For almost forty years, since the appearance of his too often neglected Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (Reference Wilson1973), William Julius Wilson's work has framed how social scientists understand the social situation of African Americans. As some Blacks were incorporated into the larger middle class, Wilson (Reference Wilson1978) was one of the first analysts to point to the emergence of significant class differentiation within the Black community in The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Wilson's analyses of the effects of concentrated poverty in the inner city in his Reference Wilson1987The Truly Disadvantaged: the Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy and in his Reference Wilson1996When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor were not only pathbreaking social scientifically, pointing to the devastating effects of economic dislocations on inner-city Blacks, but were instrumental in combating an emerging conservative consensus that tended to blame poverty in the African American community on what were viewed as perverse incentives constructed by the welfare state. Wilson has attempted to guide policy discussions aimed at addressing the situations he has discussed, as in his Reference Wilson1999The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics, which focused on the need to foster interracial coalitions to address the lack of social opportunities among the socially-isolated poor. In all of these contexts, he has sought to enlarge the discussion, enabling the participation of all competent analysts, helping to free them to write honestly, and when necessary, critically, about the situation of African Americans.Footnote ¹

Wilson's (2009) recent book More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City is a sensible reaffirmation of many of the themes found in his earlier work. It brings up to date his analyses of the inner-city poor, while, at the same time, reflecting judiciously on how he has treated previously cultural explanations of inner-city poverty. The main theoretical contribution in the new book is Wilson's attempt to integrate social structure and culture into an explanation of inner-city poverty. It also reformulates his understanding of how we might frame a discussion of the plight of the inner-city poor (especially Blacks living in situations of concentrated poverty) to increase the understanding of the larger populace and how this understanding might be leveraged politically to enhance support for programs to ameliorate concentrated, inner-city poverty and the social problems it generates. In all of these areas, we benefit greatly from having the opportunity to think along with Wilson as he invites us to reconsider both his and our own previous arguments.

Wilson rehearses, in an illuminating way, the negative effects of governmental policies and programs on the inner city and its residents. Federal transportation policy facilitated the movement of jobs to the suburbs, mortgage interest tax exemptions incentivized the development of suburbs, urban renewal and highway development destroyed many inner-city neighborhoods, the New Federalists' fiscal policies starved cities of cash just as they became more Black and Brown, and weak labor-market policies (e.g., the deterioration of the value of the minimum wage, and regressive taxation) undermined the ability of inner-city workers to support their families. These policies, when coupled with economic dislocations caused by technological developments and the internationalization of the economy, devastated poor African American communities as manufacturing jobs left the inner city, often, eventually, moving abroad. Wilson once again traces the consequences of such developments masterfully.

While there are many places one might take issue with his discussions of these structural effects, my primary concern is one of emphasis. Wilson does not stress sufficiently that these economic and political changes have led to a profound increase of income inequality in the United States, nor that this income inequality has resulted in an increase in the gap between Whites and Blacks because Blacks are concentrated among those groups that have lost ground economically over the past two generations. Wilson (2009) notes that “many political acts contributed to the decline in real wages experienced by the working poor. Because people of color are disproportionately represented among the working poor, these political acts have reinforced their position in the bottom rungs of the racial stratification ladder” (p. 12). While this is correct, it would have helped if Wilson had emphasized, and demonstrated more precisely (Juhn et al., Reference Juhn, Murphy, Pierce and Kosters1991), that the economic transformations he discusses have led to increased income inequality, that increased income inequality in the United States (and elsewhere) is the natural outcome of the integration of the world economy, and that, instead of mitigating this trend, political policies associated with the Reagan and two Bush administrations have exacerbated it, resulting in the stagnation or decline in real wages for most Americans and in the astronomical increase in the wealth of the very richest Americans. These political policies were reaffirmed in the recent midterm elections.

