Sociologist Gans (Columbia; Middle American Individualism, 1988,
etc.) deconstructs the pejorative label "underclass" and offers
some pie-in-the-sky proposals for eliminating poverty in America.
According to Gans, since 1980 a diverse cross-section of poor
Americans have been lumped together as "the underclass" and thus
banished from mainstream society. Welfare recipients, school
dropouts, panhandlers, drug addicts, street criminals, illegal
immigrants, and assorted others have all been shoved under the
derogatory umbrella label, which has become a behavioral term
connoting "moral deficiencies [and] bad values." Gans traces the
word "underclass" to a brief passage in a 1963 book by Gunnar
Myrdal that described the economic victims of deindustrialization.
Gans then shows how the word was transformed into a stigma by a
succession of journalists and social scientists who assumed from
the start that the underclass was black. The author's
deconstruction of the popular misnomer is instructive;
nevertheless, he stops short of full-scale analysis, maintaining
that society is not a "text." Instead, his interest here is in how
the popularization of the behavioral label "underclass" has
resulted in certain political actions (such as current efforts to
eliminate welfare as a means of eliminating morally suspect welfare
dependency) and in certain popular trends (such as the
proliferation of racist talk radio and books like The Bell Curve).
The book's second section is an academic's wish list for an
antipoverty program that would assimilate the underclass into
American society: Gans favors massive job creation by private
industry plus government-sponsored public works, "drastic
work-sharing," and value-added taxes, as well as a variety of
nebulous measures, such as "the separation of work from income"
through a minimum income guarantee and "a yet-to-be-invented
method" for media to debunk class stereotypes. Gans's analysis of
the popular code word reads like a fascinating footnote; the rest
of the book is familiar going. (Kirkus Reviews)
In his withering dissection of the origins and misuse of the term
underclass" to stereotype and stigmatize the poor, Herbert J. Gans
shows how this ubiquitous label has relegated a wide variety of
people,welfare recipients, the working poor, teenage mothers, drug
addicts, the homeless, and others,to a single condemned class,
feared and despised by the rest of society. Probing the deep
psychological, social, and political reasons why Americans seek to
indict millions of poor citizens as undeserving," Gans calls for a
cease-fire in the undeclared war against the poor. He concludes
with a set of innovative, job-centreed policy proposals and a
multifaceted educational plan to stop the endless flow of new
recruits into America's untouchable caste.
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