Louis Kushnik and James Jennings, eds., A New Introduction to Poverty. The role of Race, Power, and Politics. New York University Press, 1999.
This is a collection of seventeen essays which, though examining poverty and its causes from a variety of angles, share as a common thread the concern for the structural causes of poverty and offer, therefore, a welcome alternative to the dominant ideological views that portray poverty as a result of individuals' decisions, attributes and/or moral failings. Genetic, moral, religious, cultural, ethnic and racial explanations of poverty are shown to be flawed because they neglect the historical and political context of poverty in the U.S. The authors show the connections between capitalism, slavery and the development of state policies and ideologies that maintained the oppressed and exploited status of African Americans after the Civil War and constituted the basis for the emergence of white identity and privilege to the detriment of working class identities based on a recognition of the common plight of workers, regardless of skin color. They trace the rise and decline of the U.S. welfare state in its national and global context, highlighting the decline of unionized labor, the class compromises that privileged craft workers and undermined the rights and powers of non-white workers and workers in labor intensive and service occupations, thus cementing a racial divide that has weakened and continues to disempower the American working class.
Poverty, in light of these essays, is best understood not just as the unanticipated effect of national and global processes of economic change but as the intended result of class politics favoring the interest of the economic and political elites. To the notion of feminization of poverty, the concept of the racialization of poverty contributes to highlight the disproportionate poverty of some sectors of the population. The plight of single mothers and their children is examined in light of the dismantling of AFDC and its replacement with draconian cuts in benefits which jeopardize the well being of millions of women and children. While an emphasis on race, power and politics (and, in some of the essays, gender) as key causes of poverty in the U.S. is important there is, to some extent, a problem in the way class is dealt with.
There is explicit recognition of the role of class power in fostering structural (e.g., deskilling, de-industrialization, capital flight, etc.) and ideological (i.e., racial and gender stereotypes and scapegoating) conditions for the endemic nature of poverty and the disproportionate burden it places among "non-whites," women, and children. But there is no awareness of the actual meaning of poverty as the ideological category of analysis that glosses over its real significance, as an empirical indicator of the undermining of the social reproduction of a large proportion of the working class. The discourse on poverty. especially the emergence of concepts such as "underclass" or "marginalized" sectors obfuscates the class understanding of what is otherwise painfully and clearly visible: the disproportionate poverty of ethnic and racial minorities, the disproportionate poverty of children, single mothers and elderly women, and the homeless. What all these sectors have in common is their location in the propertyless class and their plight shows how not only how the daily and generational reproduction of the working population is left to their ingenuity, but how, as the forces of production develop rendering jobs obsolete, creating unemployment and qualitatively changing the nature of marketable skills, millions of people are deprived from the possibility of ever joining the work force, except in menial and low paid employment. It would be, therefore, important to integrate a concern for the poverty of mothers, children, non-white persons, etc. with the understanding of the significance of this phenomena as indicator of the extent to which the daily and generational reproduction of a proportion of the working class is routinely jeopardized. Nevertheless, this is an outstanding collection, useful for courses in social stratification, the sociology of work, and race and ethnic relations.
Return to Martha's Papers