neighborhoods is not surprising: Some of the people here tonight are residents of just such neighborhoods. The real question is whether the nation as a whole will come to share Wilson's conviction that there is an urgent need to address the problems of the urban poor - and, if so, whether policy makers will think that Wilson's ideas are the right tools to tackle those problems.
At a time when casualness seems to define American culture, from the clothes we wear to our reaction to social conventions, William Julius Wilson evokes a bygone era. Tall, almost gaunt, and exceedingly grave, his legendary reserve seems born of caution. Even in a classroom surrounded by graduate students in jeans and sweatshirts, he adheres to a uniform: dark blue woolen slacks, matching dark blue jacket, woolen vest, starched white shirt, a conservative print tie.
Wilson seems an unlikely academic celebrity; occasionally, a smile brightens an otherwise somber face, creating a chink in the armor and offering a glimpse of humor. But it isn't his personal style that has brought him widespread recognition, it's his ideas.
Wilson, who is currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, has for the past quarter-century systematically studied the problems of the urban poor. His conclusion: Joblessness is at the root of many of the problems they face.
``A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless,'' he writes in When Work Disappears. ``Many of today's problems in the inner-city neighborhoods - crime, family dissolution, welfare - are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.''
Despite the addition of nearly 30 million jobs nationally over the last decade, little work has filtered down to the unskilled residents of rural and inner-city America, something Wilson attributes to a steep decline in the number of unskilled manufacturing jobs. As many of those jobs went overseas, low-income neighborhoods lost the work that encouraged local business expansion and growth.
For example, fewer than 40 percent of all adults of working age who live in such high-poverty neighborhoods as North Dorchester, Roxbury, and the Fenway-Kenmore Square area are employed in any given week, according to Paul Harrington, associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. By comparison, 75 percent of non-elderly adults residing in Massachusetts are employed.
And the disappearance of jobs has social as well as economic consequences. ``Work is not simply a way to make a living and support one's family,'' Wilson writes. ``It also constitutes a framework for daily behavior, because it imposes discipline. ... In the absence of regular employment, life, including family life, becomes less coherent.'' This leads to the disintegration of families, the deterioration of neighborhoods, and the neglect of the very institutions - churches, schools, community groups - that are needed to provide social, moral, and economic support, Wilson says.
It is the lack of jobs, not the lure of welfare, that keeps the urban poor from working, Wilson believes. That raises questions about the effectiveness of cutting off people's welfare benefits with the goal of forcing them to find work. In fact, Wilson's upcoming research in Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago will track several hundred welfare recipients as their benefits are eliminated. ``The goal,'' says Wilson, ``will be to record, firsthand, the impact of removing the safety net, as former welfare recipients struggle to find and hold on to employment.''
Wilson's prescription for the nation's urban ills involves primarily race-neutral federal programs: education reform, improved child care, housing subsidies. But perhaps the centerpiece of his program is the development of a public-works program modeled after Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, which not only put people to work during the Great Depression but improved the nation's infrastructure, as workers built or repaired countless roads, bridges, and buildings.
``This program would give adults with no skills, but the desire to work, a chance to do so,'' Wilson says. ``No, it's not a panacea, but it is a start.''
Critics call the idea naive. Douglas Massey, author of the book American Apartheid and chairman of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania, fears a backlash. ``Yes, a WPA program sounds good,'' Massey says, ``but, sooner or later, some politician would find a way to discredit it, using race to feed the fire.''
Wilson acknowledges the icy political climate but says that, packaged properly, the program could work. ``If you say that all working-class people are suffering, and all poor people are suffering, because of structural changes in the economy, the computer revolution, and the globalization of the economy, and the answer is to reduce the adverse impact by creating a public-sector jobs program, then it could work. If, on the other hand, you say that a program should be created, and the jobs should be only for the inner city, then there will be resistance.''
Wilson understands that memories of a more recent federal job program - the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program of the 1970s, known as CETA - may also make acceptance of his ideas difficult. If the WPA is today generally viewed as a successful response to the problems of the Depression, CETA plagued by administrative problems and political patronage, was a public-relations nightmare. But Wilson says that CETA in fact gave thousands of young men and women skills training and the encouragement they needed to leave their cities' meaner streets.
As for the massive price tag typically tied to federal job programs - cost more than $75 billion between its inception in 1974 and 1982, when it ended - Wilson argues that financing for his program shouldn't be seen as a problem. He points to a defense bill that contained $11 billion more in funds than Clinton requested - money that could have been used to fund a public-service jobs program, Wilson says.
``I really believe that if we want to make a difference and do something before it's too late, then we had better start reevaluating our priorities,'' Wilson says quietly. ``Twelve billion dollars would create a million jobs at $12,000 per public-sector job. I think we can afford that.''
Although Wilson generally doesn't talk much about himself, ...
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