Culture of Poverty
Race, Class & Activism
Published July 24, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
I don't know about you, but I'm over Gates-gate. You? The more I listen to Professor Gates, the more I get concerned by his apparent recent realization of how f*cked up our incarceration rates of men of color are. Anyway, I'll leave you with this Radio Boston podcast on the case and wish you the best coming to your own conclusions about this fiasco.
One of the things I've found so frustrating about it as it drags on is how so many legitimate perspectives abound in our varied interpretations of this fairly murky case, and how difficult it is to reconcile those. If you're a person of color or a white ally and deeply familiar with experiences of racial profiling or police violence, it's really hard to remove that lens in looking at this case. If you're not as knowledgeable about this brutal history of ours, and believe that the police have a case-by-case right to act as they deem appropriate, you may think this professor got his just deserts. If you're familiar with Cambridge (and Boston) class politics, you may see it as an arrogant professor being taken down a notch. If you're a woman, you may think, why do men need to have these chest-bumping competitions in the first place? Our identities and lived experiences color how we interpret this event, and getting past those situated experiences to reach a common understanding is damn tricky.
Gorilla Marketing: Framing Poverty
Published July 21, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
As I was writing my brilliantly titled blog post this morning about California's budget cuts, :), I kept thinking about this report I heard on WBUR this morning concerning Mass. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed budget cuts and the impact on the state's zoos. The story ruefully points to the "benefit" of having two newspapers in Boston (for how much longer, one wonders) and how their warring coverage of the threatened euthanizing of zoo animals due to budget reducations distracted us from the direct human impact of those cuts.
"All the while this Animal House drama played out, other victims of the governor’s budget vetoes – from senior care to education to services for children and families – were virtually ignored.
Which brings us to the third eternal truth of budget-cut coverage: It’s a zero-sum game. Every photo of Little Joe displaces an image of elderly hardship or shuttered libraries.
That’s guerrilla warfare of an entirely different kind."
Pun intended! Chortle, chortle.
But in all seriousness, I get that reduction in amenities like zoos, libraries, music classes, etc. have a detrimental impact on our quality of life and human development. But, I'd argue, so does leaving our elderly to ration their meds or to let kids' asthma go untreated or to relinquish teens to idle, hot summer afternoons with little to do. I was one who fell prey to the zoo story (heh). I pay a remarkable little amount of attention to local politics given I was raised in this state and have been back for 5 years now, but I went so far as to post the zoo story on facebook, chuckling at the idea of the zoo admin holding the legislature hostage with threats of dead animals and weeping children. (The zoos' cuts were restored.)
I'm not sure what lesson to take here: reporter John Carroll's original point that kids and animals are winning causes every time, or the uglier, flip side of that that hearing about poor grandma eating her cat food or freezing to death in the winter makes us so uncomfortable that we'd rather just not hear about it. Why is that? I get our easy moralizing about poor mothers, given we're a society that believes we have the right to legislate reproductive behavior. But why don't we feel a similar level of protectiveness for our elders as we do for kids? Am I way off here? Social Security is fairly sacrosanct; so maybe I'm wrong.
But there's no denying that people are much more jazzed about their pets or zoo charges than they are their most vulnerable neighbors.
R.I.P. Frank McCourt
Published July 20, 2009 @ 05:16AM PT
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
Frank McCourt wrote this in the second paragraph of his award-winning bestselling memoir, Angela's Ashes - a chronicle of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. McCourt died this weekend from cancer; he was 78.
I read Angela's Ashes and loved it. I was in my 20s, living comfortably in NYC, pursuing a Master's degree and after that, working full-time. Life was good and plentiful.
But there was something about Angela's Ashes, cultural, I suppose, to which I could strongly relate, and my mom felt the same. It was odd, we thought, how much a story about extreme poverty in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s could resonate with our own Irish-Catholic experiences in Boston.
