erty expropriation, financial discrimination and, for many decades, a legalized system of racial segregation.” The inequality doesn’t stop at the front door of ghettos. It does reach the property owners and investors, which are black. What is the black underclass? Is it a class segment, a class or a useful term at all? Who do we consider to be a black underclass? Would it be all the poor useless displaced in the inner city? Because if this is so than how can you take a single parent mother and a drug dealer that live on the same block? While she rides the bus to get to work or the grocery store the drug dealer is driving a brand new Lexus truck just to ride the streets. So what is class? Pryor defines class as: “the designation of a group into which persons are placed by either objective criteria, subjective criteria, self-identification, or mixed criteria. Depending upon the theory of social stratification that is proposed, ‘class’ can be defined in terms of ‘objective’ criteria (for example income, wealth, position), ‘subjective’ criteria (solidarity in terms of social or economic interests; or self-identification with some group) or mixed criteria (for example, evaluation by others in society in terms of esteem or some other scale of value). Depending upon the theory of social structure that is proposed, ‘class’ can be defined in terms of a group that is struggling together to change the structure; or statistically in terms of the position or power of the group concerning the operations of the societal causation that is proposed, ‘class’ can embrace a difference defined terms of a single criterion or of some combination of set of criteria.” Class deals with political economy relations external and internal in the black society. The criteria of self-identification and wealth, income social structure, and their roles in the economy, and the class rankin...
