Editing Underclass (section)

===Derogatory and demonizing language===
Many who reject the underclass concept suggest that the ''underclass'' term has been transformed into a codeword to refer to poor inner-city blacks.<ref>{{cite book|last=Wacquant|first=Loïc|title=Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality|url=https://archive.org/details/urbanoutcastscom00wacq|url-access=limited|year=2008|publisher=Polity Press|location=Malden, MA|isbn=978-0-7456-3124-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/urbanoutcastscom00wacq/page/n49 89]}}</ref> For example, Hilary Silver highlights a moment when [[David Duke]], former [[Grand Wizard]] of the [[KKK]], campaigned for Louisiana Governor by complaining about the "welfare underclass".<ref name="Silver" /> The underclass concept has been politicized, with those from the political left arguing that joblessness and insufficient welfare provided are causes of underclass conditions while the political right employ the underclass term to refer to welfare dependency and moral decline.<ref name="Morris">{{cite book|last=Morris|first=Hilary|title="Dangerous Classes: Neglected Aspects of the Underclass Debate" in Urban Poverty and the Underclass (edited by Enzo Mingione)|year=1996|publisher=Blackwell Publishers|location=Cambridge, Massachusetts|isbn=0-631-20037-1|pages=[https://archive.org/details/urbanpovertyunde0000unse/page/160 160–175]|url=https://archive.org/details/urbanpovertyunde0000unse/page/160}}</ref> Many sociologists suggest that this latter rhetoric – the right-wing perspective – became dominant in mainstream accounts of the underclass during the later decades of the twentieth-century.<ref name="Morris" />

[[Herbert Gans]] is one of the most vocal critics of the underclass concept. Gans suggests that American journalists, inspired partly by academic writings on the "[[culture of poverty]]", reframed ''underclass'' from a structural term (in other words, defining the underclass in reference to conditions of social/economic/political structure) to a behavioral term (in other words, defining the underclass in reference to rational choice and/or in reference to a subculture of poverty).<ref name="Gans" /> Gans suggests that the word "underclass" has become synonymous with impoverished blacks that behave in criminal, deviant, or "just non-middle-class ways".<ref name="Gans" />

[[Loïc Wacquant]] deploys a relatively similar critique by arguing that ''underclass'' has become a blanket term that frames urban blacks as behaviorally and culturally deviant.<ref name="outcasts" /> Wacquant notes that underclass status is imposed on urban blacks from outside and above them (e.g., by journalists, politicians, and academics), stating that "underclass" is a derogatory and "negative label that nobody claims or invokes except to pin it on to others".<ref>{{cite book|last=Wacquant|first=Loïc|title=Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality|url=https://archive.org/details/urbanoutcastscom00wacq|url-access=limited|year=2008|publisher=Polity Press|location=Malden, MA|isbn=978-0-7456-3124-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/urbanoutcastscom00wacq/page/n28 48]}}</ref> And, although the underclass concepts is homogenizing, Wacquant argues that underclass imagery differentiates on gender lines, with the underclass male being depicted as a violent "gang banger", a physical threat to public safety, and the underclass female being generalized as "welfare mother" (also see [[welfare queen]]), a "moral assault on American values".<ref>{{cite book|last=Wacquant|first=Loïc|title=Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality|url=https://archive.org/details/urbanoutcastscom00wacq|url-access=limited|year=2008|publisher=Polity Press|location=Malden, MA|isbn=978-0-7456-3124-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/urbanoutcastscom00wacq/page/n26 44]}}</ref>