Such poverty, or even a slightly less desperate, modern American version, I'd barely felt it growing up, but seen my cousins struggle with it in Boston, and knew my parents had experienced it as well. Again, not to the depths that McCourt described, but the alcoholism; the cold, condemning shoulder of the Church even as it fed and clothed families; the concept of living "on the dole" as my father still quips today whenever my material needs become parasitic - all of these I know from experience or family history, passed down through the generations. And of course, what continues through my generation: tough exteriors and a distrust of emotionalism, the joking and heckling to get through tough times.
“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
Yep. Rest in Peace, Frank, and may you have them in empathetic stitches wherever you're headed.
More on McCourt here, here, and here.
(Photo of Frank McCourt by David Shankbone)
Criminalizing Poverty
Published July 16, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Or so it can feel when interacting with case workers to apply for public assistance.
Barbara Ehrenreich has another whopper editorial this past week about the real safety net in the United States: poor Americans and their friends and families, often poor themselves, taking care of one another. I am pretty easily outraged when I read the news, but rarely do I feel weepy after I read something. This op-ed just makes me feel like crying. If you're de facto treated like a criminal in order to apply for cash assistance, would you show up at the welfare office or maybe just turn to your mom, neighbor or best friend? No surprise, then, that welfare reform has effectively stopped 60% of eligible Americans from collecting the temporary cash assistance to which they're entitled.
The Lived Experience of the "Wise Latina"
Published July 14, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
...Is apparently scaring the hell out of some people.
I'm so over the dog-and-pony show that is Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. As you probably heard, barring a "meltdown," she'll be confirmed. Good, so can we move on already?
Apparently not, as every hour on the hour NPR reminds me that we should all be hyperventilating and unpacking her "wise Latina" remark. Still.
Sigh.
By now, Sotomayor (for the countless time, probably) has clarified her remarks while also trying to make clear that we are all bound by our lived experiences. Justice Ginsberg does the same in an excellent interview over the dearth of women on the Court. And Jamelle at PostBourgie nails the bias involved here...heck, I'm just going to cut and paste practically the entire thing:
Is Pregnancy a Smart Economic Strategy for Low-Income Teens?
Published July 08, 2009 @ 12:53PM PT
Following up on the vibrant conversation (mostly happening at PB) concerning the post yesterday about providing incentives for teen girls to avoid pregnancy, graduate high school and go on to college, commenter Marissa Pherson offers some interesting links about our over-blown shrieking about the costs of teen pregnancy for low-income women and society. I want to tread carefully here, because two posts on this topic in 24 hours makes me feel a bit like your average liberal dood blogger cavalierly discussing the lives of women in the abstract.
The first link is to an LA Times article that points to a popular piece of research that asserts, based on a natural experiment, that teen pregnancy is a smarter economic strategy for young women and society - as the women turn out to work more and pay more in taxes over the long-term than women who delay childbearing into their 20s. This is because the teen mothers have more time and ability in their adult years to work; effectively, they get the child rearing out of the way during their less productive years.
Interesting concept. Compare it now to research that shows that women who delay childbearing until they're over 30 enjoy higher wages over the lifecourse - the premiums, it turns out, are biggest for college-educated women, and women in managerial positions. In fact, "higher expected career earnings lead women to postpone childbearing." What's that now about incentives?
Paying Teens Not to Get Pregnant?
Published July 07, 2009 @ 12:43PM PT
Via Postbourgie, who gets it from AverageBro, I see that a NC-based maternity nurse has launched a program that pays teen girls $1 per day to remain pregnancy free. At least that's how the papers tell it. Founder Hazel Brown expands on the program's goals:
"Our three goals are that they avoid pregnancy, graduate from high school and enroll in college," Brown said.
So, as I wrote over at PB, why hasn't this been framed as "Program provides cash incentives to graduate" or "Students eligible for thousands in aid if they go to college". Too neutral? Too boring? Or inaccurate?
