culture
of poverty claims |
research
responds |
people
are poor because of their culture/values:
- 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)
|
Latinos
don’t do well in school because the culture doesn’t value education |
- 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]
|
African
Americans don’t have a strong “work ethic” |
- 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!) |
and
would rather live off welfare |
- 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
Americans don’t have strong family values, don’t value the nuclear family |
- 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.
|
single
parent households cause 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)
|
Jews
& Asian Americans have better values, so they do better than African
Americans and Latinos in the economy |
- 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
|
people
of color have low aspirations & motivation, which is why they don’t
get out of poverty |
- 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
|
welfare
causes bad values by encouraging births out of wedlock |
- so we should expect out of wedlock
births to decrease if welfare is cut. welfare has been cut. this has no
effect on birthrate.
|
female-headed
households don’t provide the right values for raising children |
- divorced/separated/never married
Black fathers have more contact with children than white ones, but Black
fathers have fewer resources to help with childraising
|
African
American men are irresponsible |
- 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 women don’t take good care of children. |
- 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
|
people
don’t have the right values in terms of their own finances: they aren’t
thrifty and don’t save money so they can’t move up (no “delayed gratification”,
planning for future) |
- 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
|
people
of color do drugs |
- 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.
|
education
can save you from poverty |
- 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
|