sses and their environment] proved to be too intimidating to liberal scholars" (Wilson, 1993, p. 2).
The underclass in America today generally refers to inner-city African Americans who exist on the basis of public assistance. Public assistance may be defined as welfare, Medicaid, AFDC payments (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), and subsidized housing paid to those recipients who qualify under federal guidelines. Of course, to arbitrarily stigmatize blacks as welfare recipients as a social group is unfairly arbitrary, as well as academically unsound. Research needs to avoid such capricious assessments, and Wilson (1993) underscores this distinction when he urges researchers to avoid terms (such as "underclass") which become "hopelessly polluted" (p. 24). When he bemoans the fact that concepts such as "underclass" are often defined (and misused) by scholars and non-scholars (the media) alike, he is really arguing for a less amorphous usage of sociological terms.
Wilson (1993) specifically urges research scholars to "give serious consideration to dropping the term and carefully selecting another that also allows one to describe and highlight the important theoretical linkage between a disadvantaged group's position in the labor market and its social environment" (p. 24). Following Wilson's advice would lead the researcher to further qualify the term "underclass" to the phrase, "disadvantaged African-American men who drop out of high school before graduation," as one example; one could also speak of "disadvantaged Latino youths who remain unemployed two years after dropping out of high school," or, "Anglo-American women who become pregnant before entering high school and enroll in ADC programs," and so forth.
The fact that the term "underclass" has been negatively associated with African-Americans is indicative of the pervasiveness of social inequalities levelled at blacks in the past, and, to a large extent, in th...