Bheki Sibiya, who runs Business Unity South Africa, a business group with close ties to government and organized labor, said more of the truly disadvantaged must benefit.

But giving a candidate points on whatever scale is used simply because the student is African-American is unjust if it means turning down candidates of other races who are truly disadvantaged.

I had become a convert to William Julius Wilson's argument, articulated in his book The Truly Disadvantaged, that there were no race-specific solutions to hard-core unemployment and poverty.

William Julius Wilson and "The Truly Disadvantaged"

William Julius Wilson's books, The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), are popular accounts of the black urban underclass.

In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson highlights a conglomerate of factors in the last half of the twentieth century leading to a growing urban underclass.

However, programs to combat inequality in American society ought not be restricted to the truly disadvantaged.

In "the Truly Disadvantaged" Wilson also argued against Charles Murray's theory of welfare causing poverty.

In The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson coined these processes as "concentration effects."

In a cruel reversal, it is the white guy, with no tradition to call his own, no history but one laden with guilt and apology, who is "truly disadvantaged."