The War Against the Poor

...the young person who will not work suffers from depression...

...The recent display of interest in and appeals for affirmative action along class lines—even by conservatives like Dinesh D'Souzasuggests that the time may be ripe to recognize, and begin to fight, the widespread existence of class discrimination and prejudice...

...Even so, most of those labeled "undeserving" are simply poor people who for a variety of reasons cannot live up to mainstream behavioral standards, like remaining childless in adolescence, finding and holding a job, and staying off welfare...

...Stereotypes sometimes turn into everyday labels that are so taken for granted that they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies—and then cause particular havoc among the more vulnerable poor...

...But, then, they are not yet poor enough to be considered undeserving...

...Alas, when taxpayers discover how much cheaper it is to pay welfare than to create jobs, that remedy may end as it has before...

...Members of the more fortunate classes are generally free from moral judgments altogether...

...However, even minimal conventional anti462 • DISSENT poverty programs are politically unpopular at the moment...

...Abusive middle class parents may remain invisible for years, until their children are badly hurt, but violent poor parents soon draw the attention of child-welfare workers and may lose their children to foster care...

...The most constructive way to supply such jobs would be an updated New Deal that repairs failing infrastructures, creates new public facilities (including new data bases), and allows the old ones to function better—for example, by drastically reducing class size in public schools...

...Class bigotry is itself still a novel idea, but nothing would be lost by mounting a defense of the poor and putting it on the public agenda...

...Even this difference can be attributed to income disparity...

...How many reporters ever ask whether economic hardship is part of the crime story...

...Actually, employers prefer immigrants because they are more easily exploited or more deferential than native-born Americans...

...9. Blaming the poor reduces neither poverty nor poverty-related behavior...

...Even the riot that took place in Los Angeles in early May did not interrupt that war, perhaps because the riot was a mixture of protest, looting, and destruction...

...This ideal is today more utopian than ever, but it ought to be kept in mind...

...Poor young women often do not want to marry the fathers of their children because such men cannot perform as breadwinners and might cope with their economic failures by battering their wives...

...Thus, social workers can have live-in lovers without being married, but their clients on welfare cannot...

...5. Black troubles and misbehavior are caused more by poverty than by race...

...Despite the willingness to help the poor expressed in public opinion polls, other, more covert, attitudes have created a political climate that makes the war on the poor possible...

...Black jobseekers sometimes face the additional burden of being expected, both by employers and the general public, to compete for jobs with recently arrived immigrants...

...The 1992 Democratic presidential candidates paid little attention to the poor during the primaries, except, in passing, in New York City and, then again, after Los Angeles...

...The first priority for reducing that anger is effective policies against drugs and street crime, though they alone cannot stem all the negative feelings...

...In addition, the notion of the "undeserving poor" has become a symbol for the general decline of mainstream moral standards, especially those celebrated as "traditional" in American society...

...Poverty, racial polarization, crime, and related problems cannot be allowed to rise higher without further reducing morale, quality of life, and economic competitiveness...

...The hostility toward today's welfare recipients is a subtler but equally revealing index to the fears of the more fortunate...

...Such labeling justifies political ideologies and interests that oppose solutions, and thus increases the likelihood that nothing will be done about poverty—or crime...

...Ten such defenses strike me as especially urgent: 1. Poverty is not equivalent to moral failure...

...Poor people, on the other hand, rarely have access to such experts or to clinical treatment...

...True, some poor people are indeed guilty of immoral behavior—that is, murderers, street criminals, drug sellers, child abusers...

...Ironically, however, the "undeserving poor" can be forced to uphold some of these very standards in exchange for welfare, much as some Skid Row homeless still get a night's dinner and housing in exchange for sitting through a religious service...

...Decent jobs that are open to the poor, especially to blacks, were the first to disappear when our deindustrialization began...

...2. "Undeservingness" is an effect of poverty...

