Bullshit. You are demonising the poor. I’m from a poor area, and I grew up in public housing. The problem is not attitudes or a lack of a work ethic or any of the other blame-the-victim bullshit that gets endlessly parroted in these debates.
Pure and simple, it’s employment. Yes, people from disadvantaged areas often have a bad attitude: it’s because they know that they can’t compete for such jobs that exist. You can’t give those people hope because - amazing revelation - poor people aren’t stupid. They know that their chances are terrible. All the pep talks in the world and all the threats in the world will not make a blind bit of difference. They’re not choosing to be poor and unemployed, and somehow forcing them all to get college degrees wouldn’t change a damn thing.
There are more people than there are jobs. That’s the only thing that really matters in this debate, and the poor are very well aware of it.
Your assumption that poverty is operationally due to decent paying jobs not being available to under-educated and under-skilled people is perfectly correct. As I pointed out in my first response it’s a poverty issue. So if decent jobs are not available to low skill people with limited educations in technologically advanced, industrialized economies what’s the solution? You can only chicken and egg this so far. What keeps people in poverty?
Immigrants who barely speak the language and get here with little more than the clothes on their backs are often out of poverty in one generation, sometimes sooner, while American ghetto families live in squalor across multiple generations. And yet you claim it is not an entrenched dysfunctional attitudinal or lifestyle issue?
There is a fundamental contradiction about poverty that is very salient and difficult to address. On one hand, we must address entrenched poverty on a systems level and hold our government and our politicians accountable. Critiquing the system is necessary. On the other hand, people living in poverty cannot feel that they are powerless to make changes in their lives. Believing your cannot do anything to change your circumstances is the definition of hopelessness. This is indeed a dysfunctional contradiction and it is a problem that so many Americans in poverty feel so hopeless. On a micro level, good social service advocates understand that you need to create self-efficacy and hope in people even when the large forces seem oppressively indifferent or callous.
The fact of the matter is that many immigrants come to the US with an absolute belief that a better life is feasible. The land of opportunity becomes accessible (to a small percentage mind you!) who are able to overcome systemic challenges and make sacrifices that others may not be able to make. It is also true that some immigrants coming to the US are much better educated and self-sufficient then people who have lived for generations in fairly depressing, unchanging circumstances.
It is silly to dismiss cultural/social differences as having no role to play and also short-sighted to think that poverty is simply a matter of unemployment. It is a complex thing and we must understand it as such.
I suggest people read any book by William Julius Wilson if they want more insight into urban poverty, culture, social programs and employment.
A minor nitpick, but you don’t need to create jobs. You just need to be able to distribute the necessary finished products and services to people. It’s the fact that food, clothing, cars, and other stuff, plus the methods for distributing them, doesn’t just materialize out of thin air is the reason we need people to work.
I have seen first hand the results of Kennedy’s and Johnson’s great Social Justice Laws. The hiring process no longer involves finding the most competent person to fill a job opening. It involves finding someone who will satisfy the requirements of the law. Crack heads, winos and unwed mothers of 5 or 10 welfare babies are chosen over people who could actually DO the job.
As soon as these folks are safely “on the payroll” they start filing law suits against the company. In the factory where I worked for 20 years, you could walk in the break room and buy crack cocaine, pot, sex or hire out a murder, but you didn’t dare ask anyone to do any work, or you would have a law suit filed against you for discrimination.
I’m not sure the country will survive another 50 years of this type of “progress”.
EXACTLY! This is why people on welfare have such low rates of unemployment! Those bastards.
(btw, just because it’s your username doesn’t mean that every post needs to be a demonstration)
You guys are acting like the ghetto is some magical self-contained island.
It’s not. The ghetto is a part of the city, a part of the city’s economy, and a part of the whole.
You don’t look at the office blocks downtown and think “Well, there are some people who really like building tall buildings!” Downtown exists because of the business that open in a city, the middle managers in the suburbs, the executives in their uptown mansions, the creative types in their lofts, the freeways and subways that get everyone from here to there, the banks that finance all of this…the entire city is connected.
Likewise, you can’t look at the ghetto and not see the rest of the city. Nor can you look downtown or uptown or out of town and not see the ghetto. It’s a part of the same system that made all of that other stuff. It’s a part of the structure. The ghetto is not some anomalous zone functioning independently according to its own laws. It’s an expected by product of whatever is going on in a city. And to get to the roots, you need to be willing to look at the systems- just like if you for some reason wanted to get rid of downtown, you couldn’t just convince everyone not to be businessmen any more and to go do something else. If you wanted to get rid of downtown, you’d have to restructure everything.
