The Invention of the 'Underclass'. Loic Wacquant

his obituary in the New York Times, October 23, 2000, and from a foundation profile.

      24 24. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (2001), p. 232.

      25 25. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, p. 232. The word “underclass” is used in the annual report of MDRC for 1977. It is the term the corporation employed to define its target “clients.”

      26 26. George Russell, “The American Underclass: Destitute and Desperate in the Land of Plenty” (1977), p. 16.

      27 27. Cited in Russell, “The American Underclass: Destitute and Desperate,” p. 17.

      28 28. Time, “The Blackout: Night of Terror,” cover picture and featured story, July 25, 1977.

      29 29. The captions read: “Young, unemployed blacks reflect frustration and resentment from the confines of a ghetto basement”; “Three generations on welfare”; “Nowhere to go, an elderly woman surveys the litter of her inner-city surroundings from atop a trash can”; “High in hand, a glue-sniffer takes his ease – alcohol, heroin also abound”; “A jobless man gazes through a shattered tenement window in one of the many abandoned dwellings in New York City slums”; “Washing at a neighborhood fire hydrant – jealousy can make you hate”; “Down and out on a bleak inner-city street in Harlem, two men take dispirited refuge in whiskey and sleep on a summer afternoon.”

      30 30. Russell, “The American Underclass: Destitute and Desperate,” p. 21.

      31 31. Cited in James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (2000), p. 210, my italics.

      32 32. Andrew Hacker, “The Lower Depths,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1982. Hacker is uneasy about the terminology but bows to the emerging consensus: “I confess to mixed feelings about this phrase: it suggests a sociological perspective which may not in fact be there. However, since I lack a better term (‘lumpenproletariat’ has special connotations), I will go along with underclass, and without quotation marks.” Morris L. Fried endorses the term and the book with no qualms in Contemporary Sociology (1983, p. 461): “The Underclass should be required reading for students in courses in social problems and the structure of American society.” An early dissenting view, appropriately published in Dissent, is William Kornblum, “Lumping the Poor: What is the Underclass?” (1984).

      33 33. “Ken Auletta was not the first to use the term [underclass] but he was largely responsible for making it part of middle-class America’s working vocabulary” (Christopher Jencks, “Is the American Underclass Growing?,” [1991], p. 28).

      34 34. Auletta, The Underclass, pp. xiii–xiv, original italics. Four decades later, Auletta confirms: “I did not receive very much pushback on my use of the term. There were some who thought I was suggesting this was a permanent condition, a notion I took care to debunk both in the original 1982 book and in the 1999 Introduction. And I recall one reviewer described me as a ‘redneck’” (personal communication with Ken Auletta, May 2021).

      35 35. Auletta, The Underclass, p. xvi, original italics. This folk typology was derived from the administrative categories eligible for the MDRC supported-work program (personal communication with Ken Auletta, May 2021).

      36 36. The quotations are the words of program participants, in Auletta, The Underclass, pp. 52–3, 57, 61, 90, 124–5.

      37 37. Auletta, The Underclass, pp. 73–4.

      38 38. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century, chs. 3 and 4, and Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail (1977).

      39 39. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; on the racial and class backlash of the long 1980s, see Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008).

      40 40. The swift transformation of the space of “think tanks” during this pivotal period of growth and consolidation is mapped by Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (2012), ch. 3.

      41 41. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, p. 245.

      42 42. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, p. 244.

      43 43. On the role of philanthropies as conservative “clearing houses” for public common sense and vectors of epistemic consensus in policy debates, see Donald Fisher, “The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundations and the Social Sciences” (1983); Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (2003), ch. 6; Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (1992), esp. “Scientific Philanthropy,” pp. 29–84 and ch. 9; Alice O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (2007), part II; and David L. Seim, Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Social Science (2013).

      44 44. Peter Goldmark, cited in Kathleen Teltsch, “Charity to Focus on Underclass” (New York Times, 1989), my italics.

      45 45. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1992, p. 42.

      46 46. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1992, p. 42.