why are people of color poor? (United States)

• culture determines values
• values determine economic success
• so groups on the bottom must
  have cultural weaknesses

• people of color face discrimination
• lower pay for the same work
• job ceilings
• “structural unemployment”: good-paying
  jobs they worked in 1940s-1960s no longer exist (deindustrialization)

• African Americans value education
  highly, but kids are still tracked into special ed.
• schools in lower income communities
  spend far less $ per student
• urban schools are segregated
  and unequal [Kozol, Savage Inequalities 1992]

• when jobs were available, African
  Americans worked. the problem is that there aren’t jobs. 
• 1979-1984: ½ of Black
  workers in manufacturing jobs lost their jobs
• 1930: 8% of Black women were
  unemployed, 1983: 56%

(it can’t be culture, because
culture doesn’t change that quickly!)

• statistically, there is no such
  thing as “intergenerational welfare” culture
• most welfare users are short-term
• people in poverty one year are
  not the same as those the next
• vast majority of welfare users
  want jobs
• but few jobs provide healthcare
  for children, which means it’s better for a woman with children to be on
  welfare

• African American families have
  stayed together through very difficult times (slavery, migration, domestic
  service)
• people of color often have stronger
  extended
  family traditions than whites, tend not to institutionalize elders
• Latinos have very strong family
  values, mostly two-parent households, but this doesn’t save them from poverty.

• 2/3 of poor Black children in
  single-parent households were poor before their parents split up
• most poverty increase is
  among two-parent families
• two working parents don’t get
  families out of poverty!
• “direction of causation” is the
  problem: actually poverty tends to cause family breakup for people
  of color. (it’s true that among middle class whites, divorce often results
  in poverty for the mother and children, but for people who are already
  poor, those difficulties often lead to divorce)

• invisible Jewish & Asian
  poverty
• immigration was a choice for
  some, but not for all groups
• status of immigrants was very
  different: they came with skills and/or capital to start small businesses

• psychological tests cannot confirm
  any difference between aspirations/motivation of poor people, people of
  color, whites, and middle or upper income people as groups
• people with extra high aspirations/motivation
  have no better chance of getting out of poverty than others

• so we should expect out of wedlock
  births to decrease if welfare is cut. welfare has been cut. this has no
  effect on birthrate.

• divorced/separated/never married
  Black fathers have more contact with children than white ones, but Black
  fathers have fewer resources to help with childraising

• it’s hard to support a family
  when there are no jobs
• it would take 3 Black male wage
  earners to lift a family to US median income, 4 to earn enough tot be middle
  class
• anyway, maybe some women don’t
  want to depend on a man, would like to work. need to pay attention to job
  opportunities (and barriers) for women and mothers as well as fathers

• African American mothers have
  been forced to work by American economy which does not provide a living
  family wage. 
• as domestic servants, African
  American mothers had to take care of white children and leave their own
  at home

• banks redline communities of
  color and refuse to lend money for small businesses and homes inside the
  red line
• middle income Blacks have higher
  rates of rejection for home loans than low income whites

• 70-80% of drug consumption is
  outside of “ghettos”
• Black high school students have
  had highest rates of reduction of drug use. whites have reduced use, but
  not by as much.

• fastest increase in poverty for
  any group is among young white families with children, families with marriage
  intact. part of this comes from the fact that poverty rates are increasing
  for families headed by young families with college degrees