Symposium on William Julius Wilson’s More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

Abstract

For more than 30 years, William Julius Wilson has engaged social scientists and public policymakers in an analysis of urban poverty and persistent racial inequality. Wilson's fundamental question over the long course of his career is why poverty persists for so many African Americans (2009:3). He has forcefully argued that social structural transformations and historical changes in the political economy are the primary basis for racial inequality and its interaction with class (Wilson 1973, 1978, 1987, 1996, 1999). In Wilson's argument, it is the persistent power of social structure (including the disappearance of work, the decimation of inner cities, and the abandonment of progressive social policies) not attitudes or values that results in urban poverty and its concomitant social problems. His comprehensive and lucid analyses of urban inequality, based on both his rich Chicago study and detailed secondary analysis, have informed the academy and, importantly, also major public figures, including presidents, mayors, governors, and the educated lay public. Indeed, there is probably no other sociologist who has so consistently had the attention of key policymakers, even at times when public policy has turned away from the progressive programs and policies that Wilson would endorse. Thus, when William Julius Wilson says now that we should be paying attention to culture, people listen. Implicit in Wilson's earlier work, although never as directly addressed before, is an argument with cultural determinists who ignore the structural causes of disadvantage in favor of arguments that posit values and attitudes as fundamental to the life chances of the urban, minority poor. In More Than Just Race, Wilson now directly engages the question of structure versus culture, arguing that we cannot ignore cultural influences if we are to understand urban poverty, the disadvantaged plight of poor, urban black men, and the black family (each topic detailed in a chapter). He criticizes his own earlier work for implicitly assuming that culture is merely a by-product of structural forces, arguing here for some influence of culture in its own right.