It is important to reemphasize that Wilson contends, repeatedly, that social-structural constraints are primarily responsible for inner-city poverty. Even so, the book is part of a new trend focusing on the role of culture in generating and reinforcing inner-city poverty. As Patricia Cohen (Reference Cohen2010) put it in the New York Times, the “‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback.”Footnote ² Both because the discussion of “culture” is the essential “new” set of arguments in his book, and because this discussion mirrors positions others have taken, in what follows I shall assess Wilson's attempt to “bring culture back in,” contending, with him, that the inclusion of both cultural and social norms (and more generally social structure) is crucial in explanations of poverty—while arguing that the way Wilson characterizes culture precludes its effective use in his argument.

Wilson (2009) argues for a framework “that integrates cultural factors with two types of structural forces: those that directly reflect explicit racial bias and those that do not” (p. 144). While he emphasizes the latter type of structural forces, mainly by focusing on governmental policies and economic transformations that have affected the inner city (pp. 144–147), he devotes more attention to the former type than previously, addressing how racism in the society at large (for him a cultural factor) generates structural constraints for poor African Americans. This racist ethos is one of two forms of culture that he discusses; the other is the set of cultural attributes that may have emerged in the social situations that characterize the inner-city (Black) experience. We will see that his failure to characterize adequately the normative sources of the first, racism, inhibits his ability to satisfactorily characterize the second.

A crucial change in emphasis in More Than Just Race is the reintroduction of racism into the structure of Wilson's dominant argument.Footnote ³ Wilson draws on Lawrence Bobo's discussion of “laissez-faire racism” (Bobo et al., Reference Bobo, Kluegel, Smith, Tuch and Martin1997; Bobo and Smith, Reference Bobo, Smith, Katkin, Landsman and Tyree1998) to characterize racism as a cultural frame, “a perception that blacks are responsible for their own economic predicament and therefore undeserving of special government support” (2009, p. 16). Following discussions with Erik Olin Wright, Wilson (2009) recognizes that this “laissez-faire racism” is experienced structurally by inner-city Blacks (p. 76); for example, “there is persistent racial discrimination in hiring practices, especially for younger and less experienced minority workers” (p. 41).Footnote ⁴ This contention gainsays his earlier analyses.

In previous discussions of employers, Wilson (Reference Wilson1996) equivocated about whether they were simply facing the facts about inner-city Black men, suggesting that their hostile orientations towards these men should not be seen as discriminatory because Black employers as well as White employers shared them (pp. 129–130).Footnote ⁵ Here, in More Than Just Race, his cultural analysis seems to add warrant to this argument. Employers, like many cultural analysts, see inner-city Black men as bearers of cultural attributes that inhibit their ability to take advantage of economic opportunities. Paradoxically, however, in the discussion in this book, he discounts these contentions, suggesting that the employers are discriminating against prospective Black employees. He cannot have it both ways. If inner-city Black workers are embedded in a culture that hinders their ability to take advantage of economic opportunities and inhibits their economic productivity, and if employers recognize this, their reluctance to hire these men is not discriminatory. It is, as they suggest, facing facts.

This conclusion may be problematized consistently in the following way. If we recognize that there is a dominant set of values institutionalized in the United States, typified by individualism, universalism, and egalitarianism (Bellah et al., Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton1985), we can understand the employers' orientation. If they believe that African Americans should be treated universalistically, given equal opportunities, and if they believe, with most Americans, that African Americans have equal opportunities, then the failure of Blacks to “succeed” can only be attributed to traits internal to them and their communities. It does not matter whether these traits focus on dysfunctional families or a culture than inhibits success, when employers express hostility towards the bearers of these traits, they do not see themselves as racist; both Black and White employers see themselves as facing facts.Footnote ⁶

Unfortunately, while Wilson has a certain understanding of this form of racism and of the social values that ground it,Footnote ⁷ he adopts a position that precludes a successful analysis of the values and of their implementation. He agrees with Lamont and Small (Reference Lamont, Small, Lin and Harris2008), who represent the dominant point of view in cultural sociology, that “‘Instead of imputing a shared culture to groups,’ they argue, it is better to examine empirically ‘the range of frames through which people make sense of their reality and how they use them to orient their action’” (Wilson 2009, p. 115).Footnote ⁸ It is, however, only by postulating a dominant set of values in U.S. society that we could explain the emergence and effects of the “new racism.”Footnote ⁹ These same values better explain Wilson's strongest case for the influence of local culture—here the set of cultural attributes that characterize the inner-city Black experience—which is found in his discussion of Sandra Susan Smith's (Reference Smith2010) work, where he finds a “culture of distrust” (p. 149).