...and a more egalitarian society, in which the displacement of such anger on the poor is no longer necessary, and the remaining class conflicts can be fought fairly...

...they do not study it as a possible effect...

...Viewing the poor as undeserving helps to maintain and even widen that status gap...

...8. The dangers of class stereotypes...

...This expectation calls on people who have been in America for generations to accept the subminimum wages, long hours, poor working conditions, and employer intimidation that are the lot of many immigrants...

...6. Blacks should not be treated like recent immigrants...

...Women who choose to be financially dependent on their husbands are not described as spouse-dependent, while professors who rely on university trustees for their income are not called tenure-dependent...

...Such labels are only a way of expressing anger toward the poor...

...Most poverty news is about crime, not poverty...

...Because the proportion of blacks who are criminals, school dropouts, heads of single-parent families, or unmarried mothers is higher than among whites, blacks increasingly have to face the outrageous indignity of being considered genetically or culturally undesirable...

...Effective job-creation schemes, housing programs, educational and social services that serve the poor—and some of the working classes— are vanishing...

...Few remember that, at the start of the twentieth cenFALL • 1992 • 461 tury, the "Hebrews" then arriving were sometimes described as a "criminal race"—as the Irish had been earlier in the nineteenth century...

...Once they, and other poor people, are labeled as undeserving, public officials who are supposed to supply them with services feel 464 • DISSENT justified in not being as helpful as before— though depriving poor people of an emergency rent payment or food grant may be enough to push them closer to homelessness or street crime...

...Every step toward it will help a little...

...But the basic moralistic expectations remain the same, including the demand that the poor live up to values that their socioeconomic superiors preach but do not always practice...

...Labeling the poor as undeserving does not attack the causes of street crime, improve the schools of poor children, or reduce adult joblessness...

...Society's wordsmiths—academics, journalists, and pundits—like to find, and their audiences like to hear, buzzwords that caricature moral failings among the poor...

...The Constitution that is now interpreted as barring racial discrimination can perhaps be interpreted to bar class discrimination as well...

...Otherwise, America will not be a decent, safe, or pleasant place to live, even for the affluent...

...Then there are poor people whose anger at their condition expresses itself in the kind of nihilism that cannot be defined as political protest...

...People who have not been poor themselves do not understand how much of what the poor do is poverty-related...

...Likewise, the percentage of people below the poverty rate is an annual news story, but the actual income of the poor, often less than half the poverty line, or about $6,000 a year, is not mentioned...

...Acting irresponsibly becomes an angry reaction to, even a form of power, over that society...

...There are no hard-core millionaires, and troubled middle-class people will never be labeled an under-middle class...

...The "spins," both in government statistics and in journalism, carry over into scholarship...

...Welfare "dependents" are in that condition mainly because the economy has declared them surplus labor, and because they must rely on politicians and officials who determine their welfare eligibility...

...Welfare recipients possibly provoke anger among those concerned about their own economic security, especially in a declining economy...

...Many Americans, including too many economists, have long assumed that there are always more jobs than workers, that the properly eager can always find them, hence the jobless are at fault...

...Middle-class people, after all, do not turn into muggers and street drug dealers any more than they become fifteen-year-old unmarried mothers...

...There are also innumerable other studies of the homeless, but too few about the labor markets and employers, housing industry and landlords, and other factors that create homelessness in the first place...

...The war on the poor is probably best ended by job-centered economic growth that creates decent public and private jobs...

...Because their ghetto "cool" may deter employers does not mean they are unwilling to work...

...This helps to explain why so many poor men have dropped out of the labor force, and are no longer even counted as jobless...

...Welfare recipients are also assumed to be getting something for nothing, often by people who are not overly upset about corrupt governmental or corporate officials who get a great deal of money for nothing or very little...

...Bums" can be found at all economic levels...

...The future of antipoverty programs looks no brighter than before...

...3. The responsibilities of the poor...

