William Julius Wilson is as famous as a sociologist can get, but his fame rests in part on things he never wrote. He knows that in some eyes, he will forever be the man who believes that racism in America magically vanished when Jim Crow was dismantled.
At Washington, D.C.,'s Vertigo Books, a stop on the publicity tour for his new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (Alfred A. Knopf), the inevitable question about his previous work comes up within a few minutes. Some people in the racially mixed crowd of 60 are clearly puzzled by his repeated claim, during a brief talk, to be on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
A young black woman in the front row raises her hand."I studied with a liberal professor, and he criticized your book mercilessly,” she says."You are always talked about as a conservative. Have you been misunderstood?”
“They have severely misinterpreted me,” he says, drawing knowing chuckles from the crowd.
Dr. Wilson, a professor of social policy newly arrived at Harvard University, still endures fallout from the book the woman had in mind, The Declining Significance of Race (University of Chicago Press, 1978). Its argument was a complicated one, but it began with the observation that the fates of middle-class blacks and the urban poor were diverging. This was happening, he argued, not because of old-style racism, but because of a galaxy of factors that included the flight of the middle class from cities and housing patterns that reflected past discrimination. The title, however, is what people remember. It was either a stroke of genius or a curse.
As frustrating as it is to be misunderstood, the controversy drove him to clarify his views -- and it may have made his subsequent work better. Even those critics who have read him closely and still believe he underestimates racism acknowledge that his study of concentrated black poverty, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, 1987), set the agenda for poverty research for a decade.
In When Work Disappears he zeros in on one aspect of the problem."I was out in the field, looking at the notes and listening to people, and it wasn’t poverty that was coming up -- it was jobs, jobs, jobs,” he says over midmorning coffee in a Georgetown restaurant."My thoughts crystallized.”
That insight is distilled in the first sentence of his book: “For the first time in the twentieth century most adults in many inner-city ghetto neighborhoods are not working in a typical week.” Poverty in Chicago’s black belt, the historically black neighborhoods including Douglas, Grand Boulevard, and Washington Park, has risen from 30 per cent in 1970 to 50 per cent today.
In that same period, the Sears, Sunbeam, and Zenith plants in the black belt shut their doors. Many of the barbershops, doctors’ offices, and grocery stores supported by the working poor closed, too. Well-paying jobs drifted to the suburbs or required skills that the public schools weren’t teaching. In the 1950s, those black neighborhoods were just as segregated as today, but they had employment rates of nearly 70 per cent. Now, Dr. Wilson says, kids grow up never having seen someone organize his day around a job.
“Neighborhoods that are poor and jobless are entirely different from neighborhoods that are poor and working,” he says."That is the underlying, driving message of my book. I believe that it is a powerful message, and it was not present in my earlier work.”
“Careful readers of my book pick this up. Sloppy ones miss it and say there is nothing new here.”
If Dr. Wilson sounds as if he still thinks he is being misunderstood, it is because his new book has drawn at least one attack reminiscent of the ‘70s. In a review in The Washington Post, David J. Garrow, a historian at American University, called the book"embarrassingly weak and uninteresting,” a rehash of The Truly Disadvantaged. The views of many other academics are probably closer to that of Sheldon Danziger, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who says Dr. Wilson’s work"will continue to be the place from which research on poverty in the inner city will begin.”
But love his work or hate it, everyone reads Wilson.
He was a ready target for criticism 20 years ago because he was a youngish academic challenging the dominant idea that race determined every aspect of black life. Now he may attract potshots because he is a bona-fide member of the academic stratosphere. Time magazine this year called him one of “America’s 25 Most Influential People.”
He has dined at the White House and advises President Clinton, although Mr. Clinton signed a welfare bill that the professor believes will be a disaster. Nonetheless, Dr. Wilson is sticking with Mr. Clinton:"He’s a hell of a lot better than Dole.” Lately, Dr. Wilson has advised the President not to place much faith in"enterprise zones,” arguing that research shows they don’t create as many jobs as their proponents say they do.
When Work Disappears offers the fullest vision yet of what Dr. Wilson would do to fix the problems he studies. The centerpiece is a public-jobs program modeled on the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Low-wage, last-resort jobs, such as sweeping streets or filling potholes -- with salaries set below those of the private sector -- could provide a first rung on the ladder in neighborhoods where even jobs at McDonald’s are hard to come by.
On a smaller scale, he proposes job-information centers to bring residents up to speed on the behavior that employers expect, and subsidized car pools to get them to the suburbs, where many jobs are. He wants what he calls a"race neutral"safety net, including child care and universal health care, that would make it easier to hold onto low-paying jobs.
