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Six: American Dream
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Poverty
Trap
In
his book The Unheavenly
City, political scientist Edward Banfield explains urban
poverty as the end result of what he calls “the logic of
metropolitan growth,” (23).
Many of the urban poor, Banfield argues, come to the city
in search of better opportunities, bringing with them
lower-class behavior patterns that are passed on to their
children and that are inconsistent with the labor markets in
urban areas and the polite sensibilities of the upper-class,
urban inhabitants. Without
going into further detail on the causes of these lower-class
behaviors, Banfield focuses on the negative habits of the urban
poor and firmly believes that they will end their poverty only
when they change their habits.
However, Banfield’s theory does not touch upon the
roots of this culture of poverty; it does not answer why there
are lower classes, or why the poor view the urban labor market
with such a high degree of fear, disappointment, and anger.
It is likely that a culture of poverty does indeed hamper
one’s chances of rising to higher socioeconomic ranks.
However, the direction of cause and effect does not run
in only one direction. The American social, political, and
economic structures themselves -- the same institutions whose
purpose is to open new doors of opportunity for disadvantaged
people -- also maintain and feed into this culture of poverty.
Increases in the minimum wage have lagged well behind
inflation (Levy, 183), relegating the poor to low-income jobs
carrying little or no benefits.
Mediocre schooling for minorities has “contribute[d] to
black-white achievement differences,” (Sourcebook, 355).
And inequality in after-tax income has grown faster than
inequality in pre-tax income (Levy, 208), providing indication
of a tax system that allows few financial breaks for poor
families to invest in higher education and training for their
children. Therefore,
the culture of poverty seems in many ways a mass reaction to the
numerous insults of the American structure upon the poor. A
review of the ethnographies documented in Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s
Corner and Jay Macleod’s Ain’t
No Makin’ It brings to light the negative effects of
American society upon the urban poor’s behaviors, ambitions,
and opportunities. By
examining the persistence of intergenerational models of poverty
transmission, we are able to discern inherent and underlying
structural conditions that drive behavior and consign the poor
to a culture of poverty. As
a result, to alleviate this culture of poverty, we must strike
at the root and look to reform the social structure of American
society, so that these people are given the opportunity to and
instilled with the belief that they can succeed.
INTRODUCTION
Tally’s
Corner and Ain’t No
Makin’ It are two compelling works that follow the lives
of poor, disadvantaged individuals whose dismal life stories
support Macleod’s belief like actors in a play:
There is a
strong relationship between aspirations and occupational
outcomes; if individuals do not even aspire to middle-class
jobs, then they are unlikely to achieve them.
In effect, such individuals disqualify themselves from
attaining the American definition of success – the achievement
of a prestigious, highly remunerative occupation – before
embarking on the quest (2).
Liebow’s
Tally’s Corner
describes a shifting collection of anchorless adult Negro
males who came together regularly at Tally’s Corner, an
unsightly urban section of Washington’s inner city during the
early 1960’s. Severely
handicapped by lack of education and skills, and inadequate
income, these men considered the streetcorner a source of
security and self-esteem, since failures were transformed into
successes, and weakness turned into strengths.
The men of Tally’s
Corner were in their 20’s and 30’s when Liebow conducted
his research. As
young and full adults, these men were perfect subjects to
observe and interview in order to understand the complexities of
and reasons for their adult lifestyles: unstable marriages,
low-wage, low-responsibility jobs, heightened friendships, and a
lack of preparation for the future.
Liebow’s comprehensive and poignantly personal
observations of his subjects bring a certain logic to their
unacceptable, uncivilized behaviors.
In a world where society expected one to be a “loser”
and left one very little room for self-improvement, the men of Tally’s
Corner could find some self-worth, a sense of belonging, and
freedom only amongst themselves.
Ain’t
No Makin’ It by Jay Macleod complements Liebow’s work by
focussing on the youths of Clarendon Heights, a low-income
housing development in a northeastern city.
However, whereas Liebow’s subjects were adult Negro
men, the most disadvantaged and resentful group in Macleod’s
study was composed of white teenagers. Although Macleod
conducted this research twenty years after Liebow’s work, one
can see that these children still possess and express many of
the same “unacceptable” behaviors and bleak ambitions as
Liebow’s subjects. The
similarities between both groups reveal that a minority group --
even if it is of the same race as the dominant social group --
will probably exhibit lower school achievement and socioeconomic
rank if the group experiences discrimination and relegation to
society’s least-valued occupational roles.
