American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

Wilson first attracted national attention as a young scholar at the University of Chicago with a book whose very title, The Declining Significance of Race, provoked criticism from the black community. His point, it turned out, was that there was no such thing as a “black community,” because a class division separated middle- and working-class blacks from inner-city blacks. The former were beneficiaries of the civil rights movement and affirmative action programs. The latter were a category unto themselves, mired in zones of concentrated poverty beyond the reach of liberal legislation, a permanent black proletariat. In effect, there were two black narratives: one group, a slight majority of the black population, was advancing, albeit slowly and incrementally, into the mainstream of American society; the other group, a sizable minority, remained outside the pale without any prospects for social or economic salvation.