AthenaAwakened
Contributor
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2003
- Messages
- 5,338
- Location
- Right behind you so ... BOO!
- Basic Beliefs
- non-theist, anarcho-socialist
Is there a culture of poverty?
The answer may be "Not really"
The answer may be "Not really"
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/the-poverty-of-culture/... every aspect of that narrative has been subjected to withering criticism by social scientists over the last thirty years. It is not simply that the aspects of black culture that the narrative identifies have been shaped by structural forces like racism; for the most part, they either don’t exist at all, or else are reflective of norms and values that are commonplace in the United States — and are not, therefore, unique features of the “black community.” Every component of the culture of poverty narrative is a phantasm, a projection of racial fantasies on to the culture of African Americans, which has for several centuries now served as the screen on which the national unconscious plays out.
Put more bluntly, they are lies.
Take, for example, the claim that black youth inhabit a culture that venerates criminality, in which having been incarcerated is a matter of pride. This particular trope has seen heavy circulation in the last few years, trotted out to rationalize every death of a young black man at the hands of the police or vigilantes. Constructed out of a conglomeration of supposedly “thuggish” photos, snatches of rap lyrics, or social media ephemera, it works to make respectable the narrative that, in every case, it was the black teenager who threw himself in a fury at the men with guns. Confronted with such deep-seated criminality, the pundits innocently ask, what else were the police supposed to do?
Ethnographies of returned prisoners and their families reveal a very different world, one that coincides more with the commonsense notion that people who already face discrimination in the labor market would hardly celebrate events, like incarceration, that will make their lives even harder. Donald Braman spent four years conducting interviews with prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families in the Washington DC area, and found that black families regarded incarceration with anything but pride.
Instead, he found a pervasive sense of shame. Families of those in prison hid the truth from even their extended family, and went to great lengths to conceal the fact from their social circles. In interviewing close to fifty families, Braman reported that not one was “out” as having a member in prison to their entire extended family. Reading the stories he collects, one gets a sense of a suffocating stigma, a desperation not to be associated with the prison system in any way.
In light of Braman’s work, the claim that young black men are happy to be locked up is perverse. There is no culture of criminality in black communities. Convenient as it may be to ascribe one to the victims of state violence, all of the evidence suggests that black families work incredibly hard to keep their members out of prison, and feel a profound sense of failure when they are unable to. In fact, compared with white families, black families place an even greater emphasis on following the rules and obeying authority. Given the disproportionate consequences black youth face for their transgressions, this differential is hardly surprising. Yet the disseminators of this lie persist, attempting to convince the nation that African Americans are (“culturally, not biologically!” they hasten to add) simply unable to assess even the most brutally obvious consequences of their actions on their lives.
The disconnect between claims of a culture of criminality and the evidence presented by reality is not at all unusual when it comes to the various elements that make up the culture of poverty narrative. Its other facets are equally guilty of inverting the world in which we live. Consider three prominent claims made by the would-be augurs of black culture: that black students devalue education out of a conception of school as a white thing, that black parents place a low value on marriage and a stable family life, and that the black poor are simply uninterested in finding work. All of these have been given voice across the political spectrum, from liberals to reactionaries, and all of them are patently false.
The notion of a black disdain for school as a “white thing” has been given voice recently by Barack Obama himself. Giving an address for his neoliberal “My Brother’s Keeper” program, Obama took the opportunity to opine that in black communities “there’s been the notion of ‘acting white,’ ” where high-achieving black students are stigmatized by their peers. Obama was relatively restrained in his invocation of “acting white theory,” as it’s called, confining himself to the assertion that it exists and is wrong, insofar as doing well in school does not compromise one’s racial authenticity.
The very fact, however, that the president felt the phenomenon was important enough to comment on suggests that he thought black attitudes on this question were skewed enough to warrant correction. Other commentators have been even bolder in their use of the theory, trotting it out to explain that black attitudes, and not white racism, are the cause of black-white educational disparities.
Despite its ubiquity in popular discussions, however, acting white theory has come under sustained criticism from education scholars. As social scientists have attempted to test the theory, they have found over and over that black and white students’ attitudes on education do not differ substantively. Black students, just like their white counterparts, express a desire to do well in school, and report higher self-esteem when they succeed.
In fact, recent research by Ivory Toldson suggests that it is white male students who express the most ambivalence about the impact of good grades on their social standing. By contrast, 95% of black female students reported that, if they did really well in school, they would be proud and tell all of their friends about it. Similarly, black students were most likely to report that their friends would be happier if they went to college than if they didn’t. Most white students said their friends wouldn’t care either way.
