Monday’s front-page New York Times piece, “‘Culture of Poverty,’ Long an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback,” is about how it’s okay again for scholars to talk about the “culture of poverty” and to study “cultural” aspects of the subject.
It’s a trend reporter Patricia Cohen suggests vindicates Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who popularized the term in the mid-’60s when he infamously wrote that much of black America was caught up in a “tangle of pathology” resulting from “the weakness of the [black] family structure,” which he called “the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate, the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”
But Cohen cites no one defending the term “culture of poverty,” though the headline suggests as much. And some of the studies cited as being part of a vindication of “cultural” studies of poverty are things that few sociologists–who, of course, routinely study “culture” as a matter of course–would ever have objected to. Exactly who, for instance, would object to a study of the effects of community violence on the ability of children to learn?
And, as Cohen explains, at least two of the studies cited in her report (including one that looks at what makes parents with kids in daycare more likely to develop networks of support) don’t track with income or ethnicity, making them examples more suitable for inclusion in an article other than the one she wrote.
One of Cohen’s problems seems to be in her narrow definition of “culture,” which buys into the the right-wing view that culture, in this context, denotes such issues as marriage, “illegitimacy” and so on. In other words, largely Moynihan’s view of things.
Unless I am imagining things, scholars have been studying for decades how cultural factors such as educational and economic opportunity, violence and even nutrition affect poverty and poor communities.
In the end, Cohen’s suggestion that Moynihan’s racist views are back in academic vogue amount to little more than Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey saying Moynihan has been “maligned” (without explaining how), a gratuitous mention of comedian Bill Cosby’s more Moynihanian sociological conjectures, and the Times‘ devout wish to see the great man vindicated.
Shouldn’t we be talking about the culture of *creating* poverty, and what that means for both those in poverty, and those soon to be?
Steve, I’m a huge fan of FAIR and have been for many years (including your work), but I think you’re a little bit confused by the subject matter, or at least it’s coming off that way.
First of all I’m not remotely a defender of Moynihan–his views were indeed racist to my mind, and I’ve no interest in “vindicating” that man in the slightest. I also am well aware that “culture of poverty” arguments often come from an inherently conservative place, and I’m loathe to see those advanced to the exclusion of the kind of arguments about urban and racial problems one saw in the Kerner Commission of 1968, for example (these are issues I talk about with my students when I teach a university class on urban problems in the postwar era).
But I don’t really have a big problem with the Times’ article. Scholars have indeed generally made a distinction between “structural” and “cultural” explanations when it comes to explaining poverty, particularly among ethnic minorities in cities. I guess I sort of don’t understand your argument, but I think you might be confusing this point.
Partially in reaction to Moynihan and his ilk, most sociologists and urban scholars have focused on what they would describe as “structural” factors that lead to poverty. These would be problems like “educational and economic opportunity” (indeed those are the big ones), nutrition/health, quality of the built environment, racism in housing practices, etc. When studied by scholars, these are specifically defined as NOT being cultural, and that’s why I’m having trouble understanding why you are talking about “cultural factors such as educational and economic opportunity.” The traditional liberal or leftist argument is that education, unemployment, etc. are not defined by culture (which has a certain meaning in this context–see next paragraph), but rather deep structures in our society which relate to race and class and which can be traced back pretty far in time. These kind of arguments are extremely influenced by Marxist thought (which is all to the good as far as I’m concerned).
The “cultural” explanations are those that focus on the behaviors and values of the poor themselves, and traditionally related to issues with the family, welfare dependency, etc. This dichotomy between structural and cultural explanations for poverty was not something invented by Moynihan or conservatives in general, it’s a real argument that has been raging for decades. Academics have generally taken the structural point of view while conservative and neoliberal thinkers and politicians–and a lot of average Americans–have taken the cultural one (see also an earlier NYT piece, which I am by no means fully endorsing, by famed scholar of slavery Orlando Patterson at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26patterson.html?pagewanted=print for some background).
I think the Times is correct that there is an increase in the number of scholars who are now focusing on “culture,” as I generally defined it above, IN ADDITION to structure. The kind of work that is happening, however, is not necessarily, or I guess even mostly, the kind of thing Moynihan did. It’s more like the research done by Edin and Kefalas, described in the article, on the attitude of low-income women toward marriage. The argument being made is “cultural” not “structural”–it relates to thought processes and beliefs–but leads to the very not conservative conclusion that the kind of marriage programs promoted by George W. Bush and others won’t work.
