Culture of Poverty vs Destruction of Impoverished Poor Ethnic Communities: Two Approaches to Healing Poverty and Racial Injustice Marc Pilisuk Each cultural pattern, if it has survived, has had within it a set of practices and beliefs sufficient to avoid the eradication of its members and of its nurturing habitat. Viable cultural patterns include the roles of kin and non-kin in providing for the shelter, food, healing socialization of children, and teaching the accepted norms of the social group. Poverty strains such cultural support. The persistent cycle of impoverished neighborhoods enduring across generations. Led to the concept of a culture of poverty. Its major tenet is that the poor are not only lacking resources, but they also are themselves transformed by a poverty-perpetuating value system. According to Oscar Lewis, "The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it, especially because of what happens to the world view, aspirations, and character of the children who grow up in it.” (Moynihan 1969, p. 199). The term "subculture of poverty" first appeared in the ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. Lewis argued that although the burdens of poverty resulted from the larger system and were imposed upon certain members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture. Children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass. Lewis offered as many as seventy characteristics that indicated the presence of the culture of poverty (1996 [1966], 1998), which he argued was not shared among all of the lower classes. The people in a culture of poverty have a strong feelings of marginality, helplessness, dependency, and not belonging. They are alienated and estranged in their own country. They are convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their needs. They internalize the scorn of others and share widespread feelings of inferiority. Racial discrimination may exacerbate this as in the US but the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who did not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group, also demonstrated the pattern. People within a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor.(Lewis 1998) The theory attracted academic and policy attention in the 1960s, but has largely been discredited by academics around the turn of the century (Goode and Eames, 1996; Bourgois, 2001; Small M.L., Harding D.J., Lamont M., 2010). Although the idea is experiencing a comeback, current scholars recognize many scholars have noticed that the poor do not typically hold different values from middle class people. Critics of the culture of poverty argument insist that structural factors rather than individual characteristics better explain the persistence of poverty (Goode and Eames, 1996; Bourgois, 2001; Small M.L., Harding D.J., Lamont M., 2010. Rather than the "values" of the poor as the reason for potentially mal- adaptive behaviors, [1]. racism and isolation were considered to underlie the persistence of poverty. 2 Although Lewis was concerned with poverty in the developing world, the culture of poverty concept proved attractive to U.S. public policy makers and politicians. It strongly informed documents such as the Moynihan Report (1965) and the War on Poverty more generally. The culture of poverty also emerges as a key concept in Michael Harrington's discussion of American poverty in The Other America (1962). For Harrington, the culture of poverty is a structural concept defined by social institutions of exclusion which create and perpetuate the cycle of poverty in America. Proponents of this theory argued that the poor are not simply lacking resources, but also acquire a poverty-perpetuating value system. According to Oscar Lewis, "The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it, especially because of what happens to the world view, aspirations, and character of the children who grow up in it.” (Moynihan 1969, p. 199). Later scholars have noticed that the poor do not have different values. The term "subculture of poverty" (later shortened to "culture of poverty") made its first appearance in the ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and therefore imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass. Lewis gave some seventy characteristics (1996 [1966], 1998) that indicated the presence of the culture of poverty, which he argued was not shared among all of the lower classes. The people engulfed in the culture of poverty have strong feelings of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from 3 racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor. (Lewis 1998) This culture contains a strong element of despair, marginality, sense of unworthiness. In such a subculture, an ethos of fighting for daily survival, avoidance of future planning, often without capacity for longer term regard of the well-being of self and community. Lewis argued that such an internalized life view was itself a major factor preventing any escape from poverty whether initiated by internal or by external efforts. While Lewis was a humanistic scholar and his indictment was of the society rather than upon the distressed individuals within it, his proposals to address the problem, and the many implementations of subsequent anti-poverty activity, have been guided by efforts to change the sub- culture of poverty, ie, attitudes and behaviors of individuals. Despite controversy, this assumption underlies much of the conventional approach to helping members of poor, ethnic minority groups to improve their lives. While hunger, malnutrition and homelessness are tangible indictors, the experience of poverty is typically relative to what one sees as the wealth of others. 4 Awareness of poverty is based upon observations of inequality. Wide and unbreachable gaps test the resilience of traditional cultures. The gap is illustrated in the United States where 46.5 million people live in poverty. At 21.8 percent, childhood poverty in the US is the highest in the industrialized world. One out of four US children lives in a family that receives food stamps, a program that faces cuts even while family income shows no gain. Poverty among US seniors is increasing. Over 9 percent of seniors lived in poverty in 2012 , a percentage higher than in 1972. It is no accident that average American families have seen their incomes decline over the past 30 years as an economic agenda endorsed by the two major political parties has endorsed “free trade” agreements which have served to exchange American jobs, workplace standards, food safety laws and consumer protections for greater corporate profits. While median family income has declined and poverty has increased, the number of millionaires and billionaires has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 1996, there were 121 billionaires in this country; now there are 442. Corporate greed has ushered in large gaps in the capacity of local communities to apply their cultural strengths to the well- being of their members. With corporations extracting more from the commons and returning less, people are asked to accept the mandates of austerity. Austerity is driving many to suicide, depression and causing soaring rates of drug use and HIV and increases in infectious disease. Austerity reduced access to medicines and health care in Europe and U.S. 10,000 suicides and a million depression cases can be blamed on austerity. In Greece, HIV rates increased 200% since 2011 because of budget cuts * Greece had first malaria outbreak for decades due to mosquito spraying cuts * Five million Americans lost access to health care during recession * In Britain, 10,000 families are now homeless because of austerity.