People who take a strict binary view of culture (culture of privilege = awesome; culture of poverty = fail) are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. They extoll middle-class values to the ignorance and exclusion of all others. To understand, you must imagine what it means to confront algebra in the morning and Shorty, can I see your bike? in the afternoon. Its very nice to talk about middle-class values when that describes your small, limited world. But when your grandmother lives in one hood and your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than middle-class values. You need to be bilingual. In 2008, I was living in central Harlem, an area of New York whose demographics closely mirrored the demographics of my youth. The practices I brought to bear in that tent were not artifacts. I was not under a spell of pathology. I was employing the tools I used to navigate the everyday world I lived. It just so happened that the world in which I worked was different. As I said in that original piece, There is nothing particularly black about this. I strongly suspect that white people whove grown up around entrenched poverty and violence will find that there are certain practices that safeguard them at home but not so much as they journey out. This point is erased if you believe that black culture is simply another way of saying culture of poverty. This elision is not particular to Chait. In the 1960s, when 20 percent of black children were found to be born out of wedlock, progressives went to war over the tangle of pathologies choking black America. Today, 30 percent of white children are being born out of wedlock. The reaction to this shift has been considerably more muted. This makes sense if you believe that pathology is something reserved for black people. When The New Republic wanted to dramatize the evils of AFDC, there was really no doubt about whose portrait theyd pick. m.theatlantic/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 03:45:52 +0000
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