Also, almost all crime is caused by 18-25 year old men. The ghetto is full of a whole lot of people who do not happen to be 18-25 men. Grandpa is not “feral.” Little sister is not “feral.” “Single mom working her way through community college” is not “feral.” “The guy who runs the Chinese restaurant” is not “feral.” Yes, there is crime and social ill. But there is also a hell of a lot going on. Ghettos have their own complex, and often vibrant, economies that few people outside of a handful of sociologists know much about.
Yup. I’ve been in an urban school with new EVERYTHING and wonderful class offerings and great sports and PE and art and it was one of the ‘most ghetto’ schools in Denver…and the kids sucked.
I love how you put this. There’s a helplessness about “the ghetto” that some people just don’t understand. What happens is that we end up putting everything on 13, 14 year old kids to just suddenly “wake up” and want to wonderful in school because that’s their “ticket”.
I have a chronically homeless student who’s dated a few thugs and her parents are routinely incarcerated. Her GPA is 1.8. Since she starte with us, she’s been coming to school consistently, has a great relationship with me and a couple of kids in our program, and I can see her getting all As and Bs. But college? Right now she’s trying to figure out where she sleeps at night. A university that she could afford with dorms would be the best thing, but college isn’t even that kind of affordable right now.
Yet it’s hard to get out of. You know how many students I have that rarely go “downtown”, or have only been to a museum because of a 5th grade class trip or have never been to Boulder?!
Look, I think the poster who posted that is being a bit disingenuous (regarding using the term “ghetto”.) Even sven, if I recall you also live in the Howard area, meaning you’re probably talking about the new Watha T. Daniel/Shaw library (which I agree is gorgeous). In no way is the Howard University area a ghetto. I moved there 10 years ago, and it was “rough” but not a ghetto, even then. I had solidly middle class black neighbors and a few interlopers like myself. My older black next door neighbors kept an eye on the neighborhood, was a DC native many years back and all of their kids went on to college. This place has an iconic American institution of black education located in it. Sure, it’s got some rough spots, but that does not make it a ghetto.
She should be eligible for a Pell grant ($5,500 a year) and a variety of student aid programs. I had good, but not outstanding grades, went to a University of California school, and I never had to pay a penny up front- I ended up with maybe 10k in student loans. Things have changed, but there are a lot of resources out there for her. The mental block is a lot harder than the financial one for the truly poor.
FWIW, my family was on welfare until I was 12, and I lived in a HUD housing project until I was 18. My father was a drug addict and my mother was a teenage single parent. I’m incredibly lucky to be living in my current area as a yuppie grad student in it for cheap rent, but this is one particular block that I have been around.
I grew up dirt f poor, too, but things were different when we went to college, and that wasn’t THAT long ago.
She needs grants and loans that she can get without parents and it has to be enough to cover her housing partially. Right now, she’s trying to make sure she has a place to sleep in a week. I really hope she graduates. <sigh> If she stays a ward of the state, she can get more loans. She’s getting an alternative diploma, but I really hope that being a Colorado resident and her background and all, she can still get into the CU Promise program or something.
What I said. If a person lacks the belief that there’s any way out of their poverty (aside from a lottery win or something equally unlikely) then they won’t bash their heads against a brick wall trying. What they’ll do is try to make the best of a bad situation. Which means they’ll find some other occupation, often illegal or quasi-legal, or they’ll break down into chronic depression and misery and end up the sort of no-hoper that right-wingers love to blame for their own poverty.
My solution? I wish I had one. Wait and hope for economic conditions to improve while staving off disaster as long as possible is my plan.
The next poster - ecoaster - addressed this, and I agree.
The difference is that immigrants are often a self-selecting group. The ones that do believe they can make a better life for themselves are the ones who make it to western countries. The ones that don’t believe they can do it don’t try, so we in the west never see them. I suspect that’s what causes us to perceive certain ethnic groups as self-improvers: we don’t see the ones who aren’t. I’d say culture has some influence, but it’s not the whole story.
