Harvard professor says urban poverty worse now than in previous decades
Although the civil-rights era garnered economic and social gains
for middle-class blacks in the 1960s, poor inner-city blacks still
suffer from economic inequality, a Harvard professor said in a lecture
Thursday night. Issues that affected inner-city blacks such as
inadequate jobs, housing and schooling outlasted the civil-rights gains
of the era, said professor William Julius Wilson. Wilson is a
distinguished professor in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government. He spoke in the spring semester installment of the
University of Montana Presidential Lecture Series, with a lecture
titled The World of The New Urban Poor. He said the rate of
joblessness among inner-city black males exceeds that of the past, and
it Ãs a fact which is often overlooked or obscured. In the last three
decades, black males with few job skills or little training have had
difficulty finding jobs suited for them, Wilson said. This is due to a
decrease in the demand for low-skilled workers and an increase in jobs
that require workers to have computer skills and high school degrees,
he said. Many problems are driven by fundamental changes in (the) new
global economy,he said. An employer's image of the inner-city black
male also contributes to this economic inequality, he said. As a
professor at the University of Chicago in the 1980s Wilson oversaw a
study based on a random sample of employers in Chicago. The study found
that employers considered inner-city black men with little job
experience to be lazy, dishonest and prone to theft. The effect of this
attitude was that black males were denied a chance to prove themselves
in the workforce, he said. [more]
Author, Harvard professor explores roots of racial polarization in America [more]
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