Poverty Theorists Can't See White People

One of these days, academic social scientists are going to find out that this country is chock-full of poor people who are white, but I wouldn't want to hang from a rope until then.

The 12-zillionth book on the "culture of poverty" has hit the shelves and no one seems to think it's odd that it speaks exclusively to black urban ghetto poverty.

Even though just last month ABC's "20-20" managed to get the entire Appalachian region up in arms with a show on mountain poverty that focused on actual poor white people.

The really bizarre part of Sudhir Venkatesh's review of William Julius Wilson's More Than Just Race is that it stresses culture rather than race as the factor defining poverty, yet refuses to acknowledge that people caught in this non-racial culture can be any race other than black.

I haven't read Wilson's book, but Venkatesh accepts Wilson's apparent thesis that poverty is cultural, not racial. His argument would be a lot more persuasive if he didn't insist that this non-racial culture is confined to one race.

Moynihan forced a nation to ask, "Is the culture of poor blacks at the core of their problems?"

This question continues to haunt us, and Moynihan's arguments about black culture still preoccupy and divide academics. (The January 2009 issue of the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science is dedicated to a critical reappraisal of his report.) Coming from a liberal democrat, the senator's discussion of race was remarkably bold and straightforward: Unemployed black men were "failures"; female heads of households ("matriarchs") threatened black masculinity; blacks needed help from "white America."

Replace "black" with "Eastern Kentuckian" or "rural" and "white America" with "Central Kentucky" or "wealthy suburbs" and suddenly you're talking about white people.

Newsflash: the vast majority of poor people in this country are white. The white culture of poverty is just as entrenched, just as tied to drug-dealing, just as rewarding of teenaged single motherhood, just as lacking in good jobs, just as dismissive of education and hard work as is the black culture of poverty.

The Mountain Parkway between Pikeville and Lexington is paved with the shriveled souls of anti-poverty workers who spent their best years beating their heads against the brick wall of the "culture of poverty" in white Eastern Kentucky.

Liberals believed that black poverty was caused by systemic racism, such as workplace discrimination and residential segregation, and that focusing on the family was a form of "blaming the victim." Conservatives pointed to individual failure to embrace mainstream cultural values like hard work and sobriety, and intact (read: nuclear) families.

Nor is discrimination against poor people based on skin color. Ask any white Letcher County native how many Louisville employers and landlords rejected him after getting an earful of his mountain accent.

Yes, entrenched poverty affects a far greater percentage of the black population than the white population, but confining the discussion of the "culture of poverty" to black culture only reinforces the association of poverty with being black. Refusing to recognize that the "culture of poverty" is also white culture just feeds the racism beast.

Wilson wants to explain inner-city behavior—such as young black males' disdain for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for children—without pointing simplistically to discrimination or a deficit in values. Instead, he argues that many years of exposure to similar situations can create responses that look as if they express individual will or active preference when they are, in fact, adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion.

Really? In Owsley County, the third-poorest county in the entire country, "young (white) males' disdain for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for children" are probably not "adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion." They are, however, pretty obviously responses to economic, educational and cultural exclusion.

As for the argument that welfare payments act as an incentive to teenage girls to have babies, does no one remember that Eastern Kentucky whites invented welfare dependency three decades before Moynihan?

Venkatesh keeps nailing the all-races culture of poverty, then undermining the point by reverting back to black-only references.

Wilson does more than argue for the rationality of such behaviors. The actions of both the young man and the teenage mother are "cultural," he suggests, because they follow from the individual's perceptions of how society works. These perceptions are learned over time, and they create powerful expectations that can lead individuals to act in ways that, to the outside world, suggest insolence, laziness, pathology, etc. In this way, Wilson's framework seeks to find individual agency in contexts of dire economic hardship.

Wilson describes this process succinctly: "Parents in segregated communities who have had experiences [with discrimination and disrespect] may transmit to children, through the process of socialization, a set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how one should respond to circumstances. … In the process children may acquire a disposition to interpret the way the world works that reflects a strong sense that other members of society disrespect them because they are black."

I don't think Venkatesh is ignorant of white poverty, or the similarity of its culture to black poverty culture. Which only makes his refusal to acknowledge it in this review that much more inexcusable.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....