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

Wilson cites Vivienne Henderson as saying, “racism put blacks in their economic place, but changes in the modern economy make the place in which they find themselves more and more precarious” (7). One of the biggest such changes has been the digital revolution, which has radically reshaped markets, including the employment market. Wilson argues that despite the nonracial nature of this macroeconomic trend, the onset of the technological age has disproportionately affected black workers. Wilson claims that African Americans historically have had less access to education and, therefore, less access to work that did not entail manual labor. As manufacturing is outsourced to the developing world, many low-skilled black males are left without employment. Outsourcing manual work to developing countries has also exerted a downward pressure on the minimum wage, which was until recently unprotected.

In parallel, the incarceration rate of black males has skyrocketed since the Clinton era, making returning to employment even more challenging. Disaffected by their inability to gain employment and provide for a family, Wilson asserts, many black males live a more short-term-focused lifestyle and resort to underground means to survive. Wilson builds a case that criminal and antisocial behavior associated with poor African American men are largely the corollary of a severe dearth of social mobility.