When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.

• Author: Whitman, David

Twenty years ago this month, I sat in a University of Chicago classroom as an obscure sociologist in horn-rimmed glasses droned on about American race relations. The professor, a man named William Julius Wilson, was speaking with all the animation of a metronome to about a dozen students. Wilson methodically explained that he was going to teach from the manuscript of his book, which would come out the following school year, The Declining Significance of Race. Pipe in hand, wearing a natty sweater vest, Bill Wilson then proceeded to discourse at length about "structural barriers" and the "shifts in economic life chances" that were altering the system of "racial stratification."

Over the course of the semester, Wilson's elocution failed to improve a whit. Yet for all his sociological jargon, one couldn't help but be provoked by Wilson's then-unorthodox ideas. He believed the liberal establishment was wrong to attribute the plight of impoverished blacks simply to racism. He warned that shifts in the job market were opening a destructive gap in the black community between the middle class and those left behind in the ghetto. And he thought that civil rights leaders should look beyond affirmative action programs toward social programs that benefited disadvantaged whites as well.

Wilson's class changed my life. I went on to a career of covering race, welfare reform, and urban policy. But of far more consequence, Wilson went on to change almost singlehandedly the national debate over why the urban underclass exists and what can be done about it. He is now the nation's best-known expert on race, the left-wing sociologist whom Bill Clinton regularly consults and whom Ted Koppel invited to appear on "Nightline" to critique the new welfare reform bill. An excerpt from his new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, has made the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Other accolades, including an admiring profile in the New Yorker, are stacking up, even though Wilson is still sound-bite challenged.

The unique contribution of Wilson's book is that it provides the first attempt in three decades to marry evidence from large-scale scientific surveys in the ghetto with information culled from "ethnographic" interviews of ghetto residents. To appreciate the reasons for that research hiatus--and its profound influence on Wilson's book--one needs to look back both to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on the black family and the firestorm Wilson himself ignited with the 1978 publication of The Declining Significance of Race.

Ever since the release of the Moynihan report, the all-important question in the mind of almost every reporter and scholar who writes about the plight of the ghetto poor is this: Do you "blame the victim" or do you blame society for the presence of the underclass? The phrase "blaming the victim" was itself coined by a white sociologist named William Ryan as a means of denouncing the Moynihan report, even though, ironically, Moynihan explicitly blamed white America and its discriminatory policies for the "tangle of pathology" that was at the heart of the breakdown of ghetto families. Nonetheless, Moynihan's blunt talk about out-of-wedlock childbearing--and the links he drew to unemployment, crime, and welfare--provoked the ire of civil rights leaders and the black intelligentsia. Within a matter of weeks of publication of the Moynihan report, the study of family breakdown in the ghetto became verboten. Largescale research in the ghetto vanished, most white academics stopped...