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Thursday, March 19th

W. W. Norton

Price: $24.95

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON

discusses

More than Just Race:

Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

Harvard Book Store and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies are pleased to welcome preeminent Harvard sociologist WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON for a discussion of his newest book, More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, in which he presents a new framework for understanding racial inequality.

In this provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, in the newest book of the Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Professor Wilson applies a new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African American family.

Though the discussion of racial inequality is typically ideologically polarized—conservatives emphasize cultural factors like worldviews and behaviors while liberals emphasize institutional forces—Wilson dares to consider both institutional and cultural factors as causes of the persistence of racial inequality. He reaches the controversial conclusion that, while structural and cultural forces are inextricably linked, public policy can change the racial status quo only by reforming the institutions that reinforce it.

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617.661.1515

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617.661.1424 ex.1

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William Julius Wilson is a University Professor at Harvard University, president emeritus of the American Sociological Association, and the author of numerous books, including the award-winning The Declining Significance of Race. He lives in Cambridge.