It’s worth noting that the can-do immigrants are self-selecting but that the immigrants who aren’t - refugees - are a much more mixed group. There will still be many can-do optimists, because surviving catastrophes and refugee camps is still going to weed out a lot of less-able people. But it’s also true that refugee immigrants also have a pretty high rate of turning out to be anti-social. There are other reasons for that, of course, but the fact is that many of the pessimists will have died off leaving us with the optimists and the amoral opportunists.
Do I “claim it is not an entrenched dysfunctional attitudinal or lifestyle issue”? I object to the word “lifestyle” because that implies it’s a choice that people have freely made. I say that the reason that dysfunctional “lifestyle” exists is that people who grew up in shitty poverty quite rightly perceive that their chances of escaping it are slim to non-existent. They become criminals or grifters or broken-down no-hopers because that’s the only realistic set of choices they have. They’re not choosing to not participate in the workforce, they’re making the best of a hopeless situation.
The problem with endemic poverty is not the people, it’s the lack of realistic hope for a better life. I fully believe that 99% of those people - the people that right-wingers love to claim are living in shitty poverty because they choose to do so - would be perfectly good citizens leading productive and worthwhile lives if they really had the opportunity to do so. The simple fact that there are more people than there are jobs means that many of those people will fail to become productive citizens, and they know it.
By the way, I’m not American and these problems are not unique to the US. Everywhere in the developed world has these problems. For a number of reasons, I’d expect that in the US the ghettos are worse than average, maybe worse than most, but the same problems are everywhere in the post-industrial world.
That is actually a good point and one that is rarely if ever brought up. I don’t know what the implications are. It does imply that not all people are equally capable of adapting to new situations or seizing opportunity but it may also skew some people’s view of what most people can do if they don’t realize that we only see the extreme risk-takers out of the population of immigrants.
99%? That seems really high. I don’t think even wealthy white kids have that high of a success rate. I grew up in an impoverished town roughly half black and half white. If you kidnapped all the kids at birth and put them in with responsible families, I think about 85% would do just fine. After adolescence however, it takes a lot to correct a bad upbringing and maybe 50% of those would do OK. You just can’t fix much of it after that point because they are already formed as adults.
I seriously doubt it. The U.S. has lots of new coverage about its problems but Europeans are the current masters of keeping problem populations warehoused until the erupt enough to get international news coverage. Intentional segregation doesn’t exist in the U.S. like it does in European countries like France where Muslim populations are warehoused as non-citizens outside of the city to be hidden away until they start burning every car in sight night after night. I know people like to pick on the U.S. because it is the big guy on the block but many other countries are ahead in the line when it comes to hiding away ghetto populations and they all have them tucked away somewhere.
I’m defining “success” as being gainfully employed. Not rich or even particularly happy, just employed. And yes, I do think that 99% of currently unemployed people would be gainfully employed if the jobs were there for them. Yes, there are people who have become unemployable through circumstance, but I meant that if those circumstances hadn’t existed, they’d be employable. What I’m saying is that unemployment is not something that these people have chosen and that their lack of jobs isn’t something that they can be blamed (and vilified) for. They’re not unemployed because they’re “lazy”.
That’s another question for another debate, really. I said “maybe” and “I suspect” - I don’t know and don’t claim to know for sure.
I think this is kind of the crux of the issue and the point at which we part company.The statements you are making about poverty being more or less structurally insurmountable for ghetto residents are IMO manifestly incorrect. I know in many countries (possibly yours) the education system is very stratified, and people are effectively completely locked out from advanced educational opportunities at fairly young ages if they are not in the right achievement or tracking cohort. That’s not quite the way it works in the US. There are multiple opportunities for re-entering the US educational system and advancing your education even with very limited resources.
In my view it’s borderline absurd to assert that
There are multiple choices and opportunities available for ghetto residents in the US to get a leg up if they wish to get ahead, however, they have to have the attitude that they will engage and follow through with these options. Waiting around for the magical decent job for a low skill, poorly educated person to appear as a matter of human rights is not a viable life strategy or a “realistic choice” in the modern world for anyone who wants to get ahead.
Possibly if there were decent jobs for low skill, minimally educated people these attitudes might change, but I doubt these jobs have ever really existed. Across time any job with decent pay is usually going to require a fairly substantive skillset.
Re the hypothesis coming out of the question posed by the OP that if we make the environment nice enough the adult ghetto residents will somehow magically become imbued with middle class social values is IMO a fantasy. Being a dysfunctional economic actor and the toxic attitudes that go along with it is a state of mind. Building a nicer environment in which to have that state of mind is not going to change it.
