Thirty
years ago last month, President Johnson used his first State of the Union
message to declare "an unconditional war against poverty. " Johnson
argued that the condition of poverty is not inevitable. "We are not
helpless before the irott laws of economics," he said. Today such notions
can seem like mere '60s idealism. The persistence of poverty has caused many
Americans to become cynical about change. Ronald Reagan tapped into that
cynicism when he gutted many of Johnson's Great Society programs. Yes, Reagan
quipped, the nation had fought a war on poverty, but "poverty won. "
Historian
Jacquelyn Jones, American Others
Michael Harrington's
book The Other America: Poverty in the United States was published 32
years ago.
Today, it is scarcely possible to mention the book without
conjuring up the platitudes that invariably go with it. The Other
America, it is said, "stirred the conscience of a nation" and
"inspired policy-makers at the highest echelons of government to initiate the War
on Poverty.
In fact, the legacy of this study is much more complicated
than such rhetorical accolades would suggest. In many ways the debate over
poverty has moved backwards since then. Contemporary poverty
"experts" seem to have retained only the most regressive aspects of
Harrington's book—such as his reliance on the notion of a "culture of
poverty," an ideological construct that, over the years, has given license
to politicians and bureaucrats who have launched a mean-spirited attack on the
way poor people live their lives.
Since the publication of The Other America,
academicians, policy-makers and "mainstream" Americans have forgotten
what in many ways was the most important aspect of the book: Harrington's
relatively expansive view of poverty. Harrington provided a compelling picture
of the many faces of poverty around the country-bolder, displaced autoworkers
in Detroit; ill- paid service workers in an Atlanta hospital; elderly men and
women in Ohio unable to negotiate a maze of Social Security red tape; the
malnourished children of Appalachian farmers; unemployed men clustered on a
Harlem street comer; alcoholics and drug addicts shivering in doorways in small
towns and big cities.
Today's poverty experts have turned away from this
comprehensive vision of poverty, and have instead focused with a vengeance on
one specific manifestation of the problem-the Northern black ghetto. Queried
about the best books on poverty, most contemporary experts will list works
dealing with the "underclass"-poor people who are by definition
confined to the inner city, and who are by implication African-American.
Poverty statistics today show that residents of the
Northern black ghetto represent but a subset of the total population of
impoverished Americans. Indeed, the highest rates of black poverty can be found
outside the ghetto. Data provided by the Current Population Report on Poverty
in the Unit- ed States, issued by the Department of Commerce in 1992, show that
the white poor (23.7 million) outnumber the black poor (10.2 million) by two to
one. Even in the inner city, the total number of whites below the poverty line
(8.3 million) is more than the number of poor blacks (6.1 mil- lion). The
black. poverty rate is, of course, proportionately much higher than the white
rate; about one in every three blacks is poor, compared one in every 10 whites. Yet that simple fact too often obscures the
large numbers of whites who suffer from chronic unemployment and
underemployment, and who live in distressed communities. The brute facts of
poverty confound much of the conventional wisdom.
Outside the ghetto (in areas designated by the Census Bureau
as non-central-city metropolitan and non-metropolitan), a total of 20 million
people are poor (compared to 15 million of all races in the inner city). More
poor blacks (11 million), live outside the inner city than in it (6.1 million).
The proportion of black people who are poor is consistently higher in
non-metropolitan areas of the country (38.9 percent overall) than in inner
cities (35.3 percent). For example, the poverty rate among black Southerners
who five outside metropolitan areas is 40 percent; among black Northeastern
inner-city residents, the rate is 31.3 percent.
These statistics do not necessarily posit a stark rural
urban differentiation in the locus of poverty. The War-on Poverty
generation might have boiled the problem down to the difficult lives of the
hardscrabble Kentucky farmer and the Harlem day workers; but today the family
farm has all but disappeared, the sharecropping system has vanished, and few
people can be classified as "simple rural folk." As anthropologist
Rhoda Halperin suggests, we should explore the "shallow rural"-those
places all over the country located between the backwoods and the shopping malls,
where 'people combine gardening, foraging, neighborly cooperation and part-time
wage work in order to make a living.
Poverty today is as intractable as ever. In their recent
book Forgotten Amerirans: Thirty Million Poor in the Land of Opportunity, John
E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy argue persuasively that, despite a decline in
the official poverty rate (to 14 percent in 1992 compared with 22.4 percent in
1959), fully one-quarter of the American population can be classified as poor
today, a slightly higher percentage than in 1959. Schwarz and Volgy point out
that poverty is best measured in terms of a household's ability to pay for
basic necessities-food, shelter and clothing-rather than in terms of cash
income. According to this more accurate standard, the poverty rate has remained
stubbornly high for 30 years.
