[lbo-talk] Saturday, Doug, Reed, and Heritage on poverty

[Auguste Blanqui]

Actually, most 1960s stuff (from both the left and the right and
everywhere in between) pretty much perpetuated the mythology from the
Moynihan Report to Kenneth Clark's Dark Ghetto to the Kerner Report
and Michael Harrington's The Other America (which borrowed the
"culture of poverty" phrase from the left-wing anthropologist Oscar
Lewis).  It's entirely possible to inflect the single-parent, absent
father, pathological culture stereotypes in either a right or left
policy direction.

The genealogy stretches back even further in the U.S. to at least the
late 19th century and early 20th century.  In fact, Reed's book on Du
Bois has a great chapter on the Philadelphia Negro that analyzes Du
Bois's Victorian moral sensibilities.    Alice O'Connor's book POVERTY
KNOWLEDGE is probably the best thing out there for tracing the whole
story through the entire 20th Century.

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> Finally got Doug's latest program on Saturday morning, and as usual
> it was great, unraveling the mystical substance known as clean coal,
> and then followed by Adolph Reed's latest on Obama.
>
> I want to go back to Reed, here, where he outlines what he called the
> coin of the realm, that black poor people are poor because of their
> behavior and cultural profile---or something like that. Obviously I
> agree that is the establishment wisdom. And it has been pretty much
> accepted since Reagan by the liberal Democrats, who somehow forgot the
> volumes of poverty studies and documentaries during the sixties and
> beyond that tried to dispel this mythology.
>