Page 59 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

44 . The Shadow of Whiteness

force and energy into examining the causes and experiences of poverty
in economically distressed urban areas, seeking to clarify the structural
foundation for persistent poverty. Researchers scrambled to present
their arguments in an even-handed, clear-headed manner, arguing that the
sudden appearance of hordes of homeless people on the streets of New
York was not due to an inexplicable, lemming-like rush of the indigent
to live in cardboard boxes placed over hot-air vents, but rather to such
economic and social policies as the deinstitutionalization of the mentally
ill and destruction of single-resident-occupancy (SRO) housing.
One important tactic has been to undermine popular images indirect-
ly, by presenting analyses that challenge the primary assumptions behind
notions of the undeserving poor. The basic argument is that despite the
importance of individual choices, poverty is structurally determined by
such elements as an increasingly globalized economy, institutionalized
racism, unequal provision of goods and services, policymaking, social
geography, and a host of other factors not in the control of any given in-
dividual, and least of all a poor one living in an urban ghetto. This is not
to say that individual decisions can have no impact on either life trajecto-
ries or structural factors, but rather to make the point that any frame-
work that gives undue weight to either agency or structure is fundamen-
tally flawed. Social scientists responding in the early 1980s to analyses
such as Ken Auletta's The Underclass (1982) strove to move the debate
away from individual failings and toward changing economies, historical
processes, and federal policy (Katz 1993; Susser 1996; Vincent 1993;
Wilson 1987).
In the 1980s many social scientists found themselves making up for
lost time. As social historian Michael Katz points out (1993), dividing the
poor into moral categories has preoccupied policymakers, relief workers,
and the public at large almost since the nation's inception, but the social
and academic climate in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in ceding the field
to conservative voices and analysts when it came to investigating either
the causes of poverty or the lives of the poor. These analysts have tended
to turn to moral categories that attribute poverty to personal failings—
laziness, lack of self-discipline, greed. At two key junctures, works that
had been intended to launch powerful critiques of historic, social, and
economic factors in the generation and maintenance of poverty were ac-
tually widely interpreted to prove that it was the poor themselves who
caused their own misery. Oscar Lewis's notion of the "culture of pover-
ty" was a thinly veiled neo-Marxist analysis of cultural factors at work in
the daily lives of the poor (Lewis 1966). He posited that the extremes of