So long as we keep talking about structural factors like education and lack of jobs, I don’t have a problem with looking at culture more than scholars have in the past. Some of it is going to be absurdly reductive, wrong, and Moynihanesque–perhaps the most common example of this in recent years is “hip-hop is the cause of all of the problems in black communities,” a la Bill O’Reilly–but some of it can obviously be useful, and I think there was a real (if understandable) reluctance to focus on attitudes and behaviors in the past.
The shift here mirrors a larger academic shift in effect since the 1980s–for example in history, which is the field I know–whereby studying culture has become de rigeur, in contrast to a previous emphasis on structure or the “base”, to put it in Marxist terms (which it often was). The shift to culture in parts of academe is not solely or even primarily some conservative revolt, indeed the folks who are interested in it are still often steeped in Marx and the whole edifice of critical theory that followed him.
Maybe you know all of this and I’m prattling on for no reason because I misunderstood you, but I thought it was worth getting into. To the extent that the Times article does anything to rehabilitate Moynihan–I think that’s somewhat implicit, but not at all the focus–it’s off base since that’s not what’s happening (though the article basically acknowledges that in the “they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects” paragraph). My apologies if I’m wrong, but I think it’s possible a lack of familiarity with the scholarly history and a misreading of the article due largely to its mention of Moynihan may have led you to draw some incorrect conclusions. Okay I’m done now!
To follow up a bit on what Geoff says, there is a difference between considering and researching cultural “factors” and positing a “culture of poverty.” The way Moynihan did it, he was arguing that poor people had “a culture” in an anthropological sense, with a kind of distinctive internal coherence, which was distinct from general U.S. culture. This might also have been expressed as something like a deviant, pathological, aberrant, inadequate etc. sub-culture.
The term “culture of poverty” actually was coined by Oscar Lewis, I believe, who applied it to the culture of poor Mexican peasants in a context of rural poverty in the late 1950s. Lewis was in part drawing on the work of the sociologist Robert Redfield and the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who has argued that peasants had “part-cultures” in “part-societies,” which were linked to national or perhaps ethnic high cultures as developed in cities, and shared recognized affinities to them, but formed a distinct element in the overall social structure that corresponded to distinctive cultural practices. Some such practices might be e.g. ritual or religious but others attitudinal, including accepting subordination within certain moral limits and focusing on local community solidarities at the expense of personal ambitions and the kinds of attitudes toward education and wealth that fostered accumulation of wealth and other sorts of individual / familial “progress” in urban settings. But the key point is that such rural communities were coherent and cohesive social entities that shared a culture.
This is a much harder case to make about the urban poor in the United States since the 1960s, particularly if you are simultaneously arguing that the poor *lack* social structure and have pathological or antisocial values and attitudes.
It is also notable that this is not the first time that there has been an effort to valorize and rehabilitate Moynihan’s “culture of poverty” argument. The vogue in the late 1980s and for much of the 1990s for underclass class theory was quite similar, in which it was posited that an underclass of poor who were supposedly isolated from mainstream society and culture were characterized by a distinctive and self-destructive culture. Again, this is not talking about “cultural factors” when interpreting particular situations or people or local communities, but some more cohesive idea of a class with shared characteristics. People promoting that kind of theory or journalists reading them sometimes took it as vindicating Moynihan — although Moynihan’s version was especially racialized insofar as he blamed putative pathalogical family structure fairly directly on slavery while ignoring the intervening century of social processes and change. Adolph Reed, Jr. was a particularly vociferous critic of underclass theory at the time.
Also I agree with Doug Latimer, and would think that arrogant yet ignorant self-satisfaction combined with privileged access to media for propagating those views and values are key elements of the culture in question.
Thanks for mentioning Adolph Reed, Jr., Chris L. He’s one commentator whose brilliance and sharp acuity are criminally over-looked. He saw right through our current President very early on (pegging him as the safe, centrist, pro-corprate man that he is), and has written about the true nature of all the actors in our political class for a long time now. And Doug L. is indeed right.
I will stand up to the hivemind here and say that Pat Moynihan was one of the few honest men to serve in office during the previous millennium.
Carry on with your delusions.
Oh, he was “honest” of course – he was as out a drunk as a drunk could be.