He knows the slim odds of the plan’s getting by a Republican Congress."I know I’m going to be ridiculed, I’m going to be called naive,” he says,"but it’s got to be done.”
This year is a big one for Dr. Wilson -- not only because of the book, but because it is his first at Harvard after 24 years at the University of Chicago. Harvard had been after him for years, but what finally sold him was the coterie of black intellectuals that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department, has assembled there. Dr. Gates’s pitch was that he needed Dr. Wilson in order to realize W.E.B. DuBois’s dream of a community of black scholars addressing the problems of the race.
Dr. Wilson is splitting his time between the Kennedy School of Government and Afro-American-studies. He will also establish a center to study poverty in Boston, much like one he headed in Chicago, which is now closing.
“He was something of a lone star at Chicago,” says Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard."If your concern is to become involved in an interdisciplinary approach to the problems, rather than focus on one area, this is the place.”
Some of the most striking data in Dr. Wilson’s book come from the Chicago center’s survey of employers’ attitudes toward black job applicants. Some 75 per cent of the employers said they viewed inner-city blacks negatively. They worried about absenteeism, drug use, theft. But 80 per cent of the black employers said they felt that way, too.
A black insurance executive says,"There is a perception that ... they don’t have the proper skills ... they don’t know how to write. They don’t know how to speak. They don’t act in a business fashion or dress in a business manner.” The interviewer interrupts to ask the man’s own view of these perceptions."I think there’s some truth to it,” he says.
Many employers judge all inner-city blacks based on bad experiences with some. These employers won’t advertise jobs in the big newspapers, instead relying on papers read mostly by immigrants.
Douglas S. Massey, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania, sees a gap between Dr. Wilson’s data on racism and the policies he proposes."All of his work is ambivalent,” Dr. Massey says."He acknowledges that race is an important factor in life as far as housing segregation goes, and it also plays a role in hiring practices. Then he goes on to discuss policy issues and wants to distance himself from race-specific solutions. I think he’s kind of caught on the horns of a dilemma.” Dr. Massey has called for a federal assault on racism in the real-estate market, a proposal mentioned only in passing in Dr. Wilson’s book.
Dr. Wilson has always argued that liberal squeamishness about ghetto culture allows conservatives to seize the day with scare stories and social-Darwinist solutions. In When Work Disappears, he does not back away from describing what he calls"the fading inner-city family.” In some poor Chicago neighborhoods, he writes, only 28 per cent of black parents are married. He quotes black men who wonder why anyone would ever get married.
Yet he also calls media coverage of these trends outrageous. “The problem with these journalistic accounts is that you get the view that blacks don’t endorse the mainstream values of society,” he says."That is simply wrong. What I try to bring out in the book is that there are certain ghetto-related cultural traits that reinforce the economic marginality of people in these neighborhoods. It is to be expected, given the environments these people face.”
Some people may find it hard to discern the line Dr. Wilson draws between frank discussion and journalistic hyperbole. He takes the journalist Mickey Kaus to task for dwelling on"the culture of the underclass,” for example, but then borrows the W.P.A. policy proposal from him.
Conservatives even question whether work has disappeared. They point to low unemployment rates among groups other than blacks to argue that some jobs -- albeit low-paying ones -- can be found.
Many also think ghetto culture drives joblessness as much as joblessness drives ghetto culture."I don’t understand why, after someone loses a job, the adaptive behavior is for the neighborhood to become dysfunctional,” says Lawrence M. Mead, a professor of politics at New York University."Why would you shoot yourself in the foot and make things more difficult for yourself?”
Dr. Wilson is happy to debate all comers -- he and Dr. Mead spoke at a meeting of Capitol Hill policy experts -- because his first goal is to establish the magnitude of the problem in the public mind. That’s also why he switched publishers, and why he is enduring his month-long publicity grind in good spirits.
He is not the kind of liberal whom people are used to hearing on the subject of race. Sharon Carruth, who works for a temp agency in Washington and was in the crowd at Vertigo Books, says she is used to hard-line conservatives who wield stockpiles of statistics, like Dinesh D’Souza, and liberals who are more attuned to high culture than to street realities. (She mentions Dr. Gates.)
She, too, came to the reading thinking Dr. Wilson was a conservative. She was pleasantly surprised to find a sober-minded scholar immersed in the data on poverty."He is very rigorous, not just in his analysis to the problem, but in the structural ways to implement them,” she says.
“This guy is down in the trenches.”