Wilson discusses several possible characterizations of inner-city culture, all of which constitute cultures of poverty in that each would have to be transformed before inner-city African Americans would chose to, or be able to, take advantage of increased social-structural opportunities. These range from Mead's (Reference Mead1992) subculture of defeatism, to Patterson's (Reference Patterson, Harrison and Huntington2000, Reference Patterson2006) cool-pose model, to Venkatesh's (Reference Venkatesh2006) Code of Shady Dealings, to a subculture of resistance, “in which individuals resist working in low-skilled and menial jobs because they feel those jobs are undignified or beneath them” (Wilson 2009, p. 149). Paradoxically, in his discussions of each of these “cultures,” Wilson finds that the evidence for them “was mixed at best…” (p. 149). It is only in his discussion of Smith's “culture of distrust” that Wilson finds an inner-city subculture that inhibits (occupational) success.

In Smith's work, Wilson finds “cultural traits that emerge from patterns of intragroup interaction in settings created by racial segregation and discrimination” (2009, p. 147).Footnote ¹⁰ In her (2007) book, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor, Smith finds that a culture of distrust among inner-city Blacks makes them reluctant to refer relatives and friends to their own employers because they fear that their relatives' and friends' work will be substandard and that their own reputations will suffer in consequence. Wilson (2009) contends that “Smith's analysis provides an excellent example of how cultural frames (shared visions of human behavior developed from the micro-level processes of meaning making and decision making) orient action—in this case, the limited use of job referrals” (p. 92). Thus, for Wilson, Smith characterizes a “culture of poverty,” a culture located in the inner city that inhibits the ability of inner-city African Americans to take advantage of available job opportunities.Footnote ¹¹

There is, however, another interpretation of Smith's findings, one that she herself articulates in a more recent essay. There it becomes clearer than in her book (although it is, in my opinion, clear in the book) that inner-city African Americans are acting out societally shared social values, the values that result in the “New Racism.” Smith (Reference Smith2010) writes:

Smith (Reference Smith2010) argues that because most inner-city workers viewed “the U.S. stratification system to be open … , much like cultural deficiency theorists and conservative commentators, they largely understood Black joblessness as a function of defeatism and resistance, individual and cultural” (pp. 33–34). Relevant to the following discussion of “culture” in the inner-city, Smith goes further:

These points of view are not localized. They repeat, often using very similar language, those Wilson's team found among employers in Chicago. They are the consequence of the conjuncture between shared universalistic, individualistic, egalitarian social values, the conviction that equality of opportunity is desirable and is (largely) present, and the social situation (here joblessness) of inner-city Blacks. The convergence in perspective among those in the inner city and the Black and White employers in Chicago cannot be explained in terms of a lack of trust among inner-city African Americans that emerged situationally. It is the consequence of shared social values.

Social values regulate what is desirable. According to Wilson (2009), if folks do not find a good job desirable, they will not seek one when the opportunity to do so arises (p. 153). Interestingly, the evidence Wilson presents suggests that inner-city African Americans share the dominant values present in the society. They believe in the American dream, in the relationship between hard work and success, in the relationship between educational accomplishment and occupational success. In More Than Just Race, Wilson emphasizes that inner-city Blacks view hard work as desirable (pp. 82–84), and he suggests that they act out these values, providing evidence for a dramatic increase in employment, and decrease in poverty, for Blacks when opportunities become available (pp. 57–58).

