lowest possible rung on a class ladder. According to Wright, the underclass are oppressed. He believes this is because they are generally denied access to the labor market, and thus they cannot rise above their status easily but also thus are "not consistently exploited" because the opportunity for their economic exploitation is minimal for the classes above. Unlike the working class, which he believes is routinely exploited for their labor power by higher classes, the underclass in Wright's view, do not hold the labor power worthy of exploitation. Wright argues his highly doctrinaire opinion of class malevolence that: This quote partly concerns the spaces and locations for the underclass and reflects the leftist view of the other classes as acting against the underclass in unison, as opposed to other sociological views seeing class actors behaving as individuals reacting to individual incentives within society. Focus on space and place The underclass generally occupies specific zones in the city. Thus, the notion of an underclass is popular in Urban Sociology, and particularly in accounts of urban poverty. The term, underclass, and the phrase, urban underclass, are, for the most part, used interchangeably. Studies concerning the post-civil rights African American ghetto often include a discussion of the urban underclass. Many writings concerning the underclass, particularly in the U.S., are urban-focused. William Julius Wilson's books, The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), are popular accounts of the black urban underclass. Wilson defines the underclass as "a massive population at the very bottom of the social ladder plagued by poor education and low-paying jobs." He generally limits his discussion to those trapped in the post-civil-rights ghetto in the American rust belt (see "Potential Causes and Proposed Solutions" section of this entry for a more detailed summary of Wilson on the underclass). Elijah Anderson's, Streetwise (1990), employs ethnographic methods to study a gentrifying neighborhood, "The Village" (pseudonym), bordering a black ghetto, "Northton" (pseudonym), in an American city. Anderson provides the following description of the underclass in this ghetto: Focus on behavior Lawrence M. Mead defines the underclass as a group that is poor and behaviorally deficient. He describes the underclass as dysfunctional. He provides the following definition in his 1986 book, Beyond Entitlement, Ken Auletta, often credited as the primary journalist who brought the underclass term to the forefront of the American consciousness, describes the American underclass as non-assimilated Americans, and he