In light of this body of research, the attempt to pin responsibility for educational inequality on black students themselves is beyond perverse. Black students, understandably, place a higher premium on education than white students, because they know they will pay a higher price for lacking it than white students will. Yet the aspirations of black students, however well-documented, fail to make any impact on discussions of race and education in national media. White talking heads (and black conservatives, it must be said) feel no qualms whatsoever about loudly condemning the youth of an entire race for lacking ambition, while remaining criminally silent themselves on the structures that actually frustrate black students’ real and dearly-held ambitions.
The story is, if anything, even nastier when it comes to marriage and the family. Lamentations over the decline of the black family, in particular, are something of a national ritual in the United States, and have been for decades. In the inner city, we are told, there is a culture of single parenting, and having children with multiple partners. From here, descriptions of that culture frequently veer into the luridly racist, with “broodmares” being one epithet of choice for black mothers. This culture is then held to be at the root of any number of problems, as absent fathers are blamed for black children doing poorly in school or getting in trouble, and mothers dependent on welfare programs inducing a “culture of dependency” in their children.
Once again, this narrative is profoundly mistaken. Historically, as Herbert Gutman pointed out decades ago, black Americans have placed a tremendous value on maintaining family structures, and have actually had a lower divorce rate than white Americans. Since the 1960s, it’s true that single-parent households have become far more common in black communities (though not only there), and this is the era commentators typically focus on, blaming the loss of a mythological united community under Jim Crow in more liberal versions of the story, or welfare programs in more reactionary ones. Both, however, see a transformation in black attitudes as central.
But social scientists working on family structures, however, have found that variables like the ratio of employed men to women are far stronger predictors of what families look like than attitudes are. When the supply of employed, non-incarcerated men is controlled for, black and white marriage rates look more similar than different.
Attitudes towards marriage also display no great divergence between black and white Americans. Most black Americans value marriage highly, though, as is the case with whites, men tend to value it more highly than women. This last datum is particularly ironic, given the pervasive scapegoating of black men for supposedly abandoning their children after conception. In fact, as numerous studies have found, black fathers maintain high levels of contact with their children even when not co-habitating with the child’s mother, and express a strong desire to be even more present in their children’s lives. Even more significantly, as Kathryn Edin has noted, “African Americans’ higher valuation of marriage relative to that of whites narrows the racial gap in marriage.” Black culture is responsible for the gap in marriage rates being smaller than it otherwise would be, not larger.
With this in mind, the recurrent political fantasy of addressing inequality in the US through marriage promotion programs aimed at the black poor in particular is a sick joke. If people like Sam Brownback, who wrote one of the most recent such proposals, actually cared about the marriage rate among poor black Americans, he would address himself to ending things like mass incarceration and the endemic joblessness in American cities, which all the evidence suggests play a massive role in disrupting black attempts to form stable nuclear families. The irony, of course, is that his preferred alternative is predicated on attempting to sell something to African Americans that they have been trying for literally centuries to buy at a price higher than he could possibly imagine.
One final component of the culture of poverty, and in some ways the most central, is the myth that the black unemployed simply don’t want to find work. This was given particularly vulgar voice recently by Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, whose relentless self-promotion is indeed a monument to what hard-working white ethnics, with the help of a complicit media, can achieve. Commenting on the protesters in Ferguson, he suggested that the best way to disperse the demonstrators would be to hold a job fair, at the sight of which they would “scatter like leaves.” Though the sheer contempt for the black poor may be more visible in Wurzelbacher’s quip than in other instances, in substance it doesn’t differ in the least from Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan’s pronunciation that inner city men simply don’t appreciate the value of work.
This conceit has suffered perhaps more thorough rebuttal than any other component of the culture of poverty. Since the 1960s, social scientists have produced study after study demonstrating that poor and unemployed black Americans have basically the same attitudes towards work as the rest of country. In fact, a recent study found that black job seekers are even more resilient than their white counterparts, staying in the job market longer despite persistent frustrations of their search for employment. One waits in vain for such results to generate a moral panic over the decline of a work ethic in white communities.
When it comes to the notion of welfare dependency, the verdict is much the same. One study looking at black single mothers in Milwaukee found that these women’s families were a major contributor to the high value they placed on education and finding a career. Far from being the transmission belt of a “culture of dependency,” black families act as a support network encouraging their members to achieve as much as possible. The same study found that women on welfare, almost to a person, “hated it” and wished they could leave the program. However, the demands of childcare, combined with a lack of job opportunities, ensured that leaving was difficult for most.
Other studies have found similar results, with welfare being largely stigmatized in black communities. In fact, a number of studies have found that people on welfare, black Americans included, feel that people take advantage of the system and receive benefits when they should not. Here, the constant demonization of people on welfare has had an effect on welfare recipients themselves. While attributing their own use to structural factors such as discrimination and joblessness, they attribute others’ use of the system to laziness (importantly, however, this suspicion does not carry over into political support for attacks on welfare state, which are consistently opposed by people receiving benefits). The distance from the popular portrayal of black communities content to remain on the dole could not be clearer.