...Politicians compete with each other over who can capture the most headlines with new ways to punish the poor...

...FALL • 1992 • 465...

...No wonder, then, that in the current economic crisis, the journalists' middle class and its job problems are the big story, and the poor appear mainly as the underclass, with candidates ignoring poverty...

...Government has done its part as well, increasingly restricting the welfare state safety net to the middle class...

...Once people become poor, it becomes ever harder for them to escape poverty...

...the alcoholic co-worker can doze off at his desk, but the poor drunk is apt to be found in the gutter...

...Equally important are ways of reviving private enterprise and finding new niches for it in the global economy...

...For the poor, the explanations are usually moral, and the treatment is punitive...

...Because poor adolescents do not have jobs does not mean they are lazy...

...The political climate being what it is, this may even be unavoidable...

...Meanwhile, in order to bring back antipoverty programs, liberals, along with the poor and others who speak for the poor, could also try something else: initiating an intellectual and cultural defense of the poor...

...The concern with poor unmarried mothers, especially adolescents, whose number and family size have in fact long been declining, epitomizes adult fears about the high levels of sexual activity and the constant possibility of pregnancy among all adolescent girls...

...The Americans who feel most threatened by the poor are people from the working class, whom journalists currently call the middle class...

...Indeed, as inexpensive housing and secure jobs requiring little education become more scarce, the people only slightly above the poor in income and economic security fear that their superior status will shrink drastically...

...The plain fact is that the higher rates of nearly all social problems among blacks are the effects of being poor—including poverty brought about by discrimination...

...Is she not acting FALL • 1992 • 463 responsibly toward her child...

...The government's monthly jobless rate is reported, but not the shortage of jobs open to the poor...

...Underclass and other terms for the undeserving poor are class stereotypes, which reinforce class discrimination much as racial stereotypes support racial discrimination...

...Probably the only truly effective solution is a prosperous economy in which the anger between all groups is lessened...

...Why do Americans accept so many untruths about the poor, and remain unwilling to accept the truth when it is available...

...Last but not least is a new approach to income grants for those who cannot work or find work...

...The time may be ripe to look more closely at how nonpoor Americans feel about poverty, and try to reduce their unwarranted fear and anger toward the poor—with the hope that they would then be more positive about reviving antipoverty efforts...

...But they also serve as a lightning rod— scapegoats— for some problems among the better-off...

...However, too many of their constituents see the poor not as people without jobs but as miscreants who behave badly because they do not abide by middle class or mainstream moral values...

...When poor whites are compared with poor blacks, those with social problems are not so different, although black proportions remain higher...

...The war on the poor was initiated by dramatic shifts in the domestic and world economy which have turned more and more unskilled and semiskilled workers into surplus labor...

...But who would punish an unmarried mother who goes on welfare to obtain medical benefits that a job cannot supply...

...This fear reflects a historic belief that people who are not economically self-sufficient can hurt the economy, although actual expenditures for welfare have always been small...

...Such a solution would also cut down the crime rate...

...Incidentally, the myth that the unemployed are unwilling to work is never attached to the rising number of working- and middle-class jobless...

...They are apt to live nearest the poor...

...However, more prosperous miscreants tend to be less visible...

...Researchers on homelessness look at mental illness as a cause of homelessness...

...Also needed is a non-punitive, universal income grant program, which goes to all people who still end up as part of the labor surplus...

...The abusive mother was herself abused...

...Private enterprise participated actively by shipping jobs overseas and by treating workers as expendable...

...Those whose irresponsibility is criminal deserve punishment and the clearly lazy deserve to lose their benefits...

...but it should not be forgotten that these terms were invented by the fortunate...

...The missionaries in this case are secular: social workers and bureaucrats...

...Once poor people have such jobs, they are almost automatically considered deserving, eligible for a variety of other programs to help them or their children escape poverty...

...This does not make them immoral...

