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.