William Julius Wilson

During the run-up to his reelection bid, President Bill Clinton signed a harsh Republican welfare reform bill that both he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a veteran children’s advocate, would have condemned during less ambitious times. Putting politics first--and an opportunity to extend his stay at the White House because polls showed that most Americans desire a change in the welfare system--Clinton disregarded the counsel of most friends, liberal allies and numerous experts--including William Julius Wilson, the nation’s preeminent authority on poverty and the inner city.

The sociologist sent memos urging Clinton not to sign the bill, which limits public assistance to two continuous years, and mandates a five-year lifetime maximum with neither public jobs nor child care for recipients who exceed the limit, and nothing for their children. Clinton ignored his advice--though he has credited the author with changing his thinking on race, poverty and the problems of the inner city.

Wilson, a youthful 60, joined the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in July, after 24 years at the University of Chicago. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, a rare distinction for his discipline, and a former MacArthur Foundation recipient, he and his wife, Beverly, a former school teacher, moved to Cambridge after repeated invitations from the literary critic Henry Louis Gates, who chairs the department of Afro-American studies. He joined a growing coterie of black intelligentsia there, including writer Cornel West.

Beyond his academic pursuits, Wilson is an avid golfer and a passionate Chicago White Sox fan. Though he is reserved, he roots for the in-your-face pro basketball star Charles Barkley, who now plays for the Houston Rockets.

As the election looms, Wilson remains hopeful that Clinton will make good on his promise to fix the new welfare law during his second term. This is not the first time the quiet professor has influenced public policy and the national discourse on social issues.

The 1987, publication of his seminal book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy,” popularized the term “underclass.” An analysis of the historic breakdown of urban ghettos due, in part, to the exodus of middle-class blacks, the systemic flight of jobs and the decline of employed and therefore marriageable black men, the book remains one of the most widely cited in the social sciences. Earlier, in 1978, Wilson’s “The Declining Significance of Race” ignited a philosophical tug-of-war about race and class that resonates today in the debate over affirmative action, which he favors.

His new book, “When Work Disappears: The World of the Urban Poor,” documents the extraordinary difficulty young, black, inner-city men face when seeking work, even during a time of low unemployment. Hobbled by discrimination, poor schooling and cultural factors, they are shunned by both white and black employers, who, according to Wilson, prefer to hire immigrants. He emphasizes the great importance of work, and sadly reports that most inner-city adults do not work in a typical week.

Though welfare is a scholarly pursuit, it is more than an abstraction for Wilson. Government assistance provided a lifeline when he was growing up poor in western Pennsylvania. His father died when he was 12, leaving his mother, a coal miner’s widow, to raise six children. All graduated from college. How did they make it? Wilson responds: The real question is why don’t the overwhelming majority make it?

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Question: What’s right with the new welfare reform law?

Answer: I cannot think of anything about the new law that deserves a positive comment . . . . The original welfare reform bill [President Clinton’s 1992 proposal] not only included money for child-care programs, training and education, but it also included guaranteed jobs for people who reached the time limit if they could not find jobs in the private sector. If that bill had survived, then we really would be reforming welfare as we know it.

Q: Do you favor welfare reform?

A: We should have welfare reform. The current welfare system, which has just been changed, is inadequate. There are a lot of problems. Welfare reform is needed because you don’t want kids growing up in a non-work, impoverished environment. It’s better for the mother to be working or for the father to be working. But they should be in a position where they can work and also not have to worry about the kids being taken care of. That’s why you need child-care support.

This bill, since it doesn’t provide work opportunities, and it doesn’t provide child-care support to mothers who have reached the time limit will mean that not only are you driving children deeper into poverty, whole families are going to end up on the streets. You’re asking these welfare mothers who reach the time limit to sink or swim. It’s a Draconian bill. I’m upset and saddened that the president of the United States felt that he had to sign this bill. He is saying he is going to fix it; I believe him, but if something happens . . . we could have a catastrophe.

Q: How should it be fixed?

A: The very first thing I would like to see the president do is provide monies to municipalities that would enable local governments to create work, public-sector jobs of last resort, in case the states have trouble getting people in jobs in the private sector . . . .

Q: How much would that cost?

A: . . . If you estimate that each job would cost $12,000 then if you create a million jobs--that’s $12 billion. Some people would say that’s a lot of money, and we can’t afford it . . . . It all depends on your perspective . . . . President Clinton signed a $257-billion bill for defense, which included $11.2 billion more than he was asked for . . . . You give me $12 billion, I’ll create a million jobs.

Q: Did the president feel confident that he could sign this welfare bill and still get black votes? Does he need the black vote?

A: He definitely needs black votes, but, I think, he felt that he could sign this bill and blacks would not revolt and be up in arms. And he was right. I was rather surprised by the mild reaction from civil-rights leaders. Some have spoken out like Hugh Price [head of the National Urban League] and others, but the reaction was rather mild.

I don’t want to give the impression that only blacks are on welfare--but the group that is going to suffer most because of this law will be poor black people because they have a much more difficult time finding employment than poor whites.

