As Wilson himself wrote, The Truly Disadvantaged was a research and book project written in no small part in response to the critical response to his previous book entitled The Declining Significance of Race. In short, Wilson perceived that both conservative and liberal critics focused on what he considered to be the less important argument of that book—the relative affluence of a growing black middle class—while ignoring his warnings about the growth of an urban black underclass. So, as he writes in his preface to the second edition of The Truly Disadvantaged, the book is his attempt to spell out two things: the urgency of the problems confronting what he calls the "ghetto underclass" and the "policy implications" of his work. Wilson is not a conservative, but many of his arguments were intended to, in his words, "challenge liberal orthodoxy." Throughout the book, he pushes back on liberal commentators in the 1970s and 1980s that called for race-specific policies to address these issues, but the book should be understood as a reaction to criticisms and popular misreadings (especially by politicians) of his previous work.

Wilson denies that race can be used to explain many of the conditions that face urban neighborhoods, so he decries what he calls, in chapter five of the book, "race-specific policies." In short, he claims that these policies are held up to be the "most appropriate solution to the problems of all blacks regardless of economic class." These policies, which removed racial barriers to education in particular, have had an ironic effect, according to Wilson: by elevating a small subset of African American men and women who began with a certain amount of wealth and education, they convinced many Americans that removal of barriers was all that was necessary to achieve equality of opportunity. In the meantime, men and women mired in the structural and generational poverty of the inner cities were scarcely helped. He writes:

Affirmative Action . . . applied merely according to racial or ethnic group membership tend to benefit the relatively advantaged segments of the designated groups. The truly deprived members may not be helped by such programs.

Throughout the book, which is more of a collection of essays than a unified monograph, Wilson stresses the political implications and realities of such programs. He argues that their unintended consequence was eviscerating public support for social welfare programs by making them, in effect, racialized. They also tended to treat poverty as if it was entirely environmental, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for people who grew up in the ghettos. In short, Wilson's book is an argument for a "program of economic reform designed to promote full employment and balanced economic growth."