The next few years represent a pivotal period in national policy concerning the urban poor, according to William Julius Wilson, a nationally recognized sociologist and authority on race relations and urban poverty in America."Neighborhoods in which people are poor but employed are very different from those in which people are poor and jobless," says Wilson, the Malcolm Weiner Professor of Social Policy at Harvard University.His research shows that many of the problems faced by today's inner-city ghetto neighborhoods -- crime, family separation, welfare and low levels of social organization -- are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. He also says that the emergence of jobless ghettos has also aggravated racial tensions in urban areas. Wilson will address "The New Social Inequality and Race-Based Public Policy" in a UC Davis lecture on Thursday, Feb. 13, at 4 p.m. in the University Club. The author of several books on race relations, Wilson is a member of numerous scholarly organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center's winter symposium speaker.