The Truly Disadvantaged Revisited: A Response to Hochschild and Boxill

Abstract

In the aftermath of the controversy generated in 1965 by the Moynihan report on the black family, empirical research on poverty and other social dislocations in the inner-city ghetto ground to a halt. Since the mid1980s, however, such research activity has revived as media reports and debates among academics have increased public interest in the growing problems of urban ghettos. Like the 1960s discussions of the causes and consequences of urban poverty that focused on the Moynihan report and on Oscar Lewis's writings on the culture of poverty, much of the new discourse is contentious and acrimonious.' My book, The Truly Disadvantaged, has become a focal point in this controversy and, as is too often true of controversies, much of the discussion is based on inaccurate interpretations of the arguments I originally set forth.2 A laudable goal of any author is to write as not to be misunderstood. But, even the most carefully phrased statements on the underclass are unlikely to escape misinterpretations because, as Jennifer L. Hochschild has pointed out, the issues are so complicated and politically sensitive that analysts have an apparently almost irresistible tendency to focus on that part of the problem that fits their own and to deny or ignore those parts that violate their preconceptions (p. 572).