Doug, you seem to put a fine gloss on what are fully absurd positons – what is the point of highlighting
dumb work from influential mountebanks like O’Reilly in suggesting there are valuable nuggets around that offal?
In looking for real and “honest” academic discourse, check out Phillip Bourgoeis’ work on “homeless heroin injectors,” available for the time-deprived as a podcast in the KPFA show “Against the Grain.” He and his co-author give you the”culture,” whatever that means (in this case feces and abscesses) along with the far more necessary “structure.”
Patrick Moynihan also said that Uncle Sam was stealing the Social Security money that was deducted from taxpayers paychecks. The deductions were increased in 1983 to make the fund “solvent” according to Greenspan,Reagan & the Democratic Ways & Means Committee.
But Moynihan pointed out that Uncle Sam had been taking the cash surpluses and issuing i.o.u.s which they will never be able to pay. The Reagan & Bush administrations used the Social Security surpluses to reduce taxes on the rich by claiming the tax reductions did not add to the deficit … while showing the Social Security trust fund as a plus on the deficit books.
The Social Security’s in trouble group (rich, bankers) now say Uncle Sam cannot afford to pay the i.o.u.s and therefore the benefits must be cut or “privatized”
This is a much more significant comment by Moynihan than the cycle of poverty and deserves to be the subject of contemporary pundits.
When Moynihan raised the question he was denounced with the admonition that Uncle Sam’s i.o.u.s (including Treasury Bonds) would never be defaulted and it was crazy to think so.
The modern question should be: Is Uncle Sam defaulting? or are the New Deal enemies using the threat to destroy Social Security?
Who can deny that slavery separated and destroyed the structure of black families? It took away the right of the father to protect and support his wife and children; it destroyed the mother’s ability to be a homemaker, and to nurture her children; and each new generation was more lost from its roots. Then Lincoln was killed, and all his hopes for a benevolent reconstruction era went with him. After the civil war, blacks were used by both parties for their own purposes, and they didn’t get the support they needed to integrate into white society. That combined with racism and an endemic low self-esteem, kept most blacks from making any progress as citizens in their communities. They established black churches, and this was a great help for them to come together and organize as a group, but white neglect has kept most of them struggling to survive. It seems a miracle to me that so many black people have done so well, considering all the strikes against them since the days of slavery. And the ones who are not rising above the culture of despair need our help and understanding, not our bigotry. We must put away our arrogance, and ask ourselves just how well our race would have done if the situation had been reversed?
And the question remains……How do we help people to become better, happier members of our society?
Geoff:
Before you went off on your Social Science mini-essay you rankled an old English professor. Loathe is a perfectly good word & you could have used it if you had structured your sentence properly. If instead of a verb you meant a meaningful adjective you were safe if you would have removed the ‘e’.
The disdain for Moynihan here is clear enough, though the rationale for it is not. “Culture of poverty” applies to humans with a wide range of complexions, facial structures, and languages, and Moynihan was simply insightful in recognizing the chains of dependency that the progressive warfare/welfare state was forging around the minds of those who relied on its promises, as well as the bogus foundations of those promises, e.g., the infamous “Trust Funds”, supposedly fed by a cash flow from FICA taxes in excess of current benefit payouts, but in fact stuffed with sovereign state IOU’s emblematic of the expropriation of these cash flows to fund the latest war spending or other vote-buying pork for the benefit of incumbent re-election efforts.
In my Carolina Piedmont community we encounter European, African, and Latin American households which answer to this description, as well as those over the same human ranges who are “low income” (the area has been in an economic decline well before the current depression) but full of hope, family connectedness, and investment in the future of their posterity. The difference is that the latter are consciously disconnected from the dysfunctional culture that inhabits the media empires you dissect on this site. What a waste of time and distraction from the substantive issues of life these empires promote!
“In the end, Cohen’s suggestion that Moynihan’s racist views are back in academic vogue”
Wow, Moynihan made it quite clear that he considered any genetic differences between races in terms of capability or potential as pure fiction. Said just that fairly explicitly in fact.
But, he dared to consider factors that might [departing from Liberal orthodoxy] also contribute to Black poverty, and in DEPARTING FROM ORTHODOXY *MUST* BE RACIST.
Hopefully others here can see precisely what the Times was talking about in terms of academic fascism. Sad that it should get expressed in a journal that purports to expose the hypocrisy of others.