This is a study of poverty, official poverty policy, and the politics of Black Liberation its checkered past and uncertain future. Why did black ghettoes explode in the 1960s, immediately in the wake of the Civil Rights revolution? And why have the failed to explode, at least in the dramatic sense of mass rioting, in the 1980s, when the condition of the black poor in our inner cities seems worse than ever? Is the politics of black liberation dead? Or is it ready to re emerge in a new form? These are questions which we will attempt to touch on in the following pages.
If you hear the phrases "poverty in America," or "the poor," "the underclass," or even "the inner city," and they trigger any mental image, chances are that the image you will form is one of of poor Americans who happen to be black. Our stereotyped image of "the poor" is one of teenaged welfare mothers who have babies so they can collect welfare, and of their brothers who hang out on street corners, deal and smoke "crack," and shoot one another or unfortunate bystanders (Katz, 1989: 195).
Yet, in fact, most poor Americans are not black, they are white. As of the middle 1980s, official statistics indicated that there were 52.4 million Americans living in poverty, of which 41.8 million, or almost exactly eighty percent of the total, were white. These white poor, though four fifths of the total, are socially invisible. We undoubtedly see them every day, but we have no no distinct, ever present image or stereotype for them, save for one sub class, "the homeless," by whom we mean not all homeless people, but specifically scruffy vagrants who lie on sidewalks or park benches. With a little thought, we can conjure up some other images of the non black poor: impoverished rural "shanty whites," particularly in the South; Latino migrant farm workers, many of them undocumented aliens; and so forth. Yet our predominant social image of the poor, co...