...The obvious answer is that some of the poor frighten or anger those who are better-off...

...no one talks about an undeserving middle class or the undeserving rich...

...The confrontation has to take place not only in everyday life but also in the country's major institutions, politics, and courts...

...And how well can we judge anyone's responsibility without first knowing what choices, responsible and irresponsible, were actually open...

...The many similarities between class and racial stereotypes still need to be identified...

...7. Debunking the metaphors of undeservingness...

...the school dropout has a learning disability...

...Blaming the victim solves nothing except to make blamers feel better temporarily...

...Whatever else can be said about unmarried mothers on welfare, school dropouts, and people unwilling to take minimum-wage deadend jobs, their behavior is almost always poverty-related...

...Conservatives, often mute about the responsibilities of the rich, stress the responsibilities of the poor...

...Without them, there will not be enough well-paying jobs in factories, laboratories, and offices—or taxes to pay for public programs...

...That winner should be bold enough to make room in the program for the poor as well...

...Those judged "guilty" are dismissed as the "undeserving poor" —or the underclass in today's language —people who do not deserve to escape poverty...

...Improving reporting and scholarship about the poor...

...Millions were spent to find and measure an underclass, but there is little ethnographic research to discover why the poor must live as they do...

...Street criminals rightly evoke fears about personal safety, but they, and the decidedly innocent poor also generate widespread anger about the failure of government to reduce "urban" and other problems...

...The facts are just the opposite...

...Anti-bigotry programs work slowly and not always effectively, but they are as American as apple pie...

...In a "sound bite": to fight class bigotry along with the racial kind...

...This is, of course, also true of many street criminals and drug sellers...

...Such metaphors are never applied to the more affluent...

...Being poor often means having little choice to begin with...

...Still, the concept of an underclass lumps them with those who are criminal or violent...

...Troubled middle-class people have access to experts who can demonstrate that moral diagnoses are not enough...

...This is, however, a myth—one of many Ronald Reagan liked to promote when he was president...

...However, poor people sometimes feel no need to be responsible to society until society treats them responsibly...

...To make matters worse, blacks are then blamed for lacking an "immigrant work ethic...

...The latest fashion is to put welfare recipients to work, which would be a good idea if even decent entry-level jobs for them could be found or created...

...4. The drastic scarcity of work for the poor...

...For example, boys from poor single-parent families are apt to be punished harder for minor delinquencies simply because of the stereotype that they are growing up without paternal or other male supervision...

...That moral undesirables exist among the poor cannot be denied, but there is no evidence that their proportion is greater than among the more fortunate...

...Not only is there no identifiable underclass, but a class "under" society is a social impossibility...

...Black poverty has been worse in all respects and by all indicators ever since blacks were brought here as slaves...

...Welfare recipients are seen as living the easy life while everyone else is working harder than ever—and thus become easy scapegoats, which does not happen to the successful, who often live easier lives...

...Indeed, if the winner's margin in the coming elections comes from that middle class, the candidate must initiate enough economic programs to put its jobless back to work and to solve its health care, housing, and other problems...

...Although a great deal of publicity is given to school dropouts, not enough has been said about the peer pressure in poor, and even working-class, neighborhoods that discourages doing well in school...

...They will suffer most, other than the poor themselves, from street crime, as well as from the fear that the poor could take over their neighborhoods and jobs...

...Such programs are already being proposed these days, by Bill Clinton and in the Congress, but mainly for working-class people who have been made jobless and are now joining the welfare rolls...

...If such a program copied the European principle of not letting the incomes of the poor fall below 60 to 70 percent of the median income—in the United States, welfare recipients get a fifth of the median on average—the recipients would remain integral members of society, who could be required to make sure their children would not become poor...

...Among whites, the anger is intertwined with fears about blacks and "Hispanics," or the newest immigrants, reflecting the fear of the stranger and newcomer from which their own ancestors suffered when they arrived here...