poverty

I like John McWhorter.  Even when I disagree with him (which is often), I at least think he is intellectually honest.  So here’s another example of me disagreeing with his honest assessment.  In McWhorter’s review of Amy Wax’s new book Race, Wrongs and Remedies

If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent.

The implication of this is that the door is open for blacks people but, because of “culture,” many of them are simply not walking through it:

Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it.

McWhorter seems to be asking why more black folks aren’t “walking through the open door.” The more important question is “why does the door appears closed to many in the black community?”  As a trained linguist, McWhorter  seems to put too much stock in language and symbol.  he seems to suggest that there is a black cultural hegemony of ill-advised behavior that explains disparities.   On this I agree in part.  While overt bigotry and structural racism might not be what they were a generation ago, the perception of the black-male as dangerous and the perception of the poor black single-mothers as a “welfare queen” still pervade in American society.  They may not be the only discourses about African-Americans, but they are still strong frames that hover around policy discourse.  Being confronted with these stereotypes directly, even once, has damaging consequences.  Here are the implications of a new study from the University of Toronto:

Even after a person leaves a situation where they faced negative stereotypes, the effects of coping with that situation remain,” Inzlicht said. “People are more likely to be aggressive after they’ve faced prejudice in a given situation. They are more likely to exhibit a lack of self-control. They have trouble making good, rational decisions. And they are more likely to over-indulge on unhealthy foods.”

Undoubtedly, if one can persevere past pernicious stereotypes, one can succeed.  This no doubt is the message of Bill Cosby’s now famous “pound cake” speech.  However, “culture”, which I take McWhorter to mean a tendency towards out-of-wedlock birth and criminality, is just one response to racial bias.  African-Americans also have the highest levels of religiosity of any group in the US, which I presume he’d think was a good thing.  A recent pew survey found that 79% of African-Americans surveyed viewed religion as central in their lives.

I think social critics like McWhorter spend a lot of time focusing on mal-adaptations to racial stereotypes rather than emphasizing the overwhelming number of heroic, positive adaptations to a challenging set of social circumstances.  Let’s not pretend that culture happens in a vacuum.  Structure informs culture.  The fact that there are 10 times as many African-American males in prison as White males is not simply reducible to culture and  discourse.   If you could swap the population of central city Detroit with one of it’s affluent suburbs, I daresay you might see a spike in school dropouts, teen pregnancy and criminality.  It’s not the whole explanation, but it’s not inconsequential either.

via Andrew Sullivan.

Done with Internet and Politics syllabus, on to Public Policy. Speaking of public policy (what you guys call Social Problems), if you guys aren’t aware of TED, it is an amazing teaching resource. I showed this Hans Rosling talk to my Research Methods class (It would work equally well for social inequality or race, class, gender). I don’t think I’ve ever seen students that excited about data! It wasn’t natural 😉

On to le liens épais I think that’s ThickLinks in French.
Women of the Klan – UC Press Blog

From Andrew – The Obama Effect?

Al Jazeera makes its Gaza coverage available to the public under Creative Commons license via Jo Ito’s blog

Great infographic on international migration in Good Magazine – from our friends at Sociological Images

and please indulge my soccer geekdom:

Landon Donovan with a nice goal in a friendly for Bayern Munich (around 5 minute mark)

In Off the Books, Sudhir Venkatesh offers us a compelling and nuanced look at the underground economy in the South Side of Chicago. His key insight is that the boundaries between the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” economy is blurred. He notes that legitimate businesses often engaged in illicit practices to supplement licit income:

Some, like Ola Sanders, are well-known proprietors whose businesses have suffered in recent years. They cannot resist the opportunity for immediate cash to supplement their legitimate earnings. So they rent out their space to a gang or another underground trader. They develop creative hustling schemes and do not report their income. They might even exchange services with each other off the books, letting barter replace taxable income altogether.

What struck me about Venkatesh’s description of the economy of the South Side neighborhood he studied was how much it mirrored my own experiences growing up in a Cuban-American enclave in Hialeah, Florida, a suburb of Miami. When compared to Blacks, Cuban Americans are often considered a “model minority,” but Venkatesh’s work could just as easily apply to my neighborhood where “hustling” was an essential part of the local economy.

This is the house I grew up in. Most of the houses on my block have “efficiency” apartments that homeowners would rent out in violation of city zoning laws. Many people in my neighborhood operated businesses out of their homes without licenses. It wasn’t unusual for people to have “free cable” or suspiciously cheap electronic goods in their homes. Nor was it unusual for people to get “arreglos” (fixes) from “gente de confianza” to get insurance companies to pay for hurricane damage that never happened or car repairs that were not caused by accidents.

Despite the fact that all this was going on, the people engaged in these exchanges were good folks who went to church, raised good children, and build a vibrant and thriving community. I appreciate Venkatesh’s perspective in describing the South Side economy he studied:

Despite the moralizing of some, we cannot truly understand the “shady” economy if we see it as a dirty, lawless world of violence and disrepute, one that tarnishes an otherwise pristine sphere where everyone pays their taxes, obeys the laws, and turns to the government to solve disputes and maintain order.

I could just be sympathizing with “my people,” but part of what I think is going on with these exchanges is not simply a lack of jobs in the inner city, but a lack of trust in the rule of law. In the example of my community, my family were Cuban exiles fleeing communism. This set of early exiles constituted an entrepreneurial class. This group, for good or ill, had strong anti-statist views. They perceive government to be corrupt and predatory. As a result, many people I’ve talked with in my old neighborhood see government as something to “get around.” At the same time, they were and are very pro-American and defend American ideals like the rule-of-law.

What do you think about underground economies. Are the things I described unethical? Are we in a position to moralize? Does any of this mirror your own experiences?