Two books about the poor: Peter Davis's If You Came This Way and Herbert J. Gans's The War Against the Poor
Packer, George
IF YOU CAME THIS WAY: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE LIVES OF THE UNDERCLASS, by Peter Davis. John Wiley & Sons, 1995. 202 pp., $22.95. THE WAR AGAINST THE POOR: THE UNDERCLASS AND ANTIPOVERTY POLICY, by...
...I asked another coalition member, a teacher at a local college, about Lois's isolation in the group...
...He believes there is an identifiable class of Americans—as many as twelve or fifteen million—who "have fallen out of the bottom and do not meaningfully participate in the economy of the United States...
...Two years ago I came to know a forty-yearold woman living in a housing project in a decayed industrial city north of Boston...
...During his journey Davis sometimes feels afraid and repelled, as well as ashamed, moved, angry, and numbed out—emotions that will occur in anyone who takes the trouble to look...
...shelter who once worked steadily and now, in their forties, "have no hopes"—are at best surviving, more likely deteriorating with the help of drugs and falling farther and farther out of what Herbert J. Gans calls the "mainstream...
...Look, the poor aren't who you think they are," a woman in Bangor named Adriana Saint Duclos Mathere tells Davis...
...In their articulateness, their self-inflicted damage, and their vulnerability, many of the people he meets remind me of Lois, the woman I got to know two years ago...
...Gans takes pains to trace the course of this label into the 1990s, with the implication that a different name would cast less blame for their misery on the poor themselves...
...It's no help pretending that the destruction isn't happening or isn't destruction...
...For these people to succeed in the slenderest sense of getting and keeping a $7 an hour job would require a coincidence of their own and the world's cooperation that would be, in the circumstances of their lives, all but miraculous...
...Instead of describing entrenched structural poverty, which was Myrdal's original intent, underclass came to mean what was meant in the nineteenth century by the undeserving poor...
...A son was heading toward criminality...
...Because he isn't afraid to appear foolish, he sees and hears much more than a more circumspect or less tenacious inquirer would...
...To humanize the poor and undo their current status in America as social outcasts, even enemies—the shared purpose of these two very different books—you have to start by admitting that it's easier to talk about them than to deal with them or enter their lives...
...Several years ago a member of this class mugged Davis outside his New York apartment building...
...Davis, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, doesn't shy away from the word underclass...
...He ducks into homeless shelters and starts 120 • DISSENT Books conversations with guests...
...At times Davis's quest seems maddeningly naive, as when two white cops pull him over in Chicago's South Side, where Davis has been wandering around for hours, and tell him, "You're in a combat zone...
...A local mall had rejected her application for a position as Santa during the Christmas holiday...
...Most of them— the Maine street kid nicknamed Psycho whose father once imprisoned him in a well for nine days, or the prostitute who gave up her second coke-addicted baby after selling her first to her dealer, or the man and woman in an L.A...
...That shouldn't be the choice in the first place, but the left is just as prone as the right to false dichotomies, which is one reason the right has been winning the war against the poor...
...These encounters make sobering reading for anyone who supposes that either welfare reform or a jobs program could end this kind of poverty...
...The signal feature of underclass life, besides poverty, is despair, which makes drug use, dropping out, illegitimacy, and other pathologies comprehensible as the actions of sentient human beings who may not be as different from you or me as we would like to think, only more hopeless...
...Given the way AmeriWINTER • 1996 • 121 Books can companies are treating their middle-class employees, something more skeptical than his cautious hopefulness seems required toward a corporate solution to entrenched inequality...
...They can't find work and can't do it if they do find it...
...q 122 • DISSENT...
...At one point he says that "the old dichotomy in which the Right blames the poor and the Left blames society is dubious even when it appears in more complicated guises," and yet the whole burden of this book is to highlight the dichotomy and begin shifting the blame off the poor back toward society...
...They may want what you want and not be able to get it, you know that...
...Whether illegitimacy is an effect of poverty or a cause or, most likely, both, it is not "culturally divergent behavior...
...No single catchall program is ever going to scoop them all up and convert them into employable citizens...
...He tries to discuss Head Start with truant boys playing cards in a Chicago alley until one of them demands, "Hey, Mister, watchoo want...
...The teeth are blackened, but the voice is distinctly human...
...Having to choose between saying the poor are blameless and eliminating federal support for them will always end in the latter...
...The choice confronting a man who remained a liberal into his fifties was to forget it happened, to become a conservative, or "to find . . . the kind of person who had mugged me...
...and the resulting story has the quality of a pilgrim's progress through Hell, self-mortification and self-exposure to the worst streets that America has to offer...
...You can't shame people out of such feelings...
...They don't even tell you not to judge...
...The individual poor are caught in stickier webs than most middle-class people can imagine...
...Poverty means being faced with impossible choices or none at all, and being driven by hopelessness to do destructive things...
...She also led the project's tenants council and was active in a regional coalition of community groups...
...Gans's euphemisms are every bit as effective as the word underclass in turning the poor into abstractions so that they can become what we want them to be...
...In his use of the word underclass, the reality of the poor becomes more, not less, complex and sympathetic...
...To say they won't happen any time soon doesn't mean these proposals aren't worthwhile...
...It's clear that only radical measures will change a situation in which we limp along tolerating forty million officially poor Americans—a chronic ache, symptomatic of some degenerative disease, that we spend a great deal of energy trying to ignore...
...There's no point in charging this attitude with classism or any other offense, which would only drive it underground...
...She was all for welfare reform and making the poor work...
...Gans ends with a series of proposals for combating poverty by a policy of "massive job creation, the encouragement of a labor-intensive economy, taxing the machines and their owners, the separation of work from income, drastic work sharing, as well as . . . offsets to reductions in the standard of living...
