Poor, Black, & Undereducated. So what's new?

Nothing, but this is an intriguing book review article I've come across in the New York Times - Why the Poor Stay Poor. Richard Thompson Ford is a professor of law at Stanford University, whose book The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse is being published in paperback this month.



An excerpt from the article:

"Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms."



I encountered this very phenomenon at the job I had and quit last year. The review discusses both sides of the issue - the conservatives and liberals explanation of 'the problem' with/of poor [black people]. But Wilson makes no friends on either side. He sees the problem as complex and an accumulation of both historical institutional racist and classist policies and changes in economic policy which many poor blacks have not been able to keep pace with.