So, I am no stranger to the individual weaknesses of poor people. It is the nature of a doctor's work to see people in trouble, and it often seemed that the immediate causes of my patients' poverty lay in their own behavior. For some, addictions consumed their time and energy. Others couldn't (or wouldn't) cooperate with my medical treatment plans. Still others lacked parenting skills or had no discernible job skills. And some didn't seem to
want to work.
But the longer I worked with my patients the more obvious it became that virtually all of them were doing the best they could in the overwhelming environment they inhabited. The odds against which they were struggling, however, were overwhelming. In
New American Blues,
2 Earl Shorris writes about the "surround of force" confronting poor people. Living in the ghetto, one faces the drug trade, the problems within public housing, family violence, abuse, graffiti, landlords, criminals, illness, meanness, bad luck, guns, isolation, hunger, ethnic antagonisms, racism, and other obviously "bad" forces. But there are also some seemingly "good" forces that can make life miserable for the poor: the law, the media, government, helpers, merchandising, neighbors, police, and so on. And one has to contend with all of these forces—any one of which would be overwhelming—all at one time, without a break. When one problem is solved, three take its place. The cumulative effect of the "surround" is more than the sum of individual forces. There is no space to breathe.
After fifteen years in the inner city, I no longer believe that poverty should best be attacked by improving poor people. The argument that inner-city poverty comes primarily from the individual weaknesses of poor people simply cannot be sustained. Among African-American children in this country,
half live in poverty. Among African-American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four in the city of Washington,
half are in the criminal justice system. There are only two forms of explanation for these (and many other similar) statistics. Either African-American people are genetically predisposed to poverty or something has happened to them! Charles Murray's arguments in
The Bell Curve notwithstanding, the scientific consensus offers no support to genetic inferiority as a cause of poverty. In this book I will argue what should by now be obvious: something awful has been done to poor people in this country.
But how does one explain, then, what appear to be significant rates of personal weaknesses among poor African Americans (and other groups of Americans in poverty)? How does one account for the extraordinarily high rates within the black ghettos of single parenthood (which is highly correlated with poverty), widespread substance abuse, poor parenting, criminal behavior? Where did it all begin? How did it perpetuate itself?
Even after fifteen years of urban medical practice, I could not have said. So, I decided to find out. I volunteered to teach a course on the causes of urban poverty and began to read. I was often shocked at how little I had known. This is a brief summary of what I've learned.
3
Although this book is specifically about black, urban, ghetto poverty, it is important to remember that most poor people in the United States are neither black nor urban. The poor in our country are split pretty evenly between white, black, and Latin American, and the majority lives in rural areas or, increasingly, in the suburbs.
Footnotes
2 Shorris, Earl,
New American Blues
3 I make no claims to the originality to the originality of this work, which is essentially a summary of material from a small number of other sources. As will be obvious to anyone who has read in the field of urban poverty, I have borrowed heavily from the works of Michael Katz, William Julius Wilson, Douglas Massey, and others. I have cited references to direct quotations, but it would be impossible to cite references to all of the ideas without creating a blizzard of footnotes. I am grateful to these authors for their work.
