Sunday, March 30, 2014
Does Culture Breed Poverty?
by Tom Kando
Republicans and Conservatives are of course wrong on just about every issue, including abortion, equality, sex, public health care, homosexuality, guns, race, the environment, crime, foreign policy and everything else. But the Number One reason why I loathe them is that they want to grab all the money. The desire to be rich at the expense of others is the defining characteristic of the capitalist, it is at the core of the political Right.
Congressman Paul Ryan recently said that “we have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working and learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
Syndicated columnist Eugene Robinson debunks this nonsense quite well. See: Blaming “Culture” Dodges Poverty Issue.
I want to piggy-back on Robinson. As the author aptly observes: “Say the word “culture” and you sound erudite.” Paul Ryan thinks that he correctly remembers the Sociology One course he took as a General Ed. requirement.
A little bit of knowledge can be worse than no knowledge. Think of the patient who reads up on everything medical and tries to cure himself, then dies, vs. the one who doesn’t claim to know anything and hands himself over to his doctor.
Just the same, it’s wrong to practice sociology without a license - as Paul Ryan does. Perhaps Ryan has also read the famous Moynihan Report (1965) about the black family. Perhaps he includes in “culture” the family. The breakdown of the family, most advanced in the inner city. That is what Moynihan was warning against.
The “culture/family breakdown” thesis as a CAUSE of poverty, particularly black poverty, has been popular for a long time. I dealt with it in my sociology classes as far back as the 20th century.
But it is a bad hypothesis. Robinson is a better sociologist than Paul Ryan: He knows that family breakdown and the devaluation of work are the EFFECT of poverty, not their cause. “Who succeeds and who doesn’t...mostly depends on OPPORTUNITIES...”
Poverty is a vicious cycle. Since the great recession began, we know that the longer a person has been unemployed, the less likely he is to be re-hired. The longer someone has been incarcerated, the less likely he is to ever get a job again. Racial discrimination in hiring remains a reality.
Every sociologist knows that if you want to change society, you must first change the INSTITUTIONS. The culture will follow. Nothing changes more slowly than culture (look at the old idiots still waiving confederate flags in the South). The “culture of poverty” emerged when people became poor. People became “lazy” when they could no longer find jobs.
Similarly, the “culture of poverty” (read: laziness) will disappear AFTER the people in the inner city and in Appalachia are given a chance for a decent education and a decent job.
Paul Ryan and the cultural warriors have it all wrong: by creating an ever growing chasm between the poor and the rich, they are CAUSING the “culture of poverty.” leave comment here
© Tom Kando 2014
8 comments:
Seems to me, Tom, that you are guilty of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” for blacks. They can’t change without our help, uh?
Suppose you own a shoe store and you need a part-time stock boy to restock the shelves in the afternoon. You put a help wanted sign in the window, and two boys from the same high school (i.e. the same institution) apply. One shows up for the interview in a button down oxford shirt, khaki dockers and leather shoes; the other shows up in an oversized white t-shirt, baggy jeans sagging showing his boxers, $175 red Air Jordans and a baseball hat sitting sideways on his head. The first is polite with a nice smile and seems genuinely interested in the position, the other has a surly look and gives off a sense of entitlement as he walks around the store with his hand on his crotch to hold his pants up. The first speaks eloquently ; the other speaks gutturally, replete with improper subject verb agreement and improper pronouns. And of course during the interview, we find out that, as we might expect, the first kid has a 3.5 gpa and the second has a 2.3 gpa.
Now if the first kid was white and the second kid was black, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the shoe store owner picked the white kid for the position. Of course, he would then be subject to being called a racist by certain factions of the population.
But suppose the first kid was the son of Nigerian immigrants who had been in the country for two years, and suppose he spoke with a proper English accent, and suppose the second kid was white, a rap-loving, Black gangsta wannabe (what is sometimes referred to as a w****r ). I submit that the owner would hire the Nigerian kid, because it’s not because of the institution and it’s not because of the race. It’s because, as James Carville would say, of the CULTURE, Stupid!
I thank anonymous for his effort. A charming anecdote that is, alas, utterly meaningless.
Surely Victorian Era Britian gives an example of a well-formed culture of poverty w/out a welfare state.
Thus the welfare state cannot be the cause of this so-called culture.
Steve:
thank you. Excellent example.
The reason that the culture usually can't accomplish any worthwhile objectives is because it is stupid. People can think-- cultures can't. Cultures mostly respond to fads or trends these days. For example, in our culture many people spend their time on Facebook or Twitter or Linked-In communicating their social activities to their friends,rather than reading books or otherwise educating themselves about the real problems in our society. Only a few cultures, such as the Jewish culture still have a wisdom tradition.
It is beyond me how people such as Paul Ryan and Anonymous can so completely fail to see the obvious! Perhaps they have so little experience with people outside of their own limited circles that they cannot even imagine themselves in some other shoes. Thanks for the sociology lesson, too bad so many people either forgot the classes they took, or are totally bereft of common sense!
I see that the latest reports show that the overall high school graduation rate is 78% in four years, yet the Asian rate is 93%. Asians are 14% of the California population, yet 36% of the University of California freshman class. It’s the Culture!
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