The poor are just people without enough money. But a 'culture of poverty' gives the affluent a reason to blame them for it
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Guardian
It's been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, "discovered"
poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington's engaging book
The Other America.
If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus's
"discovery" of America, it was because the poor, according to
Harrington, were so "hidden" and "invisible" that it took a crusading
leftwing journalist to ferret them out.
Harrington's book jolted a
nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted
about the spirit-sapping effects of "too much affluence". He estimated
that one quarter of the population lived in poverty – inner-city blacks,
Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We
could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his
"kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.
At
the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also
offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already
comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued,
radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived,
disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They
felt
different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles
characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote:
"There
is … a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of
the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a
culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the
society."
Harrington did such a good job of making
the poor seem "other" that when I read his book in 1963, I did not
recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of
them did lead disorderly lives by middle-class standards, involving
drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also
hardworking and, in some cases, fiercely ambitious – qualities that
Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.
According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique "culture of poverty", a concept he borrowed from
anthropologist Oscar Lewis,
who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. The culture
of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also
gave the book a conflicted double message: "we" – the always
presumptively affluent readers – needed to find some way to help the
poor, but we also needed to understand that there was
something wrong with them,
something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution
of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is
moved to pity by the man's obvious destitution, but refrains from
offering a quarter – since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on
booze.
In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was
caused
by what he called the "twisted" proclivities of the poor. But he
certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan – a sometime liberal and one of Harrington's drinking
companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village – blamed
inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the "Negro
family", clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years
after
the Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to
Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:
"The
lower-class individual lives from moment to moment … Impulse governs
his behavior … He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot
consume immediately he considers valueless … [He] has a feeble,
attenuated sense of self."
In the "hardest cases",
Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in
"semi-institutions … and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and
supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman."
By the
Reagan era, the "culture of poverty" had become a cornerstone of
conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of
jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were
dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to "defer
gratification", or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they
could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued, in his
1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their
material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of
deepening their depravity.
So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that
Democrats and
Republicans
joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty,
but the "culture of poverty". In 1996, the Clinton administration
enacted the
"One Strike"
rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few
months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance
available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in
government-imposed "workfare".
In a further nod to "culture of
poverty" theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250m
over five years for "chastity training" for poor single mothers. (This
bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by
Bill Clinton.)
Even today, more than a decade later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to
slide into poverty
from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you're
needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF
recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes,
and applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected
to drug-testing.
Lawmakers in 23 states
are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job
training, food stamps, public housing, welfare, and home heating
assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor
criminal tendencies, applicants for safety net programs are increasingly
subjected to finger-printing and computerized searches for outstanding
warrants.
Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last year,
12 states
considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving
unemployment benefits. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested
drug testing as a condition for
all government benefits,
presumably including social security. If granny insists on handling her
arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.
What would
Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the "culture of poverty"
theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s,
when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I
suspect he'd have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all
the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging
word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase "the
culture of poverty". Maurice Isserman, Harrington's biographer, told me
that he'd probably latched onto it in the first place only because "he
didn't want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical
Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties."
The ruse – if you could
call it that – worked: Michael Harrington wasn't red-baited into
obscurity. In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for
President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty". But he had fatally botched
the "discovery" of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book,
and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not
the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves –
disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.
Fifty
years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time,
we'll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents
and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech
workers, and America's ever-growing army of the "working poor". And if
we look closely enough, we'll have to conclude that poverty is not,
after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a
shortage of money.