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Introduction: The contribution of William Julius Wilson

This article introduces the essays in this symposium on the impact of William Julius Wilson’s scholarship on the work produced by a cohort of his former students. These former students, all scholars of colour, have positioned race and racism as centrally in their research as they have urban poverty and social inequality. Consequently, these essays reflect an initial attempt to respond to a critical question that has endured throughout the twenty-year advance in scholarly inquiry into American urban poverty; that is, why has this research not yielded more attention to race or racism as explanatory variables for social outcomes rather than to human capital attributes or to the creation of policy initiatives that assume a liberal disposition on race in the United States. Among other objectives, these essays represent a collective attempt to begin comenting the bridge between the fields of race and race relations research and urban poverty research.