ABSTRACT
In her timely section on the politics of sustained joblessness, Jennifer Hochschild states that “William Julius Wilson, like most sociologists or economists who study persistent joblessness in local communities, have largely neglected politics”. Nonetheless, given the continued and significant interracial disparities in income and neighbourhoods, race remains a dominant factor in the United States (US). Hochschild maintains that many of the Brexit “Leave” voters and the voters who supported Donald Trump in the Presidential campaign have similar profiles–whites experiencing economic anxiety and fearful of immigration. She states that increasingly jobless or fearful white town dwellers in the US and England are using the electoral arena to express their perhaps similar fury, fear, and alienation. The chapter argues that programmes created in response to these concerns, despite being race-neutral, “would disproportionately benefit the inner-city jobless poor, but they would also benefit large segments of the remaining population, including the white population”.
