The Ecology of Inequality: The Rise of the African-American Underclass
![handle is hein.journals/hblj8 and id is 9 raw text is: THE ECOLOGY OF INEQUALITY: THE RISE
OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN
UNDERCLASS
Roy L. Brooks*
I. INTRODUCTION
One' of the great challenges facing civil rights scholars, sociologists
(particularly poverty experts), and race theorists today is to attempt to
explain and eliminate what is beginning to look like a permanent un-
derclass in African-American society.' In the post 1960s era, the advent
of a disproportionately large number of African-Americans in the group
comprising the poorest of the poor in our nation would appear to be a
kind of non sequitur. Those who engineered the Second Reconstruction
certainly did not envision an African-American underclass. These social
reformers passionately believed that African-Americans could rise en
masse to a higher standard of living solely upon the relentless wave of
civil rights laws and integrationist impulses that swept through the
nation like a warm breeze in the 1950s and 1960s.2 They gave little
thought to the possibility that there might be a negative (in addition to
a positive) nexus between the civil rights laws and policies that grew
out of Brown v. Board of Education3 and the socioeconomic problems of
African-Americans.
*Professor of Law, University of Minnesota; B.A., University of Connecticut, 1972;
J.D., Yale Law School, 1975.
1. Statistics on the racial composition of the underclass are hard to find, in part because
the size of the underclass is a matter of considerable debate. See infra text accom-
panying note 14. It might be useful to note, however, that based on the most
recent population statistics, 33.8% of African-Americans and 14.8% of whites belong
to the American poverty class. See U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS (CURRENT POPU-
LATION REPORTS), MONEY INCOME AND POVERTY STATUS IN THE UNITED STATES:
1988, SERIES P60, No. 166, ADVANCE DATA FROM THE MARCH 1989 CUmRNT POP-
ULATION SURVEY (1989), at 23-24, table 2. If estimates of the American underclass
range from 60% to 5% of the poverty class, see infra text accompanying note 14,
then it stands to reason that the sizes of the African-American and white under-
classes range from 20.3% to 1.7% of poor African-Americans and 8.9% to 0.7% of
poor whites, respectively.
2. See generally CHISTOP -ER LAScH, THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN 402 (1991). At the
end of the 1960s, some civil rights leaders, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr.,
came to believe that civil rights and racial integration, while effective strategies for
redressing de jure discrimination and segregation in the largely rural South, were
insufficient remedies for dealing with de facto discrimination and segregation in
the urban North. King himself privately advocated socialism as a necessary means
for resolving the economic problems of African-Americans in the North. Id. at 404.
3. 347 U.S. 483 (1954) [hereinafter Brown I].](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hblj8&div=5&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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The Ecology of Inequality: The Rise of the African-American Underclass
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