No blacks are making it except Jackie Robinson. Now the difficult structural and racial barriers are reinforced by psychological defeatism. Finally, there are the newest dimensions to poverty, the precise boundaries of which are not yet known. Sweatshops utilizing immigrants from the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America have re-emerged in almost every major American city during the last decade. Added to this we have, for the first time in the postwar period, the poverty of industrial workers who have lost their jobs and farmers who are losing their farms.
Poverty is also more difficult to deal with today than it was in the sixties.
In the 1960s, blue-collar jobs were expanding. Auto employment didn't peak until 1978. Twenty thousand women got jobs producing steel in the 1970s. But, today, the combination of internationalization, corporate flight, corporate merger and corporate rationalization has decimated the manufacturing sector. The downward spiral of regional poverty that I saw in Appalachia when I first wrote The Other America could now be applied to a region extending from Pennsylvania and New York to Indiana and Illinois.