underclass

He likewise examines the on- and offstage performance and reception of the English-speaking underclasses on both sides of the Atlantic, examining 'the ways that American theatre reinvents found materials to produce its own dramatic scenes' (4).

How would he go about working for today's various underclasses in American society?

The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present.

It is, thankfully, unthinkable today that the black middle class would respond to this call in the old Walter Lippmann-Robert Moses manner, by publicly attacking the underclasses (though in private it's often a different story).