If this is the case, how can we link an analysis of normative orientations to an explanation of inner-city poverty? We can do so only if we make some conceptual distinctions. If Blacks (for both good and ill) share the dominant values (obligatory characterizations of the desirable) institutionalized in the United States, we may suggest that they also share a distinct subculture (constituting meaning and identity). While the latter is not a culture of poverty—it does not inhibit success due to its inherent attributes—it does inhibit success, due to how people who share it are treated in the larger society.Footnote ¹² In addition, we will have to draw a distinction between normative expectations, which do not change in the face of disappointment, and cognitive expectations, which adapt to social reality, if we are to understand why Blacks committed to (for example) education, may not act out their commitments.

Wilson (2009) presumes that inner-city culture affects outcomes (pp. 43, 56, 97–99, 134–135, 136, 148) because of attributes inherent in that culture:

This is a “culture of poverty” argument (Gould Reference Gould1999). It is, in my opinion, mistaken.

Wilson contends,

But how shall we consider culture? To suggest that cultural traits inhibit success in the larger society is to say nothing about why this is the case. It might be because these traits disable people from functioning educationally or occupationally. This is a culture of poverty. Alternatively, it might be that people with these traits are at a disadvantage in the larger society because of the way people with such traits are treated. They may not be hired or they may be processed differently within job and school situations, differently in ways that inhibit their performance. This is not a culture of poverty argument, but it is one that takes culture into account.

Think about the studies, including Wilson's own (Reference Wilson1996), which suggest that firms hire folks with compatible cultural traits. If inner-city Blacks are perceived as culturally incompatible, then they will not be hired. This is not to suggest that they would perform less well if given the chance, unless inferior performance is itself a result of this cultural divergence within organizations where cultural styles and performances antithetical to “inner-city culture” dominate.

This is where the notion of an “oppositional culture” is important. Often, for example in Fordham and Ogbu's (Reference Fordham and Ogbu1986) work, an oppositional culture is understood to inhibit intrinsically educational or occupational success (Fordham Reference Fordham1988; Gould Reference Gould1999). If, instead, Black culture inhibits success not because of its inherent traits (it is not the case that Blacks devalue educational success), but because of the way a Black man wearing his jeans half-way down his rear end is treated, the question becomes why many Blacks, unlike some immigrant groups, are unwilling to give up their culture and their cultural performances, unwilling to “act White.” The answer, I think, is because for Blacks, this cultural identity and the performances that actualize it (in dress, music, language, speech act, and style) are crucial; they represent, if in a form more fractured than previously, the collective solidarity that has enabled Blacks to endure and to excel culturally. This is an oppositional culture, but only in the sense that Blacks do not want to sacrifice it. As an oppositional culture, it is fully compatible with the values dominant in United States society.

If most inner-city Blacks are committed to the dominant values of their society, why is it that they do not seek to implement those values more successfully? To answer this question, we must distinguish conceptually between normative and cognitive expectations. Social values are normative expectations. If Fred is committed to a value that legitimates, makes obligatory, a social norm, if that norm is violated, Fred does not reconstruct it. Instead, he labels the violator as deviant. In contrast, cognitive expectations change when demonstrated to be false expectations. The inner-city residents Wilson (2009) has studied see few educational and occupational opportunities (cognitive expectations); if repeated attempts to implement a value result in failure, at some point one stops trying (p. 83). Even so, as Newman argues, “low-wage workers in New York City's Harlem neighborhood not only adhere to mainstream values regarding work, but also tend to accept low-skilled, low-wage, often dead-end jobs” (p. 83). Wilson continues, “Alford Young found that although some men associated social mobility with the economic opportunity structure, including race- and class-based discrimination, all of his respondents shared the view that individuals are largely accountable for their failure to advance in society” (2009, p. 83). This represents a clear differentiation between cognitive and normative expectations, but Wilson does not note the difference.Footnote ¹³ Inner-city residents accept dominant values and, consistent with those values, they blame others (and themselves) when they fail to implement them, even when they cease trying to implement them because of a lack of opportunity (which is reflected in their cognitive expectations).

