Alyssa Battistoni: The "Culture of Poverty" Myth Returns
[Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.]
The New York Times caused a stir earlier this week with its assertion that the "culture of poverty" theory of urban decline is back in vogue. But the real news isn't that it’s coming back -- it's that it ever went away in the first place.
The theory may have been formally rejected by academic sociologists for a time, but the culture of poverty has remained a staple of the political discourse since its emergence in the 1960s. To be fair, the variation described in the Times isn’t your mother’s culture of poverty -- there’s less focus on Reagan’s mythological welfare queens and more on structural forces -- but still, the idea that there’s some set of "attitudes and behavior patterns that keep people poor" persists. And it’s a shame -- not because we shouldn’t talk about the interplay of class and culture, but because the culture of poverty framework limits our ability to do it.
From Victorian-era almhouses that sought to teach the poor morality through hard work to the stigmatization of immigrants and tenement life to the temperance movement that saw alcohol as the root cause of growing urban poverty, America has long been fixated on identifying and reforming the supposed moral failings of its poor. But the “culture of poverty” refers to a very specific type: namely, black inner-city poverty and the “ghetto culture” associated with it....
Read entire article at Salon
The New York Times caused a stir earlier this week with its assertion that the "culture of poverty" theory of urban decline is back in vogue. But the real news isn't that it’s coming back -- it's that it ever went away in the first place.
The theory may have been formally rejected by academic sociologists for a time, but the culture of poverty has remained a staple of the political discourse since its emergence in the 1960s. To be fair, the variation described in the Times isn’t your mother’s culture of poverty -- there’s less focus on Reagan’s mythological welfare queens and more on structural forces -- but still, the idea that there’s some set of "attitudes and behavior patterns that keep people poor" persists. And it’s a shame -- not because we shouldn’t talk about the interplay of class and culture, but because the culture of poverty framework limits our ability to do it.
From Victorian-era almhouses that sought to teach the poor morality through hard work to the stigmatization of immigrants and tenement life to the temperance movement that saw alcohol as the root cause of growing urban poverty, America has long been fixated on identifying and reforming the supposed moral failings of its poor. But the “culture of poverty” refers to a very specific type: namely, black inner-city poverty and the “ghetto culture” associated with it....