The Invention of the 'Underclass'

A Study in the Politics of Knowledge

Loïc Wacquant

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781509552184, 9781509552177
• eBook ISBN: 9781509552191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

At century's close, American social scientists, policy analysts, philanthropists and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto: the urban "underclass." Soon the scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe and agitated the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis.

In this punchy book, Loïc Wacquant retraces the invention and metamorphoses of this racialized folk devil, from the structural conception of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to the behavioral notion of Washington think-tank experts to the neo-ecological formulation of sociologist William Julius Wilson. He uncovers the springs of the sudden irruption, accelerated circulation, and abrupt evaporation of the "underclass" from public debate, and reflects on the implications for the social epistemology of urban marginality. What accounts for the "lemming effect" that drew a generation of scholars of race and poverty over a scientific cliff?What are the conditions for the formation and bursting of "conceptual speculative bubbles"?What is the role of think tanks, journalism, and politics in imposing "turnkey problematics" upon social researchers? What are the special quandaries posed by the naming of dispossessed and dishonored populations in scientific discourse and how can we reformulate the explosive question of "race" to avoid these troubles? Answering these questions constitutes an exacting exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the tradition of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Bourdieu, and it issues in a clarion call for social scientists to defend their intellectual autonomy against the encroachments of outside powers, be they state officials, the media, think tanks, or philanthropic organizations.

Compact, meticulous and forcefully argued, this study in the politics of social science knowledge will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, geography, intellectual history, the philosophy of science and public policy.

PART ONE
THE TALE OF THE “UNDERCLASS”

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 1580

“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious.”

John Stuart Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 1829

Entry

A new social animal burst upon the American urban landscape at the close of the 1970s and soon sowed fear and loathing among the citizenry as well as caused spiking worry among public officials. Its discovery triggered a veritable media tsunami: major national outlets devoted lurid articles, fulminating editorials and alarming reports on the noxious and predatory behaviors alleged to characterize it. Politicians of every stripe rushed to denounce its sinister presence at the heart of the metropolis, in which they detected now the symptom, now the cause of the unraveling of the derelict districts that disfigured the nation’s major cities. Social scientists and public policy experts were summoned to establish its geographic location, to specify its social habitat, to enumerate its ranks, and to elucidate its mores, so that the means by which to contain its malignant proliferation might be urgently devised. Legislative hearings were held, academic conferences organized, and scholarly tomes and popular accounts proliferated apace.¹

Figure 1 Cover of Time Magazine in the wake of the “Harlem blackout riot” of August 1977

That animal is the urban “underclass,” a term with woolly contours and sulfurous connotations (see box “A nebulous term” on pp. 31–2) that is best kept in quotation marks since it refers to a sociosymbolic constellation peculiar to the United States of the two decades following the New York City blackout riots of July 1977 that prompted Time Magazine to devote its cover to this fearsome “minority within a minority” (see figure 1). As we shall see, it has no real precedent in American history due to the triple stigma of class, caste, and place it carries and no counterpart in Western European countries owing to the deep differences in the manner in which these two continents conceive urban marginality and treat it politically.²

Indeed, the “underclass” is neither the “subproletariat” of Marxist theory (for the term itself is misleading on that count; it is not a class), nor the “fourth-world” of the sociology of poverty inspired by reformist Catholicism (it is the object of scorn and terror rather than compassion), nor the “new poor” or the “excluded” figuring prominently in the contemporaneous European debates on urban inequality (the first term was briefly in fashion at the start of the 1960s, the second is largely absent from the American vocabulary on the topic).³ It is a diffuse and motley aggregate – “a mishmash of social misfits,” concludes sociologist Carole Marks upon conducting a broad-ranging survey of extant scholarly studies on the question⁴ – composed of fundamentally incongruous categories that owe being lumped together thus to the simple fact that they are perceived as a menace, at once physical, moral, and fiscal, for the integrity of urban society.

