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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2016)
January 13, 2016 The Skanner Page 15 Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At 80, W.J. Wilson, Scholar of Race and Class, Looks Ahead Hillel Italie AP National Writer CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Sociologists rarely achieve fame beyond their peers, but William Julius Wilson’s influence extends from the cam- pus to the inner city to television to the White House – with Presidents Clinton and Obama, writ- er Ta-Nehisi Coates and “The Wire” creator Da- vid Simon citing him as an influence. “When President Clin- ton introduced me, he proceeded to talk about my book ‘The Truly Disadvantaged,’ and all these national scientists saw that the president not only read my book but could talk about it and had been influenced by it,” he says. Clinton even mentioned Wilson, who turned 80 in De- cember, spoke with The Associated Press about his decades of thinking and writing about race, class, education and pov- erty and about how his “ cuts in government sup- port. Wilson’s research con- tinues. He is busy with one of his most ambi- tious studies, “Multidi- mensional Inequality in the 21st Century,” a research project on pov- erty covering everything from the labor market to criminal justice. “We not only hope to come up with compre- hensive new findings that enhance our un- derstanding of race and poverty, but to establish connections that will help us reach a broader audience, including pol- icymakers,” he says. Wilson’s initial stat- ure, ironically, was based in part on a misunder- standing. In his landmark “The Declining Significance of Race,” published in 1978, he contended that advances in civil rights legislation and the ex- pansion of the Black middle class meant that economic issues were surpassing racial ones as If poverty is a disease that infects an entire communi- ty in the form of unemploy- ment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can’t just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire com- munity ideas run through to- day’s news stories. “We should be cogni- zant of the choices avail- able to inner-city fami- lies and residents in high jobless inner-city Black neighborhoods,” he says, “because they live un- der constraints and face challenges that most peo- ple in the larger society do not experience, or can’t even imagine.” Some of Wilson’s books have become standards, notably “The Declining Significance of Race,” ‘’The Truly Disadvan- taged” and “When Works Disappears.” Combining field work, historical research and ideas root- ed in experience and scholarship, Wilson has shaped a clear narrative: Over the past 60 years, Black neighborhoods have been devastated by the departure of the mid- dle class, the elimination of manufacturing jobs, declines in wages and the greatest challenges for the Black community. Though Wilson wrote that racism remained a critical problem, the book’s title was read by some as a declaration that prejudice was in de- cline and on its way to irrelevance, a favorite contention among those who opposed affirmative action and related pro- grams. With Republicans hold- ing majorities in Con- gress, Wilson said he has little hope that the lives of poor Blacks will im- prove in the near future, but he does not want to “wallow in pessimism.” Asked what programs he would like to see im- plemented, regardless of their likelihood, Wilson says that he’d like to see a substantial expansion of Promise Neighborhoods funding and believes more solutions will arise from his Multidimen- sional Inequality project. “One of the things that the Harvard researchers who are involved in this project have in common is that we all want our re- search to have some im- pact outside academia,” he says. “We don’t want to simply engage other academics.” AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK Wilson credited with ‘inventing’ urban sociology In this Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2015, photo, American sociologist William Julius Wilson poses for a photograph in Bangkok, Thailand. Wilson, 80, spoke with The Associated Press about his decades of thinking and writing about race, class, education and poverty and about how his ideas echo through today’s news stories, whether on income inequality or the Black Lives Matter movement.
