Guest AuthorListening to all the punditry in the wake of the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty has led to one conclusion:
Most of the common assumptions Americans have about poverty are dead wrong. Among them:
– Most poor people are black. While the poverty rate among African Americans is more than double that of whites, in sheer numbers, whites living in poverty dwarf the number of poor blacks.
– People are poor because it’s their fault. Our secular and religious gospels blame poor people for their plight. Their economic plight is a reflection of their moral defect, the theory goes.
– Poverty is an economic indicator of an individual’s plight.
Poverty is actually a measure of family income, how much parents bring home. It is also a statistical gauge that reflects a family or individual’s plight as measured against everyone else. Poverty is defined as household income of $23,050 for a family of four. In 2012, 15 percent of the population, or about 46.5 million people, lived in poverty, according to the U.S Census Bureau.
America imposes a fiscal, social and cultural tax on its poor — poor folks pay more for groceries and for credit. Poor kids live in lower quality housing and attend poorer schools. Government and society often conspire to rob the poor of their dignity. Americans aren’t supposed to be poor and proud. So when poverty goes public, it is usually woven into the clothes people wear, the downtrodden expression on their faces.
In some cultures, it’s often quite the opposite. One of the earliest lessons I learned growing up in the Caribbean was that poverty and intelligence weren’t related. My classmates from the poorest families seemed to be the most determined, hardest working students. Poverty fueled their drive. Education could transform a family’s economic trajectory.
Johnson dreamed of a massive transformation when he announced the War on Poverty during his State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964. At the time, poverty was endemic throughout the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Places like the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, South Carolina’s Black Belt saw immense poverty abetted by intractable racism.
Half a century later, the statistics show poverty rates among African Americans are above 40 percent in some of those former bastions of segregation. The sins of the past might be forgiven, but their stain lingers.
America’s War on Poverty was doomed to failure not from a lack of will or resources. It was always unwinnable because of this country’s convoluted Judeo-Christian/capitalist/puritanical self-identity. You need poor folks to prove that capitalism works. Jesus said the poor you will always have.
The American ambivalence toward poverty is tied to the lies we tell ourselves about race, myths we believe about class, deceptions we harbor about who we are and what we can become.
And if critic Brooks Atkinson was right when he said, “poverty is also a reflection of those who are not poor,” then it means the war on poverty failed because we did.