Q: Why was the response so mild?

A: Blacks are sort of embarrassed about welfare. They don’t want to support a system that is hated and described in such negative terms . . . .

Q: Isn’t this a good time to reform it?

A: This is the worst possible time to have a welfare-reform law that does not guarantee jobs. Despite the fact that we have a tight labor market now and a low unemployment rate, the situation in inner-city ghettos is worse now than in decades. Joblessness has reached an all-time high. When I speak of joblessness, I am not speaking only of those who are unemployed, but those who have dropped out of the labor market all together. We are going to create a situation in which welfare mothers, when they reach the time limit and can no longer get welfare, there will be nothing for them. No child care. No jobs. We will fill a labor pool that is already filled with jobless workers.

Q: What about the explosion of new jobs we constantly read about?

A: . . . Inner-city blacks have not really benefited from this explosion of new jobs . . . . There has been a sharp increase in the number of workers. Women are entering the labor market in significant numbers . . . . Immigrants are entering the labor market in significant numbers. A lot of these new jobs have gone to these populations. The explosion of new jobs has not really penetrated inner-city neighborhoods, and inner-city blacks are still finding it extremely difficult to get jobs . . . .

Q: Your research indicates that employers would rather not hire inner-city black workers. They would rather hire Asian or Latino immigrants. Why?

A: There is a perception that inner-city black men are dangerous. They are threatening, menacing. They don’t want to work. Therefore employers, if they have the opportunity to avoid them, will avoid them. It becomes a vicious cycle. When young black men go look for jobs, and they can’t find jobs, they turn to the illegal economy. They get involved with crime. Crime is very definitely associated with joblessness. Some turn to drugs. Some get frustrated, and abuse alcohol.

When they do these things it reinforces the image that they are less then desirable, and it becomes a vicious cycle. People don’t realize how difficult it is for young, low-skilled, inner-city men to find a job. It is sad.

Q: Is this true of black employers also?

A: Black employers will express negative views of inner-city workers with a frequency that matches that of white employers. In our study, 74% of white employers expressed negative views of inner-city workers; 80% of the black employers did so as well.

One difference was that the black employers were a little bit more sophisticated in explaining why they didn’t want to hire these kids. They could provide more detail on the effects of the environment on developing the kinds of skills that employers believe employees need to work productively in a job--hard skills like literacy and mechanical ability, and soft skills like personality traits and the ability to relate to the consumer.

Q: Your book, “The Declining Significance of Race” was interpreted by some to mean race no longer mattered if a black person made it. You made it. Does race matter?

A: I wouldn’t be where I am if it hadn’t been for affirmative action. The University of Chicago [Sociology Department], back in 1972, did not have a single black doctorate. They were motivated to look for a black doctorate and the chair of the department said, “This guy, Wilson, has the potential to really do well here.” So they brought me there and gave me a year to finish my book. Read it. Liked it. Hired me . . . . Affirmative action got me started.

Q: Some supporters of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative, would say: Look at Professor Wilson. Why should affirmative action be continued?

A: Because there aren’t enough Professor Wilsons. There are only a handful--and unfortunately we’re concentrated at Harvard . . . . What can we do to increase the corps? . . . When I look at some of the young scholars who are now coming up, I know the situation is going to improve . . . . Many of them are junior professors who will soon make big names for themselves. Many of them are in graduate schools. Without affirmative action we wouldn’t have this growing pool of developing talent. We will need affirmative action until we reach the point where we won’t have any significant discrepancies in the proportion of minorities and women in these key positions.

Q: Are there race-neutral policies that can accomplish some of the same goals?

A: . . . If we had a policy that, regardless of racial make-up, we were going to reform public schools to make sure every child . . . comes out able to read, write and compete in the new global economy, blacks would benefit disproportionately from such a policy--which would be a race-neutral policy.

If we had a policy that we were going to provide national health insurance to every American, regardless of race, blacks would disproportionately benefit.

If we had a policy that we should have universal pre-school programs for children, black children would benefit from that disproportionately.

A combination of race-neutral and race-specific programs is needed. You can’t have one or the other in order to turn things around . . . .

If you are trying to create political mobilization and effective coalitions, you don’t want to put out front race-specific policies, affirmative action programs, which are perceived to benefit a certain segment of the population. You include such programs in your comprehensive package, behind race-neutral proposals, in order to really sell the idea, to get people behind the whole program.

Q: You grew up very poor. You made it. Your brothers and sisters are all college-educated. They made it. Can a young black kid in the same situation today also make it?

A: You are always going to have a certain percentage of people at the tail end who make it--who are exceptional in any population. Unfortunately, we generalize, “if they made it, why can’t the rest of them?” Just by chance alone, some people are going to make it--regardless of how difficult the situation is. Just by chance alone, some kids are going to make it out of the worst possible ghetto. There will be some factors in their lives that operated at the right time that provided them with a little edge that other people didn’t have. You could say, “Yes, it’s possible.” But the real question is: “Why is it that an overwhelming majority do not make it?” That’s where the focus really should be.