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501 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1989)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0501 and id is 1 raw text is: ANNALS, AAPSS, 501, January 1989 The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City By LOIC J. D. WACQUANT and WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON ABSTRACT: Discussions of inner-city social dislocations are often severed from the struggles and structural changes in the larger society, economy, and polity that in fact determine them, resulting in undue emphasis on the individual attributes of ghetto residents and on the alleged grip of the so-called culture of poverty. This article provides a different perspective by drawing attention to the specific features of the proximate social structure in which ghetto residents evolve and try to survive. This is done by contrasting the class composition, welfare trajectories, economic and financial assets, and social capital of blacks who live in Chicago's ghetto neighborhoods with those who reside in this city's low-poverty areas. Our central argument is that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term underclass is primarily social-structural and that the inner city is experiencing a crisis because the dramatic growth injoblessness and economic exclusion associated with the ongoing spatial and industrial restructuring of American capitalism has triggered a process of hyperghettoization. LoYc J. D. Wacquant is pursuing doctorates in sociology at the University of Chicago and the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris. He is presently a research assistant on the Urban Poverty and Family Structure Project, investigating the relationships between class, race, and joblessness in the United States. A MacArthur prizefellow, William Julius Wilson is the Lucy Flower Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Power, Racism, and Privilege; The Declining Significance of Race; The Truly Disadvantaged; and coeditor of Through Different Eyes. NOTE: This article is based on data gathered and analyzed as part of the University of Chicago's Urban Poverty and Family Structure Project, whose principal investigator is W. J. Wilson. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Joyce Foundation, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Woods Charitable Fund. 8