But if the overall poverty rate has remained relatively
constant, the demographic composition of the poor has changed. Although
mens-tested assistance ("welfare") programs have expanded since the
'60s, historic forces have conspired to increase the number of poor people in
the United States, and to bring poverty to a variety of different groups
affected by the changing economy. The proportion of blue-collar workers in the
labor force has decreased by one half since the mid='60s. Layoffs in the
white-collar sector, and the increase in ill- paid part-time service jobs
(combined with a reduction in poverty among the elderly), means that the
post-industrial poor are younger, more able-bodied and more likely to be
employed than their counterparts 30 years ago.
Tip O'Neill's immortal words
notwithstanding, the politics of poverty are not local, but transnational. The
inexorable workings of the global market economy force American companies to
consolidate or streamline their operations and to cut costs with innovative
technologies or by moving to locations, in the United States or elsewhere,
where labor is cheap; workers of all races pay the price. Moreover, refugees
from Southeast Asia and Latin America swell the ranks of the unskilled, men and
women unlikely to find good jobs or suitable housing in their port-of-entry
communities, whether in the Mouth Pleasant district in Washing- ton, D.C. or in
the decaying mill towns of New England.
Clearly these economic forces are
outside the control of any one community, and they affect people of diverse
racial and ethnic backgrounds all over the country, in different kinds of
places. Small-town America has fallen on hard times, as communities from the North
Carolina Pledmunt to the Iowa heartland have succumbed to the ravages of
runaway shops, failed businesses and foreign competition. And poverty-stricken,
formerly vital working- class suburbs and urban neighborhoods now stand in
stark testimony to the collapse of heavy industry, their beleaguered residents
facing the same kinds of personal and family hardship as their inner-city
counterparts.
How do we account for the persistent
focus on the "black underclass'? Certainly America's history of slavery
and racial prejudice would suggest that African-Americans today have a unique
claim on the nation's resources----though a similar historical claim might also
be made on behalf of the Navajo Nation of Arizona and the Sioux on the Pine
Ridge Reservation of South Dakota; indeed, sortie Indian rmrvations are among
the poorest places in the country today.
But most underclass theorists (with the
exception of William Julius Wilson and Nicholas Lemann) seem to lack much of a
historical consciousness, let alone a historical conscience. Studies of the
"underclass" have not inspired historical soul-searching among white
Americans; they have, rather, pandered to our society’s perverse fascination
with the lurid imagery of guns, sex and substance abuse, providing yet more
details of what some observers call the violent--and sensation- al-breakdown in
family organization and community standards. The mundane, everyday strivings of
the vast majority of poor people (regardless of race) make for dull copy.
Poverty and crime take an enormous toll
on African- American inner-city residents today. Nevertheless, policies that
target the underclass exclusively are bound to fall. Racialized poverty
programs will never receive adequate funding from grudging white taxpayers and
their representatives. More significantly, race-specific programs fail to
address the essential interconnectedness between the global assembly line and
local poverty, as well as the essential structural similarities among all poor
communities through- out the United States --- communities that lack decent
jobs, accessible health care, good schools and affordable housing.
Our current indifference toward poor
people outside of the Northern black ghetto is both morally and politically
indefensible. The "underclass" theorists would have us answer the
following questions in the affirmative: Isn't it better to suffer a slow death
from tuberculosis in Belle Glade, Fla., than to be killed in a shootout in
South-Central Los Angeles? Wouldn't you rather watch your child die of
starvation in rural Texas than of an overdose of crack 'in the South Bronx?
Isn't it better to focus our energies (in the form of research grants and pilot
programs) on single black mothers in the ghetto than on single black mothers in
Tuscaloosa County, Mississsippi.?
We should refrain from making the
choices posed by these questions; better yet, we should refrain from ask4ig
these questions at all. It is doubtful that this country will make any
meaningful headway in eliminating poverty as long as the major policy- makers,
academicians and journalists who spill so much ink over the problem cannot even
identify it properly. Personal and family fortunes are hostage not to
character, moralitv or ambition but rather to the unsettling transformations of
the world market-which can wreak havoc regardless of place or the color of a
person's skin. Displaced workers, the underemployed, family members just a
health care crisis away from complete and utter disaster --- these are the poor
today; and in their efforts to find employment and care for their families,
they have much in common with one another.
The localized and largely symbolic
anti-poverty strategies that seem so popular today represent a pathetically
inadequate, even cynical, approach to the problems faced by poor people.
Meaningful change by definition will be radical change-nationwide abandonment
of the barbaric property- tax method of public-school finance; federally
sponsored job training and retraining programs; the quadrupling of the minimum
wage; public-private cooperation in the creation of good jobs and affordable
housing; and the efficient provision of high-quality services (from public
transportation to health and childcare) that enable people to find and retain
jobs.
Ultimately, gilding the ghetto will
not solve the problem of poverty. What we need, instead of more foundation
dollars devoted to endless studies of the underclass, are political leaders who
will bring us together as a nation, helping us to bind up the wounds caused by
the invidious racial and regional distinctions that have shaped anti-poverty
pro- grams in this country over the last three decades. Until that time, a
whole host of "other Americas" will continue to proliferate outside
the ghetto.