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.