Abstract
In his criticism of scholarly and public utilization of the term underclass, Herbert Gans helped to initiate new and more complex thinking about both the kinds of people that constitute America's most disenfranchised urban constituency and the ways in which more privileged Americans have striven to make sense of them. In forwarding his criticism of the term, Gans helped establish a template for ethnographic and qualitative explorations of America's urban poor that breaks with a rigid and vulgar social problems framing and, instead, invites more provocative and more accurate assessments of the agency of such people. In doing so, he has encouraged recent efforts to offer new framings of this population, which have facilitated new cultural projects in qualitative studies of the African American urban poor. This article briefly reviews Gans's criticism of the term underclass, and then elucidates how that criticism relates to some contemporary scholarly efforts to consider people who would be characterized as underclass as more complex cultural actors—and, indeed, who often are more complicated social beings—than is implied by the label underclass.
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