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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Jan. 6, 2016
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INSIDE Death row privileges revisited- 4 Black church to ring in new era - 8 Heroin trafficking ring sentence - 13 Protestors stand up for Tamir Rice - 14
Richmond & Hampton Roads
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At 80, scholar of race and class, looks ahead WIRE REPORT
Seated in one of two offices he maintains on the Harvard University campus, William Julius Wilson points to the far wall and his framed citation for the 1998 National Medal of Science, only the second one given to a sociologist. “When President Clinton introduced me, he proceeded to talk about my book ‘The Truly Disadvantaged,’ and all these national scientists saw that the president not only read my book but could talk about it and had been influenced by it,” he said. Clinton
called him an intellectual deity, a “gawd.” David Simon of “The Wire” has said Wilson helped inspire the second season of the HBO program set in Baltimore. Members of the Clinton and Obama administrations have cited his work and sought his advice. Wilson, who turned 80 in December, spoke recently about his decades of thinking and writing about race, class, education and poverty and about how his ideas run through today’s news stories, whether on income inequality or the Black Lives Matter movement. “We should be cognizant of the
W.J. Wilson
knew the book so well he even mentioned the page count, 187. As soon as he got back home, Wilson said, “I pulled the book off the shelf, and yeah, the book was 187 pages of text.” Sociologists rarely achieve fame beyond their peers, but Wilson’s influence extends from the campus to the inner city to television to the White House. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates has
choices available to inner-city families and residents in high jobless inner-city black neighborhoods,” he said, “because they live under constraints and face challenges that most people in the larger society do not experience, or can't even imagine.” Some of Wilson’s books have become standards, notably “The Declining Significance of Race,” '”The
Truly Disadvantaged” and “When Work Disappears”. Combining field work, historical research and ideas rooted in experience and scholarship, Wilson has shaped a clear narrative: Over the past 60 years, black neighborhoods have been devastated by the departure of the middle class, the elimination of manufacturing jobs, declines in wages and cuts in government support. Income inequality among blacks, once relatively small, now surpasses the gap among whites. The poorest areas — what Wilson has called “extreme poverty” — suffer from a self-reinforcing absence of role models, networking opportunities, transportation and social and training skills. Affirmative action
programs, he has written, are worthwhile, but only help those already in position to have a job. “What’s most overwhelming about urban poverty is that it’s so difficult to escape,” then-Sen. Barack Obama said in a 2007 speech widely believed influenced by Wilson’s thinking. “If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community.” As president, Obama chose as his education secretary Arne Duncan, who said of Wilson: “He has influenced me more than anyone I
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Preview Obama’s final SOTU address ... page 5