THE BRIDGE OVER THE RACIAL DIVIDE: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.

• Author: Garrow, David J.
• Position: Review

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RACIAL DIVIDE: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics By William Julius Wilson University of California Press, $19.95

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON HAS been one of America's best known scholars of race and poverty for over 20 years, but this short book has an expressly political rather than scholarly purpose: to advocate the creation of a national "multiracial political coalition with a mass-based economic agenda" that would combat the dramatic increase in economic inequality that has occurred in America during the 1980s and '90s. Wilson gives almost equal weight to a second avowedly political argument, namely how such a coalition could explicitly champion "race-based affirmative action programs" without such goals "becoming racially divisive." Wilson's first aim will surprise no one who is familiar with either of his two preceding books (The Truly Disadvantaged, 1987, and When Work Disappears, 1996), but his second contention illuminates with increased frankness just how significantly Wilson's attitude toward race-conscious policies has evolved over the past 12 years.

Wilson's Bridge is not this year's only small book with a large economic agenda--Richard B. Freeman's even tinier The New Inequality: Creating Solutions for Poor America (Beacon Press) briefly advances some plausible policy ideas--but Wilson's public notoriety as President Clinton's favorite sociologist insures that his proposals will draw more attention than if the same recommendations were propounded by a less renowned academic. The most substantive and original recent books on current American poverty--Paul A. Jargowsky's Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (Russell Sage Foundation) and Dalton Conley's Being Black, Living in the Red (University of California Press)rarely if ever draw review attention from major newspapers and magazines, but the lack of originality in Wilson's analyses is not necessarily a strike against them.

What Wilson, like Freeman, terms "the rising inequality in American society" should come as no surprise to anyone who has examined income distribution statistics from the past two decades. While the top 20 percent of Americans, and especially the top 5 percent, have done very well indeed during the economic good times of the '80s and '90s, the vast majority of Americans have seen no real increase in their incomes despite the aura of prosperity. Much of the blame lies with depressed wages, especially those earned by...