Culture and Poverty

Jan 16, 2011 Editorial

In this International Year of People of African Descent, a debate that is unfolding in the US may assist activists and policy makers here in clarifying their ideas around a key characteristic that unfortunately still defines the African condition: poverty.
Reporting on a recent edition of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science under the title, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty”, the NY Times trumpeted “’Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback.”
The “comeback” alluded to the alleged silence that followed criticism of a 1965 report on “The Negro Family” that introduced the term “the culture of poverty” to the American public. As described by the NYT, the “description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.” Sounds familiar?
While conservatives never let go of the idea of “the culture of poverty” and in fact helped to shape the welfare programme of recent US administrations, it was claimed that it was politically incorrect to discuss it in public and especially in academia.
In 2004, the superstar comedian Bill Cosby precipitated a huge public debate in and out of the Black community when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. He was echoed by many other prominent black figures. The treatment in the Annals signals that the reticence may have worn off in academia and secured official imprimatur. One reason could be that poverty has now hit a 15-year high in the US – some 44 million or one in every seven American.
Extending the definition of “culture” to “shared understandings” and the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding”, it is postulated that inhabitants of poverty-stricken neighbourhoods adapt to survive.
For some young black men, one Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanour, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”
The NYT article attempted to address the old charge of “blaming the victim” and quoted one editor of the Annals: “Are the poor, poor because they are lazy, or are the poor, poor because they are a victim of the markets?”
But this was not enough for Stephen Steinberg of Boston Review. He asserted that a “myth’ was being created about the claim of “silence” which implied that the original charge of Black complicity in their poverty was true but was just not being voiced. The myth also justifies “the three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote).”
Steinberg makes the point that must be pondered over in Guyana: “The question is not whether culture matters, but whether it is an independent and self-sustaining factor in the production and reproduction of poverty.” He quoted other scholars who “argued that the despair and coping mechanisms associated with the culture of poverty were anchored in conditions of poverty, and that the only remedy for the culture of poverty was the elimination of poverty itself.”
While Steinberg acknowledged that the new “culturalists” genuflect to the notion that structural factors matter, he questions: “If the cultural practices under examination are merely links in a chain of causation, and are ultimately rooted in poverty and joblessness, why are these not the object of inquiry?”
More germane, to those that claim that any job is a “good job” he retorts, “Does it really matter how they define a “good job” when they have virtually no prospect of finding one?”
The last point undermines the claim that one structural factor that must be overcome is “education”. How many African Guyanese graduates do we have from UG that still cannot find jobs?

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