More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

William Julius Wilson (bill_wilson @harvard.edu) is the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University and the author of several award-winning books, including The Declining Significance of Race (1980); The Truly Disadvantaged (1987); and When Work Disappears (2006). His précis is drawn from More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (W.W. Norton Co., 2009 – 190 pp., $24.95). In More than Just Race, I hope to further our understanding of the complex and interrelated factors that continue to contribute to racial inequality in the United States. In the process, I call for reexamining the way social scientists discuss two important factors associated with racial inequality—social structure and culture. Although the book highlights the experiences of inner-city African Americans, it should be emphasized that the complexities of understanding race and racial inequality in America are not limited to research on blacks. Formal and informal aspects of inequality have also victimized Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans. In this book, however, I use the research on inner-city African Americans to elaborate my analytic framework because they have been the central focus of the structure-versus-culture dispute. Taking Culture Seriously