The twenty-year time span between the two studies, on the
other hand, supports the existence of the transmission of “undesirable,
lower-class” values and behaviors across generations, a
process sociologists have named “social reproduction.”
Macleod defines “social reproduction theory” as:
“a tradition of sociological literature that strives to
illuminate the specific mechanisms and processes that contribute
to the intergenerational transmission of social inequality,”
(6). In other
words, the theory strives to identify the reasons why the rich
become richer and the poor remain poor in America, the “land
of opportunity.” As
we take a closer look at the lives of those described in Macleod’s
and Liebow’s works, we will begin to realize that American
society’s structure itself provides the “specific mechanisms
and processes” that maintain social reproduction among the
poor.
EFFECTS
OF CHILDHOOD AND FAMILY STRUCTURE ON POVERTY
Tally’s
Corner follows the lives of a group of Negro men who lead
different lives yet share similar feelings of failure and low
self-esteem within the same oppressive environment of downtown
Washington, D.C. Liebow’s
main character is Tally, a brown-skinned man of thirty-one years
with the physique of a professional heavyweight fighter.
Tally’s father left the family within months after
Tally was born. Tally
never went to school and started working regularly by the age of
eleven, doing menial tasks, such as washing dishes and cleaning
up offices. In
1954, he moved to Washington, D.C. and began working as a
semiskilled construction worker, earning about one hundred
dollars a week. However,
due to the harsh winters, rainy days, and lack of construction
work, Tally only works about six or seven months during the
year. During his
eight years in Washington, Tally has lived in many sections of
the city and has married, separated, and fathered eight
children, three with his wife, and five more with five different
women. Although
this is only a basic outline of Tally’s life, it is enough to
convince the reader that his life deviated significantly from
the lives of middle-class Americans in the 1960’s.
Liebow also focuses his attention on Tally’s close
friends and ex-friends, such as Sea Cat, Richard, Stoopy,
Wesley, and Leroy. They
each have a different personal history, but they share many of
the same experiences and lifestyles: 1) some or no education; 2)
unstable, low-wage, physically exhaustive work; 3) lack of
money; 4) broken marriages and “serial monogamy;” and 5) the
fathering of many illegitimate children.
Why do these men have broken family structures?
Why can’t they have successful marriages and stay
monogamous?
Most
people first learn how a marriage is maintained and how a family
is run by direct experience during his/her childhood as he/she
observes parents, siblings, and other families.
In the case of Tally and his friends, their first
impression of a family consisted of a non-existent father, a
female-headed household, and many siblings, most of whom were
fathered by different men.
This kind of childhood experience could have contributed
to their irresponsible choices and behaviors as husbands and
fathers. But the
men of Tally’s Corner tend to explain their failures in terms
of their inability to adjust to the built-in demands of the
husband-wife relationship.
Stoopy blames the failure of his marriage on his alcohol
dependence; his wife could not understand why he would
irresponsibly spend the rent money on whiskey and gambling.
Sea Cat, on the other hand, could not stand having his
freedom and independence compromised by his wife’s demands.
Another widely held view among the men on why their
marriages failed is that no man can be satisfied with only one
woman at a time. The
men completely agree with Clarence, another streetcorner man,
who concludes that, “It don’t matter how much a man loves
his wife and kids, he’s gonna keep on chasing other women....A
man’s got too much dog in him,” (Liebow, 121-122).
Blaming one’s own personal flaws for failed marriages
is a common characteristic among the men of Tally’s Corner,
but the root or cause of these behaviors lies deeper, according
to Liebow. The wife
also plays a significant role in a deteriorating marriage.
Similar to the men, the women of Tally’s Corner as
children often experienced a family structure in which the
father did not fulfill his responsibilities as father and
husband. As adults,
the women hope that their husbands will be “the man of the
house” and provide financial and emotional support for the
family. However,
their experiences with men in the past cause them to expect
the opposite. The
men of Tally’s Corner find extreme humiliation in their wive’s
and society’s expectation of their failures; their reaction to
this humiliation leads to either crying sessions or abusive,
physical fights. It
is intolerable for the men to live with a wife’s constantly
unmet hopes, standing reminders of their failures as husbands
and fathers. With
unstable, low-wage jobs, a wife whose standards of manhood are
beyond their reach, and visions of an increasingly desperate
life, these men have no other way to prove their masculinity and
manhood other than by exerting their masculine energies
abusively, physically, and sexually. Most unfortunately, under a
social system that makes no progress for the life chances of the
disadvantaged, the children of the men of Tally’s Corner --
legitimate or illegitimate -- likely will experience the same
broken family structure, and therefore, will expect the same
failures -- as does society -- once they are husbands and wives
themselves.
While
Liebow describes how childhood experiences of family structure
can affect one’s marital and parental behaviors in adulthood,
Macleod’s focus on poverty’s youths provides more
information on how a broken family structure can have an earlier
impact on a child’s outlook, ambitions, and behaviors.
Ain’t No Makin’
It follows the lives of children in two main peer groups of
Clarendon Heights, a project community.
One group calls themselves the Hallway Hangers, while the
other is called the Brothers.
The Hallway Hangers are composed of a core of eight
youths between the ages of fifteen and eighteen who enjoy
congregating in the stairwell and on the landing of one of the
project entries. Often,
one can find them there, at doorway #13, drinking heavily,
verbally and physically abusing each other, smoking pot, and/or
sniffing cocaine at all times of the day.
Therefore, they spend little time in school; if they do
attend class, they are often drunk or high.
The American dream, according to the Hallway Hangers, is
a road of disillusionment.
From direct experience and observation of their parents
and older peers, they find the effort too long and arduous and
the chances of social upgrading too risky and remote to even
attempt. These
boys, therefore, reject the values of the dominant culture and
subscribe to their own distinctive cultural norms.
The Hallway Hangers are mainly white boys of Italian or
Irish descent, which contrasts with Liebow’s all black
subjects. It is
interesting to assess the psychological and characteristic
similarities between the black men of Tally’s Corner and the
white youths, even though they come from different racial
backgrounds but the same environmental insults.
Once again, the father figure is absent in the lives of
the Hallway Hangers. Either
they have never met their father, their father is in jail, has
moved out, or is dead. Only
one Hallway Hanger, Jinks, has a father living with him.
Additionally, most of the Hallway Hangers’ parents did
not graduate from high school, have low-paying blue-collar jobs,
and have sporadic employment records.
Although the parents do encourage their boys to do well
academically, they are also hesitant to instill high aspirations
in them for fear of setting them up for disappointment (Macleod,
114).
In
contrast to the Hallway Hangers, the Brothers are mainly black
boys with the exception of one white member.
They accept the standards of behavior and strive to
fulfill socially approved roles.
None of them smokes, drinks heavily, or uses drugs, and
they attend high school on a regular basis, although their
academic achievements are mediocre.
However, they only blame themselves for their average
achievement, not the American lower-class social system.
The Brothers firmly believe in America’s equality of
opportunity and the efficacy of schooling.
By applying themselves in school, they have a chance to
move up the ladder of opportunity, occupation, and wealth.
By
examining the Brothers’ family lives, we can see differences
between their families and those of the Hallway Hangers.
Three of the Brothers have a male authority figure living
with them, and they all work regularly.
Nearly half of the Brothers’ parents obtained their
high school diplomas, and most of the Brothers’ older siblings
have achieved significant educational marks.
Furthermore, the parents continually encourage extremely
high aspirations in their sons.
Another main difference between the two peer groups is
the duration of their stay in public housing.
Whereas the Hallway Hangers’ families have lived in
public housing for at least twenty years, some through two
generations, the Brothers’ families average five to thirteen
years (Macleod, 131). This
fact lends credence to the supposition that the length of
exposure to a low-income environment -- which American society
has allowed, developed, and maintained -- has some direct
correlation to the degree of unacceptable, rebellious behaviors
expressed by these boys. Macleod
agrees with this assessment:
The
view that the problem resides almost exclusively with the
children and their families, and that some sort of cultural
injection is needed to compensate for what they are missing, is
not only intellectually bankrupt but also has contributed to the
widespread popular notion that the plight of the poor whites and
minorities is entirely their own fault (99).
EDUCATIONAL
SYSTEM EFFECTS ON THE CULTURE OF POVERTY
Macleod’s
research is most valuable for his assessment of the American
educational system and its adverse
effects on the children of lower-class neighborhoods.
Social reformers have rallied and cried for better
schools and equal access to quality education for poor and
minority children; only then would the gap between rich and poor
reduce significantly (Macleod, 157).
Macleod finds this approach problematic and argues that
schooling actually maintains and legitimizes social inequality.
Schooling tends to reproduce the structure of inequality,
because the educational system has high regard for the culture
possessed by the upper classes over that of the lower classes.
Therefore, by the definitions and standards of the
schools, lower-class children are consistently evaluated as
deficient. For
example, the Brothers and the Hallway Hangers attend Lincoln
high school. The
school has the money, resources, and faculty of any middle-class
high school, which convinces parents and society that the poor
children of Clarendon Heights are receiving an “equal, high
quality” education. The
Brothers are also convinced of this.
They hold high esteem for the American equal opportunity
system, blaming only themselves if they fall short of realizing
their goals. Macleod
argues that while these boys are nurturing their increasingly
rising high aspirations, they are being prepared psychologically
for jobs at the bottom of the occupational structure:
“They are unaware of the discriminatory influences of
tracking (different educational paths and alternatives), the
school’s partiality toward the cultural capital of the upper
classes, the self-fulfilling consequences of teachers’
expectations, and other forms of class-based educational
selection,” (126-127). In
some ways, Macleod admires the Hallway Hangers, because they do
see the dismal truth of their society.
Although these boys do believe that a select, lucky few
will climb the social ladder with determination and effort, they
also understand that these chances are much too risky and
remote, especially in a condescending educational environment
where the middle-class teachers have little or no experience of
their personal, lower-class lives.
Like the students at Capital High in Fordham and Ogbu’s
study (Sourcebook, 312), the Hallway Hangers are aware of the
obstacles and barriers in their society and, as a result, have
polarized their subculture away from the dominant cultural norm
as a defense mechanism against these onslaughts to their
self-esteem (Macleod, 117).
Aside from the American educational system, other factors
arising from the structure of our society also significantly
discourage and deter the lower-class children from achieving
high academic performances.
One reason why the Hallway Hangers see little value in
schooling is that they are convinced that they are headed into
jobs for which they do not need an education:
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, you need it for that job.’
You get a high school diploma, and they’re still gonna
give you a shitty job,” (Macleod, 102).
This may sound somewhat offensive to us because it runs
counter to our beliefs, but Macleod argues that this assessment
is based on the Hallway Hangers’ experience and rational.
Jinks, for example, has four older brothers.
One graduated from high school but is no better off than
the rest. Another
high school graduate brother is in the Navy, as was another who
did not graduate. Jinks
would think about how the older boys in Clarendon Heights, some
high school graduates, some dropouts, are all unemployed or in
lousy jobs. Gradually,
Jinks’s attitude toward school changed, and his straight-A
grades from freshman year dropped significantly.
Like Jinks, the other Hallway Hangers do not see the
reason for academic excellence if they will eventually end up
with jobs in the army, as construction workers, or as auto
mechanics (Macleod, 102). Additionally,
perhaps the biggest cost of going to school every day is the
deferred income from full-time work.
With only a mother’s income, the Hallway Hangers are in
pressing need for money to support their families and
themselves. In
contrast to middle-class teenagers, the Hallway Hangers do not
have the money to live off as they invest time into long-range
educational or occupational plans.
Furthermore, since 1975, outright grants as a percentage
of all financial aid declined from 80% to 46% by 1986, making a
college education less and less attractive to lower-class
adolescents, because more loans would be needed to compensate
(Sourcebook, 349). To
low-income, economically unstable families, loans are considered
very risky. With
present financial needs and the firm belief that “makin’ it”
is a highly remote possibility, the Hallway Hangers want
immediate financial success even at the cost of an advanced
education. This
analysis supports Macleod’s claim that, “the leveled
aspirations of the Hallway Hangers are to a large degree a
response to the limitations of social class as they are manifest
in the Hallway Hangers’ social world,” (141).
The reason why the determined, optimistic Brothers only
achieve mediocre academic marks in not as clear.
Macleod argues that the Brothers’ overly faithful, but
naive outlook on the American dream is to blame.
Although the Brothers have a close relationship, they do
not have their own subculture like the Hallway Hangers do to
protect themselves from low self-esteem as a result of their
average academic performances.
As the Brothers continue to blame themselves and not the
structure of education for their academic marks, they are
legitimizing the school’s simple-minded claim that lower-class
children are deficient and, therefore, need alternative
schooling. Like the
example of the student accused of plagiarism in Fordham and Ogbu’s
study (Sourcebook, 312), the continuing assaults on the Brothers’
self-esteem probably hamper their academic performances in
school. Macleod
believes that although one or two of them will probably rise
economically and socially, the others will eventually end up
with blue-collar jobs like their parents.
For example, Juan, one of the Brothers, always expressed
his dislike for jobs that make you “stay on your feet.”
However, after many failed attempts to acquire a high
blue-collar job in an office, Juan now is in training to be an
auto mechanic, the kind of job he said he would never want; his
present financial need forced him to level his occupational
aspirations. It
seems as though another round of cultural transmission or social
reproduction will pass on to the next generation of low-class
adults as they grow up to encounter the same social system of
their forerunners.
OCCUPATIONAL
CHALLENGES
In
Tally’s Corner, we
can see how the workplace also contributes to the culture of
poverty. Employers
often find men like those on Tally’s Corner suspicious, dumb,
and lazy. They
justify this finding by emphasizing certain lower class
characteristics, such as the inability to achieve high academic
performances and the lack of ambition to acquire jobs with
higher degrees of responsibility and stability.
The men of Tally’s corner do have a tenuous man-job
relationship; oftentimes, the commitment to a job one already
has is shallow and tentative.
Sea Cat, for example, quit his construction job after two
weeks, and Sweets, another streetcorner man, quit his restaurant
busboy job after three months without notice or a sure reason
why.
There
are many reasons, Liebow argues, for this “irresponsible”
behavior. One of
the most compelling is that these men still have some pride and
self-esteem that they try to protect from total destruction.
The employers themselves offer ridiculously low wages, no
job stability, and few benefits to their workers, while
submitting these men to hazardous jobs and long hours.
Furthermore, the men of Tally’s Corner do not have any
reasonable expectation that their jobs will lead to better
things. Employers
do not promote the hard-working busboy or dishwasher to chef or
manager. They hold
the job of dishwasher or janitor or unskilled laborer in low
esteem and contempt, and so do the streetcorner men.
This is why the men hold no value or respect for their
jobs, for quitting his job to search for a new dead-end job is
an easy task for the streetcorner man.
These men do not strive for jobs with more responsibility
and prestige, because their self-esteem is under continuous
assault by their job experiences and job fears, until their
self-worth is eventually drained.
The men of Tally’s corner have no escape from the
constant reminders of their failures other than at the
streetcorner where all their failures become phantom successes
and their weaknesses transform into strengths. Therefore, in
retrospect, American society itself has molded the streetcorner
man with these undesirable “lower-class” characteristics and
behaviors.
CONCLUSION
To
say that the lower class’s “culture of poverty” is the
cause of their inability to socially upgrade themselves out of
poverty is quite simple-minded.
To believe in such a theory is to believe that a woman’s
sex is the cause of her lower income compared to her male
colleagues. Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s
Corner and Jay Macleod’s Ain’t
No Makin’ It allow us to surmise that the “culture of
poverty” is a mere collection of individual characteristics
that are found undesirable and irresponsible to middle- and
upper-class Americans. These
works evidence the negative effects of American society upon the
urban poor’s behaviors, ambitions, and opportunities.
By analyzing the intergenerational models of poverty
transmission, we have distinguished inherent and underlying
structural conditions that drive the behavior of the “lower-class”
and relegate the poor to a culture of poverty.
Only by working to improve societal social structure will
we be able to help these disadvantaged individuals gain the
self-esteem within themselves and the resources and
opportunities from their society to once again believe in the
“American Dream” of success.
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