At 80, W.J. Wilson, scholar of race and class, looks ahead

Wilson, who turned 80 in December, spoke with The Associated Press about his decades of thinking and writing about race, class, education and poverty and about how his ideas run through today's news stories, whether on income inequality or the Black Lives Matter movement.

Combining field work, historical research and ideas rooted in experience and scholarship, Wilson has shaped a clear narrative:

Over the past 60 years, black neighborhoods have been devastated by the departure of the middle class, the elimination of manufacturing jobs, declines in wages and cuts in government support.

The poorest areas — what Wilson has called "extreme poverty" — suffer from a self-reinforcing absence of role models, networking opportunities, transportation and social and training skills.

If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation.

"Wilson virtually invented contemporary urban sociology and reinvigorated the study of the ghetto poor," says Michael Eric Dyson, the best-selling author and professor of sociology at Georgetown University.

In 1965, the so-called "Moynihan Report" documented a rise in single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births among blacks, an observation that led to sharp reactions from the left and right.

A recipient of dozens of honorary doctorates, he is busy with one of his most ambitious studies, Multidimensional Inequality in the 21st Century, a research project on poverty covering everything from the labor market to criminal justice.

Wilson calls the Affordable Care Act a profound benefit for poor blacks, and he was pleased with the funding from the stimulus package of 2009.

At Wilberforce University in Ohio, one of the nation's oldest black colleges, Wilson found a mentor in the sociology teacher Maxwell Brooks, who inspired Wilson to think closely about his childhood growing up in poverty and experiencing racial discrimination in a small town with few African-American families.

Wilson was among the first generation of black scholars to benefit from the civil rights legislation of the 1960s — "right place, right time," he says — breaking into a field once almost exclusively white.

In his landmark "The Declining Significance of Race," published in 1978, he contended that advances in civil rights legislation and the expansion of the black middle class meant that economic issues were surpassing racial ones as the greatest challenges for the black community.

Asked what programs he would like to see implemented, regardless of their likelihood, Wilson says that he'd like to see a substantial expansion of Promise Neighborhoods funding and believes more solutions will arise from his Multidimensional Inequality project.