...But they oblige you to imagine what it's like to be poor and to consider how the poor see you...
...streetwalker who initially takes him for a customer...
...teach mine to be scared," struggle up with the help of social service agencies to a tenuous fingerhold on the working class...
...These hard-won aphorisms apply the pressure where it belongs...
...It is so easy to persecute in the underclass the tendencies we fear in ourselves: idleness, susceptibility to drugs and alcohol, surrender to immediate gratification, all the chaotic pleasures of undiscipline...
...but Gans shows convincWINTER • 1996 • 119 Books ingly that the trend away from structural and toward behavioral explanations of poverty has been helped by a label that turns the persistently poor into an alien caste and allows the rest of us to blame them for sins we may well fear and despise in ourselves...
...That, at least, is a beginning...
...Illegitimacy, for example (he doesn't specify among whom), becomes "culturally divergent behavior," and "insisting on the harmfulness of divergent behavior is a way of asserting the cultural and political power of one's own Values, and thus concurrently of blaming the diverse for asking for their place in the cultural sun...
...She had been raped by her father and beaten by her husband, she was often depressed, her project apartment was in shambles, and sometimes she smelled bad...
...But she complained that the middle-class suburbanites in the coalition neglected her and the tenants council, never came to visit, never delivered help...
...Nothing over the centuries has been so unremittingly urged upon the poor as the virtue of hardship by those who will not have to endure it...
...her daughter, nearly as obese as she, was graduating from high school with honors and a deficient education...
...Davis set out on a journey in search of the underclass that took him to Oakland, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, and Bangor, Maine...
...He gets a partial life story from an L.A...
...It isn't clear that a more "objective" term (as underclass itself once seemed) could somehow remain neutral in the war against the poor...
...What most middle-class people feel toward the poor is a degree of pity along with fear, revulsion, even hatred...
...Basic Books, 1995...
...To that end, Gans sometimes falls into the trap of defending what isn't defensible...
...Once you've acknowledged your real feelings, you can begin the harder work of finding out what the poor are really like, and what they and you might even have in common...
...Even Ted Stokes, Davis's personable, diligent guide to Chicago's Cabrini-Green project and "a member of the occasionally employed poor who teeters on the brink of the underclass," doesn't have the skills or the driver's license to raise himself beyond a makeshift existence in a city hemorrhaging jobs...
...At other times, especially in the early going, his ruminations take on the random banality of a man walking around an alien neighborhood and feeling as if he's discovered something new...
...The dichotomy between economic and behavioral explanations is sterile and false, because it ignores the way behavior further victimizes the victim...
...Peter Davis's If You Came This Way (the title, incongruously, comes from Eliot's Four Quartets) stands as an antidote to the euphemizing effect of Gans's reasonable analysis...
...No one is without vulnerability, and the weak remind the strong of theirs...
...Herbert J. Gans, the Columbia University sociologist, has written a learned and humane account of how the poor in America came to be stigmatized and made pariahs in the decades after the War on Poverty had its brief heyday...
...civilian casualties are high . . . Lot worse than 'Nam . . . Places we saw you going we wouldn't go and we're armed...
...Asking his readers to accept as morally and socially neutral pregnant fifteen-year-olds who will never be able to support their children is asking them to stop thinking about the poor altogether...
...They don't work because they can't," Davis writes...
...This cascade of jargon falls on and conceals the teenage girls turned into "property" by gangster boyfriends, the babies born addicted to cocaine (40 percent, according to Peter Davis, of all babies born in the worst parts of Chicago), the children neglected or tormented by overwhelmed mothers and left to fight the dog for food in overcrowded, filthy apartments...
...Why should this be so...
...A few of his subjects, like an ambitious young mother of three in Chicago who tells Davis, "You teach your kids possibilities...
...When I met Lois, she had just lost her job at Head Start after her car was stolen, and was collecting unemployment insurance, though she hadn't applied for the disability benefits to which she was probably entitled because of her extreme obesity, which required her to use crutches...
...Lois's weight squeezed her features into a narrow-eyed look of apparent ignorance and meanness, but she was smart and utterly decent...
...195 pp., $22...
...Davis's conclusion, which criticizes both the Republican war on the poor and an exhausted liberal agenda, looks to business for intervention in the hard-core areas...
...It seemed a brutal thing to say, but I immediately realized that it was true...
...But his brave and foolish wanderings and his earnest self-questioning yield insights into the moral relation of the poor to the rest of us that stay with you: "They are our enemies, and they know it even if we don't...
...An ally and friend of hers, he replied: "Maybe it has something to do with Lois being so fat...
...They don't bury human destruction and self-destruction under a mound of jargon, or explain it all as a result of structural defects in the economy...
...Gans's main argument is that the term underclass, coined by Gunnar Myrdal in 1963 to define "an unprivileged class of unemployed, unemployables and underemployed who are more and more hopelessly set apart from the nation at large and do not share in its life, its ambitions and its achievements," soon lost its economic connotations and became a journalistic and scholarly "label" for the destructive behavior of the poor...
...It's as if the distance between the underclass and us is so great that the only way to close it is a deliberate headlong plunge...
...Here Gans is more persuasive: he recognizes that millions of economically perilous Americans are perched "only a generation" away from the underclass, while Davis, who gets so much closer to the poor, mainly feels their terrible objective difference from him...
...THE WAR AGAINST THE POOR: THE UNDERCLASS AND ANTIPOVERTY POLICY, by Herbert J. Gans...
...But Davis has the essential virtues of persistence and candor, and the benefits of these far outweigh his occasionally awkward intrusions on his own story...
...Do you have any idea how difficult it is for the very poor, like me, to find a job—and to keep it...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
