More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (Issues of Our Time)

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma.

In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African American family. Though the discussion of racial inequality is typically ideologically polarized. Wilson dares to consider both institutional and cultural factors as causes of the persistence of racial inequality. He reaches the controversial conclusion that while structural and cultural forces are inextricably linked, public policy can only change the racial status quo by reforming the institutions that reinforce it.

• Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City
• The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New Perspectives in Crime, Deviance, and Law)
• On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City
• The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
• Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (Nation of Nations)
• Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (The William G. Bowen Series)
• The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Second Edition