“‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a
Comeback.” So read the headline of Patricia Cohen’s
front-page article in the October 17, 2010 edition of The
New York Times.
The article was prompted by a recent
issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science under the title, “Reconsidering Culture and
Poverty.” In their introductory essay, the editors, Mario Luis
Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, strike a triumphant
note:Culture is back on the poverty research agenda.
Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists
have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of
poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income
population in reference to cultural factors.Cohen begins with a similar refrain:
For more than 40 years,
social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to
treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be
Named. The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the
Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a ‘culture of
poverty’ to the public in his 1965 report on ‘The Negro
Family.’Cohen uncritically accepts two myths
woven by William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, and
repeated by his acolytes: first, Moynihan was clobbered for bringing to
light compromising facts about black families, and second, that this
torrent of criticism constrained a generation of social scientists from
investigating the relation between culture and poverty, for fear that it
would be pilloried for “blaming the victim.” Thus, a third,
patently self-serving myth: thanks to some intrepid scholars who reject
political correctness, it is now permissible to consider the role that
culture plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities.
