William Julius Wilson

William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist known for his structural analysis of urban poverty and racial inequality in the United States. In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) he argued that the concentrated poverty of inner-city Black communities resulted less from individual or cultural failings than from structural economic changes, particularly the deindustrialization and loss of manufacturing jobs from American cities, combined with the outmigration of the Black middle class, which together stripped poor neighborhoods of jobs, institutions, and social networks. His work shifted much of the debate over urban poverty toward economic and structural explanations and made him one of the most cited sociologists of his generation.