Page 60 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 45

social inequality evident in slums of cities like New York, San Juan, and
Mexico City could only emerge under capitalism, a point that generally
has been glossed over in the years since his ideas were originally pub-
lished. Instead, another of his theoretical claims, that the culture of
poverty tends to perpetuate itself, captured the public imagination. Sub-
sequent debates within anthropology have been heated, and Lewis has
often been faulted for not more strongly correcting mistaken claims
about what his culture of poverty concept implied (see essays in Leacock
1971). Nevertheless, these debates have remained primarily within the
academy and have done little to counter the popular understanding of the
term, which has come to be synonymous with chronic poverty, apathy,
and a generally low-aspiration mindset.
The second key event was the publication of Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965),
which, although intended as a rousing call to action for liberal govern-
ment and policymakers, ultimately proved to be quite the opposite. In
arguing that black families were typified by a "tangle of pathology" (in
particular, "matriarchy" and single mothers) Moynihan's report laid the
groundwork for claims that poverty was the outcome of pathological
family forms. Aside from the questionable validity of Moynihan's ver-
sion of cause and effect, his characterization of certain family forms as
pathological was deeply problematic. It has been pointed out that the
furor that emerged after Moynihan's report was released prompted
many social scientists to shy away from research among the urban poor
and especially the "underclass" (Katz 1993, 3-23; Wacquant and Wilson
1989). The result was that few scholars had the studies or data in hand
to refute a 1977 article in Time magazine that described the underclass
as "a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially
alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the
unreachables" (quoted in Katz 1993, 4). As Asia said, "The Streets [dra-
matic pause] of Newhallville ..."
Like Katz, William Julius Wilson argues that in the aftermath of the
Moynihan report social scientists either shied away from examinations
of urban poverty or would only undertake such examination by empha-
sizing the positive and adaptive aspects of social practices and patterns
that from the outside appeared deviant or perverse (Wilson 1987). The
most well known of these studies, perhaps, is Carol Stack's All Our Kin
(1974), an ethnography of poor black families in Michigan. Like other
ethnographies of poor urban populations (most of them centered on
African Americans), Stack's work was an important corrective to the