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A nebulous term with “evil” connotations

“The term is powerful because it calls attention to the conjunction between the characters of individuals and the impersonal forces of the larger social and political order. ‘Class’ is the least interesting half of the word. Although it implies a relationship between one social group and another, the terms of that relationship are left undefined until combined with the familiar word ‘under’. This transformation of a preposition into an adjective has none of the sturdiness of ‘working’, the banality of ‘middle’, or the remoteness of ‘upper’. Instead, ‘under’ suggests the lowly, passive, and submissive, yet at the same time the disreputable, dangerous, disruptive, dark, evil, and even hellish. Apart from these personal attributes, it suggests subjection, subordination, and deprivation. All these meanings are perhaps best brought together in Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. Wotan goes under the earth to wrest the ring from the malicious Alberich, who had used it to enslave a vile and debased subhuman population.”

Paul Peterson, Henry Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University and Chair of the Committee for Research on the Urban Underclass at the Social Science Research Council, reporting approvingly the findings of a major conference on the topic (in Jencks and Peterson,
The Urban Underclass, 1991, p. 3).

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Notes

1. 1. It would take a booklet to simply list all the print articles, television reports, and academic publications devoted to the “underclass” during the two decades covered here (1977–1997). A quick tour giving the reader an idea of the intensity and diversity of concerns covered by this umbrella term in journalism includes Ken Auletta, The Underclass (1982); Chicago Tribune, The American Millstone: An Examination of the Nation’s Permanent Underclass (1986); Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass (1993); and Peter Davis, If You Came This Way: A Journey Through the Lives of the Underclass (1995). A panel of scholarly views is Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (eds.), The Urban Underclass (1991); William Julius Wilson (ed.), The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives (1993a); Michael B. Katz (ed.), The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (1993a); and William A. Kelso, Poverty and the Underclass: Changing Perceptions of the Poor in America (1994). The tortuous interface between academic, journalistic, and policy views is captured live in Joint Economic Committee, The Underclass, Hearing Before the Joint Economic Committee of the 101st Congress of the United States (1989), which I dissect in chapter 2.
2. 2. Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (2004), and Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America (2005).
3. 3. On the “subproletariat,” see Pierre Bourdieu, Algérie 1960. Structures économiques et structures temporelles (1977); the concept of “quart-monde” is elaborated by Jean Labbens, Le Quart-monde. La condition sous-prolétarienne (1969), and idem, Sociologie de la pauvreté. Le tiers-monde et le quart-monde (1978). The parallel rising popularity of “exclusion” in Europe is attested by Graham Room (ed.), Beyond the Threshold: The Measurement and Analysis of Social Exclusion (1995), and Serge Paugam, (ed.), L’Exclusion. L’état des savoirs (1996).
4. 4. Carole Marks, “The Urban Underclass” (1991), p. 462.

1
Between concept and myth: Genealogy of a shifty category

Described alternatively as a “ferocious subculture,” a “hotbed of deviance,” and a “tangle of pathology,” or as a “contagion of disorder” and a “nation apart” on the verge of forming “permanent enclaves of poverty and violence” (so many expressions that one finds indiscriminately under the pen of journalists and in leading scholarly publications), the “underclass” does not encompass all the poor, nor even the most marginal of those dwelling at the urban margins. In keeping with the Victorian distinction between the virtuous and the vicious poor inherited from the nineteenth century,¹ it came to designate the “undeserving” and threatening black poor from the dilapidated remnants of the historic Bronzeville. By dint of their “antisocial” behaviors, “dysfunctional” lifestyle, and “deviant” values, those destitute African Americans trapped in the hyperghetto would be responsible for their own piteous fate as for the decline of the metropolis, which they saddle with a string of “social dislocations” that seem consubstantial to them: persistent joblessness and long-term reliance on public aid, marital dissolution and sexual anomie, educational failure and cultural deviation, drug trafficking and consumption, street delinquency and violent criminality, topped off by repeat incarceration.

Dangerousness and immorality in the city, along with membership in a stigmatized ethnoracial category (African Americans and, for some authors, Puerto Ricans), are the distinctive characteristics that motivate the authorit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Endorsement Page
• Prologue
• Part One: The Tale of The “Underclass”
• Part Two: Lessons From The Tale
• Coda: Resolving the trouble with “race” in the twenty-first century
• Appendix: The nine lives of the “underclass”
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement