The Culture of Poverty, Again

Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education Studies of Migration, Integration, Equity, and Cultural Survival

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The culture of poverty, again

Ray McDermott & Shirin Vossoughi

To cite this article: Ray McDermott & Shirin Vossoughi (2020) The culture of poverty, again, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 14:2, 60-69 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2020.1733960

Published online: 24 May 2020.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hdim20 DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 2020, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 60–69 https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2020.1733960

The culture of poverty, again Ray McDermotta and Shirin Vossoughi b aGraduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA; bSchool of Education & Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led crash from 1968 to 1980. The reason for documenting this history is the reemergence of culture of poverty rhetoric in the last decade. Our response recommends the early critiques to the new culture of poverty, which has mostly side-stepped a potent body of social scientific and literary contestation. The papers that follow give detail to the issues raised.

Poor men we must always have, til the redemption is fulfilled, but The Poor, as consisting of the same Individuals! O this is a sore accusation against society. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834; in Dean, 1990) Poverty is awful, and twice so. The most obvious condition of poor people: they have little access to resources. They stand against the odds. If they prosper, and sometimes they do, it’s because they have stayed a step ahead of butcher, baker, and policy-shtick maker. The less obvious problem: poor people have to put up with being disparaged, distrusted, rejected, and theorized by those who are not poor. In the hands of social scientists, they become The Poor and have to face being described, spoken for, and explained by policy wonks. Being poor is awful, but being treated as poor might be, or might be felt as, the more disagreeable problem. Even if all disabling images of poverty were accurate – and no, they are not – there is no reason for explaining the situation by pointing just to the poor and not to the organization of the whole society for rhyme and reason. Both problems are as old as the republic. Here is Washington Irving in 1820 reporting the “repining and hopeless poverty” of Native Americans:

It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been disposed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare: and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. (1819–1820,p.293) Poverty is still around and so too the put-down poor. Researchers record and report. Someone should fix it, they say, but nothing helps enough. A full society of someones might have a better chance, but until that version of redemption emerges, we face a smaller and trickier task. At the least, we must figure out how to NOT make thingsworsebyturningpoorpeopleoverto mainstream social sciences for objectifying interrogations and self-aggrandizing explanations. In the effort to remediate the suffering of The Poor, researchers can make things worse by describing the problems of poverty without consideration of how the people who control market and state resources arrange, by just taking care of themselves, the difficulties facing poor people

(Wacquant, 2008). By ignoring the full system of injustices, the social sciences leave The Poor guilty of generating their own problems. If the social sciences focus on what is wrong with The Poor (the better, perhaps, to fix them), many ethnographers and novelists are closer to the ground where poor people show themselves relentless and ingenious (McDermott, 2010). The characters in Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison’s novels are hard on each other, and, like most people, they can organize disasters and downfalls. What distinguishes poor people is that they have insufficient resources to organize the repairs available to the more privileged. They face tough circumstances rarely of their own choosing, and they are tied by one-down connections and comparisons to the wider social order with little room for the errors and indulgences others are allowed. A slum, said W.E.B. Du Bois too long ago, “is not a simple fact, it is a symptom and … requires a study that takes one far beyond the slum districts” (Du Bois, 1899–1993, p. 6). On return to the burned-out neighborhood of his youth, John Edgar Wideman (2008) said it sharply: “We didn’t do this neighborhood to ourselves.” We offer a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led crash from 1968 to 1980. The reason for documenting this history is the reemergence of culture of poverty rhetoric in the last decade. Our response recommends the early critiques to the new culture of poverty, which has mostly side-stepped a potent body of social scientific and literary contestation. The papers that follow give detail to the issues raised. Similarities in poverty theory in 1959 and 2008 should not obscure differences in the social climate of the two periods. In the late 1950s, Civil Rights were the issue, and the wealth gap between rich and poor was smaller than in the 60 years before or after (from the Gilded Age of the 1890s to now). Equality was the goal, and Galbraith (1958) suggested poverty might disappear as a social problem. For liberals, remedial education was a panacea. Ten years later, Johnson’sWaron Poverty and Civil Rights were buried in Vietnam, and liberal appeals to fixing poor children were recast as cynical plots to blame school failure on The Poor. This context invited new researchers – linguists, anthropologists, critical psychologists, and novelists – to discover what poor children can do under restrictive conditions forced on them by those with more resources. School failure, they argued, was more in established hierarchies than in the capacities of children. By 2008, the income gap passed previous highs, and the economy was verging on collapse. The poor, immigrant, and minoritized were again staged as trouble, and the liberal regime of policy research returned to the culture of poverty. Researchers resisting the new culture of poverty must again show that negative stereotypes of the languages, minds, and morals of poor people hide both the complexity of lives in tight circumstances and the simplicity of those who prescribe help from a distance. This was the point of critical work done from 1965 to 1980, but the situation has changed for the worse. In the 1960s, that schools were designed to inflict failure was news. The fact that they were better at sorting children into social classes than educating them was a scandal revealed. Fifty years later, sorting has become an explicit goal of the political right. In a Trumpean society, unfettered by dreams of level playing fields, competition, and unapologetic White supremacy reign.

Lewis, Deutsch, Moynihan In 1959, anthropologist Oscar Lewis used the culture of poverty in his Mexican ethnography, Five Families. He worked with the idea for a decade in studies of poor people in and around Mexico City (1961), San Juan and New York City (1966, 1968), and, as a contrast, Havana. Although shaped to fit the experiences of poor peasants migrating from country to the city in Mexico, the term was quickly weaponized against African American poor people and adopted like few social science terms ever.1 It entered policy talks at high levels. It provided assumptions for the War on

1Achievement Gap is a current competitor: less controversial, or more successfully invidious? 62 R. MCDERMOTT AND S. VOSSOUGHI

Poverty (Orleck & Hazirjian, 2011) and was central to debates over the appointments and disappointments of Brown v Board and Head Start. A Lewis conversation with Sen. Robert Kennedy appeared in Redbook, where Lewis warned that childrenraisedinacultureofpoverty had to be shown another way of life before their character would lock in around the age of eight, never to change, no matter how much conditions might change (Kennedy & Lewis, 1967). Fidel Castro invited Lewis to study a poor neighborhood in Havana, and Lewis eventually argued that in an advanced capitalist state, but not in socialistCuba,norintraditionalIndia(wherehealsodid fieldwork), the most relentless disorders of The Poor could be explained by their socialization into a self-generating culture of poverty: drive-by employment, short money, marriage failure, illegiti- mate children, mental illness, physical abuse, low self-esteem, errant morals, disrupted cognitive development, inarticulateness, and helplessness.2 Across the 1960s, Lewis responded to an unruly spotlight with essays listing the traits of people in a culture of poverty. The list grew yearly, and the problems of poor people came to look more intractable.3 Lewis documented the awful jobs and money struggles and showed how the structural grounds of family life in poverty are a weak economic base for building idealized middle-class careers and values. He attended to material culture and had the numbers to make claims about the flow of money, goods, and people (Lewis, 1968). More than most students of poverty, he documented the coming and going of family arrangements, and we can believe his claims about:

● a high incidence of free unions or consensual marriages ● a trend toward mother-centered families ● relatively high incidence of mistresses, the abandonment of wives, and children by multiple husbands.

Lewis extended his arguments to what some then called cultural factors to claim that psychological base for building idealized middle-class values and careers the structural grounds of family life in poverty offer a weak. In La Vida (1966), he added cognitive and linguistic inabilities. Beyond being poor, The Poor are unable in Lewis’s view. They suffer:

● a strong feeling of inferiority and negative self-image ● high incidence of maternal deprivation, orality, and weak ego structure ● a strong disposition to authoritarianism and a high tolerance for ● psychological pathology ● early initiation into sex and a confusion of sexual identification ● a verbal emphasis upon rarely realized family solidarity ● concrete over abstract talk, self-expression over self-constraint ● the use of “simple, direct, and earthy” speech with “little use of metaphor or analogy” ● a lack of planning, disrupted patterns of thought ● “personal loyalty” over “impersonal justice.” (1966; our reduction of his list)

As an ethnographic description, this is a weak list. The traits are hard to define and slippery when applied: just when and how is orality, weak ego structure, self-constraint, or concrete talk? To what contrast groups would the words not apply. The vague classifiers introducing the traits –“a strong feeling of,”“a strong disposition to,”“a verbal emphasis on,”“a lack of”–do not help. Only a most detailed ethnography gets to show that what is “lacking” is more than just what the ethnographer does not know how to see. In Lewis’s culture of poverty, psychological descriptions and explanations

2Anthropology destroyed the myth of a primitive mentality, but Lewis restaged a hierarchy of mental types with a new bottom. “Most primitive peoples have achieved a higher level of socio-cultural organization than our modern urban slum dwellers” (1966, p. xlvii). 3O’Connor complains: “It is not easy to keep track of Lewis’s trait list, or to understand why he thought that continually adding to it would add to his argument” (2001, p. 315; see Rigdon’s list, 1988, p. 114–15). DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 63 give more labels for what people cannot do than insights into what they do, and what might be possible. Leaky categories and weak measures leave readers hungry for specific contexts in which the labels might be meaningful.4 Lewis soon had followers. Martin Deutsch (1963) rode the newly emerging field of cognitive psychology to produce data on the diminished cognitive skills of children raised in unpromising circumstances, a move given prominence in Brown v Board, when experimental displays of Black children preferring White dolls aided the decision that separate was not equal. Deutsch morphed Lewis’s lists into an experimental description of how children develop cognitive skills under “ghetto” conditions. He assumes an overcrowded and unpleasant environment that leads to “stimulus deprivation.” The children, through Deutsch’s gaze, suffer inattention, inadequate language, a lack of questions from adults, and a disrupted “response tempo” for meeting deadlines. Asymmetrical experiments tying decontextualized tasks to the absence of responses expected by test-makers were used to confirm his hypotheses about the deprivation of children in mental and material poverty. Sociology took its turn with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family (1965). The report focused on the negative effects of want on the families of African American poor people as he imagined them on the basis of suspect government statistics. Calling for a return of Black men to a rightful wage-earning patriarchy (Geary, 2015; Greenbaum, 2015), it reads today as arrogant, overtly racist, and misogynous, but in 1965, its assault on African Americans invited immediate complaints. Two years later, it was republished with 22 commentaries, most with strong reservations (King, 1965–1967). Martin Luther King described the dignity of poor families and worried that Moynihan’s identified “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression” (King, 1965–1967, p. 404). Others were more blunt. James Farmer wrote that “the cocktail hour of the ‘Negro question’ is over and that we are sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended” (Farmer, 1965–1967, p. 410). Bayard Rustin decried the psychologizing of poor people as a way to obscure economic conditions; he accused Moynihan of turning “chaotic aspects of Negro life that are the direct consequence of the economic and social discrimination practiced by white Americans … into bogus evidence of some kind of Negro inferiority” (Rustin, 1966–1967,p.422). We interrupt with good news: Lewis, Deutsch, and the young Moynihan hated injustice. They were clear: the problems of poor people are put on them by a brutalizing political economy. Lewis can speak for all three:

The subculture of poverty, is part of a larger culture of capitalism whose social and economic system channels wealth into the hands of a relatively small group and thereby makes for the growth of sharp class distinctions. (Lewis, 1967, p. 499)

If given power, these researchers would have worked on redistributing access and wealth. Complaints facing their work center on how they talked about the minds and morals of those already without resources, and how such talk deflects attention from those benefiting – by connections, opportunities, money, profit, status, school performance – from poor people taking a beating. Now the bad news: When culture of poverty bleeds into educational policy, students are called at- risk and disabled for their limited capacities for learning. For Lewis, Deutsch, and Moynihan, The Poor adapt to circumstances that keep them living hand to mouth and playing fast and loose with the constraints of the system. They must make the most of small means. They live in broken circumstances, and become broken persons. They are not just behind, they can’t catch up. Their inabilities will not allow an advance. It could have been different. Lewis, Deutsch, and Moynihan confused individuals with social structure, and symptoms with causes. Of the three, Lewis was best, when pressed, at resisting being misread and over-interpreted. He hedges well: he is not interested in all poor people, only the

4Starting with Five Families, Lewis identified his work as half-literature and half-ethnography, but great literature is often more sensitive to wider constraints across a political economy (McDermott, 2010). 64 R. MCDERMOTT AND S. VOSSOUGHI bottom 20%, in quickly changing capitalist economies with an individualist ideology. He can be read with appreciation, sympathy, and outrage in quick succession.5 Deutsch is more difficult to read positively, his liberal “good intentions” as noticeable as his biases. Moynihan is closer to raw racial othering against the sensitivities, intelligence, and moral standing of people without normative nuclear families. Read him with a cold eye. The facts of production and consumption are horrific for poor people, and they should not stand as easy data for analyses by administrative bias, fiat, snobbery, quick stories, pity, or even grand theory. The facts of a bad situation should not be used to brutalize further the people caught in it. Whether in 1959 or 2020, all facts and biases describing social classes, racial groups, sexes, and linguistic shifts should be up for debate.6

Critiques of culture of poverty The Moynihan firestorm expanded into the research community when linguists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and research-rich novelists used the tools of their disciplines to reject culture of poverty thinking. A number of major figures – W.E.B. Du Bois, William Labov, Michael Cole, Eleanor Leacock, Toni Morrison, among others – offer crucial resources for confronting the new culture of poverty. Though his work largely preceded the interventions of Lewis, Deutsch, and Moynihan, W.E.B. Du Bois’ trajectory as a historical and political thinker reveals a deep wrestling with and direct challenging of core proto-assumptions of culture of poverty theorizing. Moving beyond a settled view of his early ideas around the “Talented Tenth” and assimilative Black political participation, and looking particularly at his break with the NAACP and his movement toward Marxist internationalism, illustrate how Du Bois came to eschew cultural explanations and intra-community hierarchies in favor of broad-based political struggle and cultural self-determination. Du Bois revised his earlier ideas of political and educational leadership to urge an expansive faith in the capacities of everyday Black people, and an explicit critique of (global) White supremacy as the central problem to be confronted. Like later critics of the culture of poverty, Du Bois’ writings model the movement beyond damage-centered narratives (Tuck, 2009)and toward a view of Black people and working-class communities as prime movers of history. Labov (1969, 1972) was also crucial. To claims that children in poverty suffered from inadequate language skills, Labov showed that African American English was a coherent linguistic system. Linguistics supplied tools for describing the ingenuity of people not bowing to middle-class norms – in ritual insult contests, for example. Under right circumstances, the dialects of the poor can be used to say whatever has to be said; under more difficult circumstances, when speakers have a difficult time saying what must be said, the problem is in the social arrangements, not in linguistic incompetence. Labov made a second point: not only were dialect speakers competent, they were put upon (“traduced”)bytheoriesofdisability from educational (“bigoted and interested”) researchers. There is nothing inherently better about White middle-class codes. Indeed, his work also revealed their verbose paucity. For the next 40 years, Labov (2012; Gordon, 2015b) revealed the workings of the vocal cords as a response to the silent forces of social hierarchies. Key developments and recent critiques further advance a view of linguistic deficit as a raciolinguistic ideology that persists in spite of the educational solutions recommended by thinkers like Labov (Flores & Rosa, 2015), reflecting a need for critics to contend more fundamentally with persistent ideologies of racial assimilation and related theories of change (Lewis, 2018). Cole (1996, 2013,Coleetal.,1971) was equally powerful in addressing the tangle of disabilities associated with the culture of poverty. Experimental psychology supplied gold standard methods for the analysis of people’s thinking, but with the interesting twist that experimental cognitive psychology was being used to deliver, a la Deutsch, the portraits of cognitive depravation among poor children. Not performing according to experimenter expectations on well-defined tasks became the measure and

5Eric Wolf (1962) praised Lewis for describing the plight of poor people in a capitalist nation, but by 1968 anthropological appreciation turned to critique and alarm (Valentine, 1968). Lewis’s(1966) contrast of Puerto Rican and Mexican poverty should have alienated everyone. 6For a great rewrite of race relations from midcentury to now, see Leah Gordon (2015a). DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 65 explanation of children with a limited future. The methods obscured any discovery of interesting things children might do beyond the limits of the experiment. In answer to the question, “What do stomachs do?” on a traditional IQ test, “Digest food” gets a nine-year-old two points, but only one point is awarded those who say “Get fat” or “Make noise in church.” This seemed unfair. To change the result, Cole challenged the methods (Cole, 1996; Cole, Hood, & McDermott, 1978). From his early work in West Africa (Cole, Glick, Gay, & Sharpe, 1971) to his 40-year hands-on experiment with learning in after-school computer clubs (Cole et al, 2005), Cole has relentlessly pursued a critique of traditional methods assessing what children cannot do with a simultaneous effort to build better methods with tools of engagement that describe and enable what children can do. Competence and mastery come in more forms than mainstream psychologists can imagine, particularly when studying across social borders. The development of Black cognitive psychology in the 1970s was a response to the same forces of degradation and oppression (Boykin, Franklin, & Yates, 1979;Jones,1972). Again, the biases of educational policy-makers were revealed. Leacock had a less public, but no less important role. She was there at the beginning. In 1959, she published a paper on voter registration with Deutsch, and when he published cognitive studies of disadvantaged children in 1960, she wrote a supportive but prescient commentary. The problem, she said,isnotoneofthemiddle-classnormsandworking-poor deviations, the first to be enhanced, the latter to be remediated. The problem is a nasty nest of “functionally related sub-cultural class-linked differences within a national whole” (1960, p. 31). As the culture of poverty was being treated as a problem of The Poor and by The Poor, Leacock worked the opposite view by pointing to those climbing mobility ladders on the backs of poor people. She extended her critique of “we-they” thinking to other dichotomies supporting poverty policies: middle/lower class norms, achievement/underachievement in schools and job markets, abstract/concrete language, and traditional/modern societies. Leacock (1980) sought tools made possible when “commonsense” assumptions about poor people (she preferred the word, “workers”)givewayto empirical inquiries rooted in solidarity. Instead of listing traits, she examined the problems poor people routinely confront, the social problems that “we”–researchers, policy makers, educators – help to reinforce:

imposing white, middle-class practices/values as the desired norm;

claiming superiorities that invite the degradation of those with less;

fixating on personality over historical and social structural analysis;

pushing reformist agendas over more radical reworkings of education

(tweaking children over reorganizing schools and neighborhoods);

accepting modes of research that maintain power over research subjects and communities. (1972, 1967; our rewrite of her points) Turning tables on the culture of poverty was necessary for disrupting the presumed desirability of White middle-class norms. New modes of inquiry might emerge if researchers would turn a critical eye on their own attitudes and methods.

The new culture of poverty By 1980, the culture of poverty theorizing went underground as the go-to explanation of poor children in school. The ideas stayed in play–in welfare offices, classrooms, and development projects – but educational theorists dropped the term.7

7If the sentiment remained the same, the term changed to “the underclass” (Auletta, 1982–1999), “the disadvantaged” (Wilson, 1987), and, for better, “the undeserving” (Katz, 2013). Katz (1993) is a persuasive historical critique of the concept of the “underclass,” but with less attention to the cognitive and linguistic deprivation countered by the early critics. Scott (1997) says that contempt and pity for the poor is the steady state among both liberal and conservative policy makers across the twentieth century. The culture of poverty rhetoric of the 1960s and the 2010s are high points of focus and contestation. 66 R. MCDERMOTT AND S. VOSSOUGHI

Culture of poverty has returned with more sophisticated arguments and better data. It’s the same story, same sentiment, by almost the same name: “culture and poverty.” Sociologists Michèle Lamont, Mario Small, and William Julius Wilson (Small & Lamont, 2008; Small, Harding, & Lamont, 2010; Wilson, 2009a, 2009b, 2010) have reunited culture and poverty to explain how The Poor renew themselves as The Poor. They emphasize the political economy and then present cultural factors to account for responses to poverty in varying situations by neighborhoods, value sets, frames, repertoires, symbolic resources, and cultural capital:

