Charles, I do not think my argument was directed against your specific position. It was more against the multi-culti approach that fetishizes culture, especially the popular variety.
Of course the bottom line of my argument was that we need to focus exclusively on social institutions (culture being one of them) to explain social inequality, because otherwise the only other option would be biological determinism.
>From that perspective, the "culture of poverty" argument appears as a step
in a right direction. The pc left does not like this argument, because as
liberals and bourgeois pundits - they hold an idealistic/mentalist view in
which culture is as product of individual human consciousness rather than
social interaction, relations of production, etc.
Only based on that assumption, they can view the culture of poverty argument as "blaming the victim" i.e. the person whose consciousness "produced" that culture (which they equate with "tastes and beliefs"). I do not make that assumption (nor do I think you do) - to me culture is a social institution, just as law or property. Individulas do not make them, socities do - under specific historical conditons.
wojtek