Paradoxes in Black Economic Progress: Incomes, Families, and the Underclass

Over the last twenty years, widely reported earnings increases for Black men' and the emergence of a Black middle class2 have documented the progress of efforts to reduce racial economic inequality. Nevertheless, the enigmatic Black ghetto remains with us. Its distressing features-crime, teenage pregnancies, welfare dependency, low educational attainment, male joblessness, drug abuse, and AIDS-have taken on alarming proportions. The recent focus on a population called the has emerged from the coincidence of these social ills in the nation's largest urban areas.3 Today, I will present new estimates of the size and growth of the underclass in a nontechnical way. I will briefly review trends in Black economic progress and discuss how these trends might have contributed to the development of this underclass. Finally, I will discuss the implications of these trends for policies aimed at reducing some of the lingering disparities between