It’s Not Your Father’s ‘Culture of Poverty’
Posted By The Editors | October 26th, 2010 | Category: Feature | 1 Comment » Print This PostBy Lee A. Daniels
Explorations of the interaction between “culture” and persistent poverty are apparently back in vogue among scholars, policy wonks and legislators looking for ways to reduce the enduring high rate of poverty – now above 26 percent – among black Americans.
Fortunately, these discussions appear to reject the old notion that the black poor’s being mired in a long-term poverty is simplistically and substantially due to their own self-destructive attitudes and behavior. Now, there’s a more complex discussion of individual and communal life inside the neighborhoods of the poor and also a determination to look beyond the ghetto walls to examine what barriers the larger system has put in place to keep them there.
The change from the old, dominant idea of the culture of poverty — if you’re black and poor, it’s your fault – is welcome; for shedding that posture of callousness disguised as objective thinking brings into view the extraordinary laboratory the American society of today offers for a comprehensive study of poverty and culture.
American society is now held, vise-like, by mass high unemployment and sharply rising poverty. More than 11 millions jobs have vanished from the nation’s workplaces since 2007, and few expect any appreciable number of them to return soon. The federal deficit is soaring; state and local budgets are sinking. And, as the Great Recession deepened, the news media began to pay attention to the psychological toll the unrelenting joblessness was taking on people – white people – from the low to the high reaches of the middle class.
Those journalistic reports have been reinforced by numerous research studies showing how quickly some substantial number of the newly-jobless have fallen into hopelessness as well as penury (PDF).
The situation is so grim that the New York Times earlier this year began a multi-part series chronicling the hardships now faced by “The New Poor.”
The Census Bureau’s annual report on poverty (PDF) offers further proof that a virulent dynamic of downward mobility is at work: the incomes of four million Americans decline to poverty-level status in just the twelve months from 2008 to 2009. Only federal and state unemployment benefits saved another 3.3 million from joining them in that year.
In fact, the Great Recession has revealed a great deal both about the dynamics of a sudden descent into joblessness and a seemingly dire future and about the mass unemployment and poverty more than a quarter of black Americans have long endured.
Hopefully, this new approach will consider not only the present, but also the past – the grinding poverty and vicious discrimination white-ethnic Americans –vilified by the dominant WASPs for their “alien culture” — endured from the nineteenth century to the 1940s and how they rose from poverty.
And it should consider the quick fraying many of the newly jobless, especially the long-term jobless, have shown in light of the fact that black Americans have endured an average annualized unemployment rate about 10 percent since the early 1970s
Most of all, let the scholars and policy-makers consider what happened to black unemployment at the end of the 1990s, the decade when the booming economy was filling the wallets of the new black middle class and stable working class.
That reign of good fortune at its very end even opened the low-wage market at the very bottom of the job ladder to the most maligned group of Americans: poor black males. In 1999, just as the nearly decade-long era of prosperity was coming to an end, the Department of Labor reported that the black unemployment rate had fallen in March to an all-time low of 7.7 percent. It would end the year at 8.1 percent, the lowest annual rate ever.
The reason for that wonderful achievement was confirmed by a study produced that year under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the think tank that serves as the official arbiter of whether the economy is in a recession or not.
The national study of more than 300 metropolitan areas found that black males, ages 16 to 24, with a high school education or less, were working in greater numbers and earning bigger paychecks than ever before. This meant that the so-called Long Boom was bestowing its benefits in significant fashion to those at the very bottom of the economic and occupational ladder.
The point to emphasize is that it was young, poorly-educated males, who as a group had endured often astonishing levels of double-digit unemployment rates since the 1960s, who were taking those jobs. They weren’t pushed by the pronouncements of civic or political leaders, black or white. They were pushed by their own clear understanding of the value of honest work. The study also noted an ancillary effect of the greater employment: levels of reported crime had fallen most sharply in those metropolitan areas where the declines in joblessness had been greatest.
Yet, for all the popularity of the old culture-of-poverty theory among conservatives, centrists and even some liberals then, the news that poor black males had shown they were eager for the chance to work, even if it meant starting at the bottom, drew strikingly little notice. E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist, was one who did. He wrote, “those who argued for years that the plight of the poor owed more to what was wrong with the economy than to what was wrong with the poor have been proved right.” Political scientist Jennifer Hochschild told the New York Times that “Poor blacks never lost faith in work, education and individual effort. What’s different now is that they can do something about it.”
Hopefully, the discussions about poverty and culture occurring now will destroy the shroud of silence about the implications of the decline of black unemployment then; for its purpose was to mask the fact that the black poor need no moralistic lectures about the value of honest work. They do need – and deserve – extra help, yes. But most of all, they need what many working-class and middle-class Americans need these days, too: the opportunity to work.
Where are the jobs?
Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.
It’s Not Your Father’s ‘Culture of Poverty’ | The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog
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