Books, Arts & Manners: Twice as Truly Decadent

Twice as Less, by Eleanor Wilson Orr (Norton, 240 pp., $15.95)

The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, by William Julius Wilson (Chicago, 254 The debate over the black underclass is only now recovering from the reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Black Family. Published in 1965, Moynihan’ s book was an early, frank attempt to show the connection between black poverty and the dissolving black family. There were charges of racism, and many of Moynihan’s sympathizers were intimidated into disavowing his work. Except from conservatives, little of value has been heard on the subject since. Two new books, however, show modest signs of a fresh willingness on the part of American liberals to participate in some open debate on the problem of what really is keeping blacks down. Both Eleanor Wilson Orr and William Julius Wilson point out structural defects in black culture (culture in T. S. Eliot’s broader sense of “all the characteristic activities of a people”). Both offer some hard-headed diagnoses. But neither has the courage to demand that black culture be radically altered to allow its entrance into mainstream American culture.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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Twice as Less, by Eleanor Wilson Orr (Norton, 240 pp., $15.95)

The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, by William Julius Wilson (Chicago, 254 The debate over the black underclass is only now recovering from the reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Black Family. Published in 1965, Moynihan’ s book was an early, frank attempt to show the connection between black poverty and the dissolving black family. There were charges of racism, and many of Moynihan’s sympathizers were intimidated into disavowing his work. Except from conservatives, little of value has been heard on the subject since. Two new books, however, show modest signs of a fresh willingness on the part of American liberals to participate in some open debate on the problem of what really is keeping blacks down. Both Eleanor Wilson Orr and William Julius Wilson point out structural defects in black culture (culture in T. S. Eliot’s broader sense of “all the characteristic activities of a people”). Both offer some hard-headed diagnoses. But neither has the courage to demand that black culture be radically altered to allow its entrance into mainstream American culture.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.