Wilson reinforces this point when he writes:

This is a classic characterization of the difference between cognitive and normative expectations. Inner-city African Americans are committed to American values and they cognitively know how difficult it is for them to implement them. This cognitive expectation is correct, but it would be modified in the face of new opportunities; they would be motivated by their sense of obligation to seize such opportunities if they were available. If greater opportunities (for example, a tighter labor market) appear, the cognitive expectations will change, and inner-city residents will seek to implement their values; they will, as Wilson documents, join the ranks of the employed.

We should not forget a lesson that Robert Merton ([Reference Merton1949] 1968) taught us many years ago: it is even possible that folks in the inner city will seek to implement societally shared values within their opportunity structures. Many of Wilson's jobless work, even though they work outside of legal parameters. Merton's “anomie” was derived from a commitment to shared values in a situation where legitimate opportunities were scarce (Gould Reference Gould, Clark, Modgil and Modgil1990); if it results in deviance, the deviance does not signal a rejection of dominant social values, but, instead, the use of illegal opportunity structures in an attempt to implement those values.

There is one additional issue that Wilson raises that it is important to discuss, if only briefly. In More Than Just Race, Wilson thinks that he has found a way to rebut Herrnstein and Murray's (Reference Herrnstein and Murray1994) The Bell Curve, which contends that Blacks are inferior genetically to Whites. Wilson contends that Herrnstein and Murray's controls for the effects of social environment on IQ (“differences in cognitive ability”) were weak (2009, p. 137). Wilson elaborates: “Simply controlling for differences in family education, father's occupation, and household income hardly captures differences in cumulative environmental experiences. Herrnstein and Murray did not provide measures of the cumulative and durable effects of race, including the effects of prolonged residence in racially segregated neighborhoods” (p. 137). Wilson finds in Robert Sampson's work on the intergenerational effects of poverty a way to characterize the impact of culture and how it interacts with social forces to capture these consequences of poverty over several generations.

Stated simply, Sampson et al. (Reference Sampson, Sharkey and Raudenbush2008) have argued that multigenerational poverty diminishes “verbal ability”Footnote ¹⁴ in African American children. Relatedly, Patrick Sharkey and Felix Elwert (Reference Sharkey and Elwert2009) argue that multigenerational neighborhood poverty affects negatively the “cognitive ability”Footnote ¹⁵ of inner-city Blacks. Wilson treats these as cultural consequences of concentrated poverty. Emphasizing the environmental determinants of cognitive ability, Sharkey and Elwert (Reference Sharkey and Elwert2009) write: “While there is little doubt that cognitive ability—whether conceived as intelligence, IQ, or simply performance on tests of cognitive skills—has a genetic component, there is also virtual consensus that development is sensitive to the family, school, and social environment” (p. 10). These authors find that a family's exposure to poverty across two generations lowers children's “cognitive ability” by more than one-half standard deviation (Sharkey and Elwert, Reference Sharkey and Elwert2009, pp. 4, 38).Footnote ¹⁶

What does this mean? If we accept this conclusion at face value, it suggests that inner-city African Americans are less cognitively able than those who have not suffered intergenerational poverty. We ought not expect that non-discriminating employers would want, ceteris paribus, to hire them given that they might be expected to perform less well than otherwise equivalent employees. We would expect that they would do less well in school than otherwise equivalent peers. While their deficiencies, at least those attributable to intergenerational poverty, are not genetic, it would not matter in terms of our explanation of their failure as due, at least in part, to their cognitive inability.

We ought not accept this set of “findings” at face value. As Sharkey and Elwert (Reference Sharkey and Elwert2009) suggest, they may refer to no more than “performance on tests of cognitive skills” (p. 10). They certainly conflate a crucial distinction between a cognitive capacity, which indicates a generalized ability to master a set of activities of a particular type, and specific performances or skills that are possible given this capacity. These capacities are ordered hierarchically and mastered within particular types of social relationship. Contrary, however, to the implications of the intergenerational poverty research, the social relationships that foster the capacity to think hypothetically and deductively are virtually universal in society; they consist in autonomous peer relationships where through cooperation and contention adolescents mature cognitively.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, the indices we use to measure these capacities, “cognitive abilities,” often show them to be correlated with class and race. This is the case because capacities can be measured only through performances and the performances measured are often more associated with certain social and cultural positions than with others.