Why do people differ in their ability to escape poverty? … the greatest barrier to middle-class status among the poor is sustained material deprivation itself. But there is significant variation in behavior, decision making, and outcomes among people living in seemingly identical structural conditions. (Small et al., 2010,p.9) Major newspapers reported the claims. Some offered resistance (Steinberg, 2011). The new culture and poverty acknowledges that the old culture of poverty blamed the victim, but this is no reason, they say, to avoid the hard truth. Their truth: unhappy days are here again; the culture of poverty is real; it is in the numbers and on the faces of The Poor;it’s time to use the term again; enough political correctness. Our truth: the new culture of poverty repeats arguments about capacities and skills of The Poor without mention or amendment of the empirical and theoretical work that once eased Lewis, Deutsch, and Moynihan from center stage. Again, good intentions subject the character and promise of The Poor to degradation.

Morrison’s reformulation From 1965 to 1970, Toni Morrison reworked the culture of poverty to an account of poor people as part of a wider situation. She wrestled with similar ideas as Labov, Cole, and Leacock while writing The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970–1993), a story about a Black child wanting blue eyes. In the following scene, two teenagers get into an argument with Maureen Peel, a light-skinned, beautiful, articulate, and parent and teacher adored child. The issue: who is prettier? In working through their struggle, Morrison, in one paragraph, takes three positions on comparative beauty; each one makes progress in the critical rejection of a culture of poverty theory of children.8 The first position: the girls are not as cute as Maureen Peel. That’s the way it is. The second position: the girls have their own attractions – at least to those who know how to look. The third position: the girls are trapped inside arbitrary racist categories about what makes beauty. By position one, the girls are losing the argument:

We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not … We were lesser … What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? (Morrison, 1970–1993, p. 74) The sentence, “If she was cute – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not,” can be read as if it were about intelligence, fluency, or middle-class status:

If she was smart – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not.

If she was articulate – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not.

If she had money – and if anything could be believed, she did – then we did not. We like to imagine Morrison was writing in response to media coverage of Lewis, Deutsch, and Moynihan. By the first position, the girls were lesser: as well as poor, they were unattractive, dumb,

8For the three theories applied to school failure, see McDermott (1997). DIASPORA, INDIGENOUS, AND MINORITY EDUCATION 67 and tongue-tied. Morrison had the girls rethink the situation with the second position: they should not be defined by what they do not have. What they do have, what most children have, is more than enough for making their way:

Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. (p. 74) The girls were more than enough cute, smart, articulate, and someday they might have enough money. The second position is a necessary advance: from being deprived to being different (“comfortable in our skins,” even when not appreciated by others). Morrison’s third position has the most impact: the problems of The Poor do not belong to them, but are unfairly brought down on them by the wider world of racial and economic hierarchies:

And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us. (p. 74) Who decides conditions for being beautiful? Why? The same can be asked of smart, glib, and well to do. The girls’ problems have more to do with their observers, labelers, and traducers, and, in school, more to do with educational researchers than with their own competencies. The girls reach beyond the culture of poverty and change the question to who is stealing their beauty and intelligence and leaving poor children feeling bereft. The girls were discovering, as Morrison did, as Du Bois, Labov, Cole, and Leacock did, that the game of intelligence and school is a mock-up that answers more to questions of power, race, and class than anything intrinsic to thinking and learning (Varenne & McDermott, 1998). The central character of The Bluest Eye is in every way put upon, her every move an occasion for diagnosis and degradation. In a forward to the novel written years later, Morrison reflects:

… the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing … many readers remain touched but not moved. (1993, p. 211) And so for the culture of poverty thinking. For Morrison, it offers not just brutalization and sentimentality. It smashes poor people and leaves the rest of us unaccountable, wringing our hands with pity, instead of making change. Coleridge, again, on the culture of poverty, again: “Othisisasore accusation against society.”

Acknowledgments

As Dean at Stanford, Claude Steele supported our efforts to teach a course on the Culture of Poverty. Eric Bredo, Shelley Goldman, Carol Lee, and Jonathan Rosa have offered key insights and critiques. Thanks to Roy Pea for Washington Irving and Katherine Shumaker for Scott.

Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors Ray McDermott, Emeritus Professor of Education.

Shirin Vossoughi, Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences.

ORCID Shirin Vossoughi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4338-7551 68 R. MCDERMOTT AND S. VOSSOUGHI

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