More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

“These problems will not be addressed […] if we are not willing to have an honest and open discussion of race in America […].” 

At the opening of More Than Just Race, William Julius Wilson addresses the correlation between African American males and crime, including violent crime. It is this cultural phenomenon that Wilson’s book reframes. Wilson takes the antisocial behavior of black males in ghetto neighborhoods as his starting point for a critical analysis of structural and cultural inequality in America today. From the ghettoization of black communities to their economic vulnerability and the fragmentation of the black family, Wilson shows that the cumulative effects of historic racism and subjugation continue to trap African Americans not just geographically, but socially, in a self-perpetuating cycle of social problems.

“Even before the restructuring of the nation’s economy, low-skilled African-Americans were at the end of the employment line, often the last to be hired and the first to be let go.”

Central to Wilson’s argument is the idea that changes wrought to the job market by the technological revolution have disproportionately affected low-skilled black workers. In Chapter 2, Wilson shows that structural factors, such as the redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1960s, have impeded access to both quality education and employment. He argues that the history of racial subjugation is perpetuated in ghetto communities, which are influenced by cumulative experiences of failure and a persistent absence of social mobility that stretches across generations. In this way, Wilson dismantles the dictum that a lack of explicit