Poor Reason / Culture still doesn’t explain poverty

[proud2BlibKansan]

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Cohen uncritically accepts two myths woven by William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, and repeated by his acolytes: first, Moynihan was clobbered for bringing to light compromising facts about black families, and second, that this torrent of criticism constrained a generation of social scientists from investigating the relation between culture and poverty, for fear that it would be pilloried for “blaming the victim.” Thus, a third, patently self-serving myth: thanks to some intrepid scholars who reject political correctness, it is now permissible to consider the role that culture plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities.

These myths add up to something—a perverse obfuscation of American racial history. They suggest that for four decades academia has abetted a censorial form of anti-racism that prevented serious research into the persistence of poverty among black Americans. If only, the mythmakers insist, we stopped worrying about offending people, we could acknowledge that there is something amiss in black culture—not, as the politically correct would have it, the politics of class—and that this explains racial inequality.

Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”

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No longer was the nuclear family, with its patriarchal foundations, the unquestioned societal norm. The blatantly tendentious language that pervaded the Moynihan report—“broken homes” and “illegitimate births”—was purged from the professional lexicon. More important, feminist scholars forced us to reassess single parenting. In her 1973 study All Our Kin, Carol Stack showed how poor single mothers develop a domestic network consisting of that indispensable grandmother, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and a patchwork of neighbors and friends who provide mutual assistance with childrearing and the other exigencies of life. By comparison, the prototypical nuclear family, sequestered in a suburban house, surrounded by hedges and cut off from neighbors, removed from the pulsating vitality of poor urban neighborhoods, looks rather bleak. As a black friend once commented, “I didn’t know that blacks had weak families until I got to college.”

more . . . http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.1/steinberg.php

[Teaser]

1. All human cultures are defective

.

[xchrom]

2. anything but class warfare. can't be that -- ever. nt

[Teaser]

3. the original article(s) isn't/aren't necessarily that bad

some of the spin put on it by Cohen is stupid, but the studies themselves are interesting and probably worthy of consideration.

[MadHound]

4. The largest group of poor people are white,

Always has been. So why are we out there finding out if there is something amiss in white culture?

This is so much nonsense.

[Teaser]

5. "there is something amiss in white culture?"

bet you can find some researchers doing this too.

Don't believe the hype article. The researchers covered seem responsible. The Cohen article isn't fair to them.

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. That is discussed in the linked article

:)

[dkf]

6. What I don't understand is how we expect high school dropouts to earn a livable wage

Competing with illegal immigrants who often get paid under the table. If we want to combat poverty, don't we need to ensure that we don't undercut American citizens ability to earn a decent salary?

Next, if there is a culture at home which may not contribute positively, isn't a society's only other intervention in a child's life through the educational system? Where else would a child learn how to be diligent, responsible, resourceful, etc?

[proud2BlibKansan]

8. We need to provide job training programs in high school

Not only do kids learn a trade, they also have a reason to stay in school. The current hyperfocus on testing and college for all has resulted in a strictly academic focus which has pushed out vocational programs. That auto mechanics class was the reason more than a few kids didn't drop out.

[dkf]

11. My ex was an auto mechanic and that isn't an easy job.

If you haven't done decently well in school, auto mechanics is probably too much.

Of course if all you do is labor and have someone else do the diagnosing and thinking then I guess you can get along without much of an education. But you can't do much without the discipline that gets you to work every day.

[proud2BlibKansan]

16. Precisely my point

We need to give kids a reason to come to school so that they build up that discipline. An interest in auto mechanics is the reason that future mechanic pays attention in Math class. Tell him he is going to college (which is perhaps NOT his goal) and he needs the math to pass the test to get into college, and you lose him.

Motivation is key.

[dkf]

19. Do we only lose kids when they are old enough to realize they have an interest in a particular job?

I would have thought the habits come earlier than that.

[proud2BlibKansan]

21. You'll have to show me where I said that

:crazy:

[dkf]

24. I'm wondering if they are already lost before we can keep them in school by offering training.

because they don't have the foundation even if they have built up the interest. If the discipline wasn't there I'm the beginning what are the odds they can get their act together to do it?

[proud2BlibKansan]

26. Intrinsic motivation is a remarkable thing

I've personally seen many kids who weren't academic stars in elementary school go on to have academic success in high school because they finally found something they wanted to learn about. Just hooked up with one of my formers on FB not long ago. He was a mess in elementary school but is a very successful businessman today. He finally found something he enjoyed that was offered in high school.

Sadly, we are eliminating vocational programs. I think that's a huge mistake.

[leftstreet]

9. Stop paying unlivable wages

Focus on the diligence, responsibility, and resourcefulness of the greedy capitalists.

[dkf]

14. Or consumers could responsibly buy from companies that pay a livable wage.

How do you expect us to force corporations to pay a livable wage?

[leftstreet]

15. So we should buy all of our consumer goods from Wall Street CEOs?

:eyes:

Please stop blaming the serfs for the crimes of the Ruling Class

[proud2BlibKansan]

17. LOL!

[dkf]

18. Costco treats their employees pretty well.

[leftstreet]

20. Wall Street treats its CEOs better. I think I'll get my lettuce from Jamie Dimon

It would be the responsible thing to do

[proud2BlibKansan]

22. I'm heading over to Goldman Sachs to pick up some tomatoes

[leftstreet]

23. That's so responsible of you. Do NOT buy produce from Shitibank

I've heard they're not good corporate citizens

(insert unicorn-shitting-skittles smiley)

[dkf]

25. Oh I'm sure you do.

Bet he has something to do with the funding of the growers, or the transportation, or the grocery store somewhere along the way.

[frazzled]

10. I'm glad he mentioned Tally's Corner

It was a book I was assigned in a sociology course in college--a course I would never have taken but for the necessity of filling what we then called a "distribution requirement" in the social sciences. That was more than 40 years ago (it was a new book then!). And it's one of those books that made a real impact on me. (We could have a whole discussion about the importance of a liberal arts education that exposes students to vast and sundry disciplines and topics --something that has been largely lost in this country.)

Many scholars have challenged the notion of culture as an independent, causal factor in generating poverty, and none more effectively than Elliot Liebow in his 1967 study, Tally’s Corner. Liebow’s subjects were men who had neither regular jobs nor stable families and took refuge on the streetcorner where they devised “a shadow system of values” to shield themselves from a profound sense of personal failure.
Liebow did not deny culture—indeed, he documented it in scrupulous detail. However, he insisted that the streetcorner man was not a carrier of an independent cultural tradition. To be sure, there were obvious similarities between parents and children, but Liebow held that these were not the product of cultural transmission, but rather reflected the fact that “the son goes out and independently experiences the same failures, in the same areas, and for much the same reasons as his father.” Thus, it is not their culture that needs to be changed, but rather a political economy that fails to provide jobs that pay a living wage to millions of the nation’s poor, along with a system of occupational apartheid that has excluded a whole people from entire job sectors throughout American history.

Click on the link in the article the OP has posted (it leads to the google books replica of the book) and read it, because, if my memory serves me right, it is not only an important sociological study but so beautifully written (and researched) that you will enjoy it as literature.

[The Magistrate]

12. Indeed, Sir: An Excellent Work, That Has Lost None Of Its Value With Passing Time

[Davis_X_Machina]

13. The single largest cause of poverty...

...as an old Jesuit prof of mine wad wont to say, is a lack of money.

Hence things like La Bolsa Familia.