William Julius Wilson’s new book reviewed:
Coming from a liberal democrat, the senator’s discussion of race was remarkably bold and straightforward:
Unemployed black men were “failures”; female heads of households (“matriarchs”) threatened black masculinity; blacks needed help from “white America.” One wishes social scientists would write with such conviction today, even at the risk of simplifying complex social processes.
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Wilson appreciates Moynihan for shedding light on ghetto poverty. But by focusing on the capacity of the poor to act rationally and thoughtfully, Wilson wants us to get off the victimhood bandwagon that followed Moynihan.
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Wilson knows it is difficult to engineer cultural change. We can train black youths, we can move their families to better neighborhoods, etc., but changing their way of thinking is not so easy. Evidence of this lies in the many “mobility” programs that move inner-city families to lower-poverty suburbs: Young women continue to have children out of wedlock and, inexplicably, the young men who move out return to their communities to commit crime!
These patterns flummox researchers and, according to Wilson, they will continue to remain mysterious until we look at culture for an answer.
