William Julius Wilson (born December 20, 1935) is an American sociologist. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1972 to 1996 before moving to Harvard University.
A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.
My research clearly reveals that if we want to put inner-city workers to work immediately, we just can't rely on the private sector. They don't want to touch them; they don't want to hire them.
Black employers are just as negative as the white employers concerning inner-city workers.
Liberals were intimidated by the Reagan administration and did not want to appear naive by talking about programs that called for government support. I just said, 'The hell with that. I'm out there. '
If you're talking about the narrow issue of public assistance, I would like to see us move to a more healthy system. But until we come up with certain guarantees - for example, guaranteed jobs where mothers move off welfare - I support welfare very strongly. The worst thing we could do is impose time limits and then expect people to sink or swim once they move off welfare.
Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.
If you're going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn't score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven't taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You're denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That's why I support affirmative action that's based on both class and race.
Over the years, black leaders have been slow to recognize the need for a very, very progressive agenda. Anytime someone has talked about putting America back to work, blacks should have said yes, but they didn't. They were so preoccupied with affirmative action that they didn't provide the kind of leadership that would help some of the other progressive folks. Only now are black leaders beginning to realize the impact of economic issues.
A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery.
If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.
If you're not working, over time you're much more likely to develop attitudes and orientations and behavior patterns that are associated with casual or infrequent work. And then when you open up opportunities for people, you notice that these attitudes, orientations, habits and styles also change.
There is a tendency to want to treat blacks as a monolithic socioeconomic group.
The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.
Black professors make more than white professors. That's because we are in demand. I'll tell you, give me two blacks in institutions of higher learning, one has a Ph. D. from an elite institution and has a certain publication record. You give me a white scholar with the same credentials, and I will take that black scholar.
During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.