Whatever Happened to the Underclass?

Those of us whose political memories extend back before the Clinton Administration — and I am still in denial that this is not true for many of my students — may recall a time when the plight of the urban poor seemed a major preoccupation of mainstream journalists and politicians.  I suppose there were even some echoes of this concern as recently as the “No Child Left Behind” phase of the second Bush presidency.  On the whole, though, it has seemed to me that the urban poor have received steadily decreasing attention in our political culture for many years.

Now I get some confirmation and explanation of these impressions in a new paper by David Papke, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Underclass’: An Exploration of Ideology and the Legal Arena.”  David is particularly interested in the notion of the “underclass,” a common term two decades ago that has since fallen out of use.  Had it retained a more robust place in our political discourse, David suggests that this sort of class conceptualization might have contributed to the political mobilization of the urban poor.  In his view, the displacement of the “underclass” in our national consciousness reflects “a resurgence of the dominant ideology’s traditional emphasis on the individual” (28) — a resurgence that served the interests of the socially powerful by drowning out the social criticism associated with the development of the underclass as an ideological construct.

David’s paper thus provides an interesting counterpoint to a recent paper by Matt Parlow that I blogged about here.  

Both David and Matt are concerned about the political marginalization of the urban poor, but David discusses that marginalization in terms of national political culture and ideology, while Matt focuses on the structure and operation of the institutions of local government.  Both perspectives doubtlessly have some truth to them, but the two papers leave me with markedly different impressions of the prospects for positive change.  While Matt gives us a specific reform proposal that he believes would help to engage and empower the urban poor, David’s paper leaves me wondering how much room there is within the dominant ideology for sustained, effective political action by the poor to address the structural causes of poverty.

Here is the abstract to David’s article:

This article explores the rise and fall of the “underclass” as an ideological construct between roughly 1980 and the present. The emergent understanding of the 10-12% of the population living in impoverished center-cities as an “underclass” carried with it a pronounced sympathy for the urban poor and also a preference for welfare and job programs that could aid them. Not surprisingly, the overall ideological construct made its presence felt in the legal arena, a discursive setting in which the organizational force of ideology is especially evident. In particular, some courts attempted to stop exclusionary zoning, a practice especially common in new, outlying suburbs. As the twentieth century drew to a close, meanwhile, attention to the “underclass” declined precipitously, and notions of an “underclass” virtually vanished from policy-making, political discourse, and the legal arena. The courts concomitantly lost interest in condemning exclusionary zoning, and the urban poor were denied a potentially valuable conceptualization which might have contributed to their political self-awareness and strengthened demands for an end to their debilitating oppression.

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