2012 Presidential Election Thread! Let's kick it off early!

[LEG1T]

Originally Posted by Corbic

Thanks for that...right.

[Corbic]

Originally Posted by LEG1T

Thanks for that...right.

You don't believe the culture of poverty is what perpetuates poverty?


Are you trying to tell me that there are secrete societies of old white guys with fancy rings sitting around plotting to introduce meth and higher crappy teachers to keep minorities down?

The culture of poverty is a social theory that expands on the cycle of poverty. Proponents of this theory argue that the poor are not simply lacking resources, but also have a unique value system. According to Oscar Lewis, "The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it, especially because of what happens to the world view, aspirations, and character of the children who grow up in it.” (Moynihan 1969, p. 199).

The term "subculture of poverty" (later shortened to "culture of poverty") made its first prominent appearance in the ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and therefore imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass.

Lewis gave some seventy characteristics (1996 [1966], 1998) that indicated the presence of the culture of poverty, which he argued was not shared among all of the lower classes.

The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor. (Lewis 1998)
Although Lewis was concerned with poverty in the developing world, the culture of poverty concept proved attractive to U.S. public policy makers and politicians. It strongly informed documents such as the Moynihan Report (1965) and the War on Poverty more generally.

The culture of poverty also emerges as a key concept in Michael Harrington's discussion of American poverty in The Other America (1962). For Harrington, the culture of poverty is a structural concept defined by social institutions of exclusion which create and perpetuate the cycle of poverty in America.