The performances mastered by inner-city residents differ from those mastered by middle-class Whites and Blacks, but their capacities are the same. There is congruence in capacity but divergence in performance, and this divergence in performance may well be related to differential educational and occupational success insofar as schools and firms rely on certain skills/performances more than on others, and insofar as these skills/performances are differentially distributed across class and race. No doubt, some of these skills are essential to the performance of relevant tasks; others, however, are implicated in the structural bias that often confronts inner-city residents when they venture into “middle-class” organizations.

We may conclude where Wilson concludes, with a few comments about social policy. Drawing on Bruce Western's (Reference Western2006) work, Wilson emphasizes that the increase in incarceration rates for inner-city Blacks is due, at least in part, to a change in attitude toward punishment.Footnote ¹⁸ He suggests that these (cultural) attitudes must be addressed in the formulation of public policy. Insofar as these attitudes focus on race, and insofar as race is relevant to the generation of social problems, our arguments must include the discussion of race. One advantage, Wilson contends, of discussing cultural orientations is that these orientations can change. He finds inspiration for his position in then presidential candidate Barack Obama's 2008 Speech on Race (March 18, 2008), which Wilson views as a model for this framing.

These discussions are not comprehensive; it is difficult to evaluate them without seeing them more fully elaborated, and without a consideration of the political effects of Obama's position, which is beyond the scope of this essay. It is difficult to disagree with Wilson that:

It is less than clear, however, what conclusions we should draw from these contentions. Wilson argues that:

This simple suggestion raises two issues. The first reinforces my previous argument about the importance of conceptualizing shared social values. Surely this is what Wilson is doing, contrary to his own contention, when evoking the “values of individualism and the work ethic” (p. 140, quoting Bobo and Kluegel, Reference Bobo and Kluegel1993). Second, we can all support “opportunity-enhancing affirmative action programs” (in part because of our social values)—but what if these are insufficient, what if, because race matters, because there are cultural differences between inner-city Blacks and middle-class Blacks and Whites, we need old-fashioned affirmative action programs, for example, college admission programs that seek out exceptionally able students who do not have conventional training and may, perhaps, lack certain conventional skills? What if we need programs to restructure organizations to fully include Blacks, Latinos, and others (Gould Reference Gould1992a)? What if this full inclusion is possible only when we stop asking Blacks to “act White,” when we come to value aspects of Black cultural identity and expect that the accommodations Blacks make to Whites will be reciprocated in the accommodations Whites make towards Blacks? The problem here is obvious. Sometimes the policies we need may not be the policies that garner support. Sometimes the policies we need will not be legitimate in terms of egalitarian values, but will call for a development of those values (into equitable values) (Gould Reference Gould1996a, Reference Gould1996b). Wilson gives us no direction when this is the case.

More Than Just Race is part of a more general movement to include culture in discussions of inner-city poverty. In my opinion, it is less successful than it might have been because it adopts certain verities implicit in current conceptualizations of culture. Those conceptualizations are, as I have argued elsewhere, empiricist and reductionist (Gould Reference Gould2009). Wilson is correct; culture is important. It is also correct that a theoretically viable conceptualization of culture (along with other aspects of normative orientation) combats, rather than, as is the case too often in Wilson's argument, recreates “culture of poverty” arguments, arguments that suggest that African American culture intrinsically inhibits educational and occupational success. We need, as Wilson recognizes, to work towards the transformation of the social opportunity structure that confronts the inner-city poor; insofar as inner-city African Americans share dominant social values, and insofar as these changed opportunities are manifest, African Americans' cognitive expectations will be altered and their social values will motivate them to take advantage of perceived opportunities. Even so, let us hope that we can find a way for them to preserve their cultural identity, enabling them to succeed through a process of mutual accommodation.