We will hear how welfare has made blacks dependent on the government, has broken up the black family, and has encouraged a culture of criminality and violence (as evidenced by all that rap music). .... Every component of the culture of poverty narrative is a phantasm, a projection of racial fantasies on to the culture of African Americans, which has for several centuries now served as the screen on which the national unconscious plays out. Put more bluntly, they are lies. .... Despite its ubiquity in popular discussions, however, acting white theory has come under sustained criticism from education scholars. As social scientists have attempted to test the theory, they have found over and over that black and white students’ attitudes on education do not differ substantively. Black students, just like their white counterparts, express a desire to do well in school, and report higher self-esteem when they succeed. ..... Black students, understandably, place a higher premium on education than white students, because they know they will pay a higher price for lacking it than white students will. Yet the aspirations of black students, however well-documented, fail to make any impact on discussions of race and education in national media. White talking heads (and black conservatives, it must be said) feel no qualms whatsoever about loudly condemning the youth of an entire race for lacking ambition, while remaining criminally silent themselves on the structures that actually frustrate black students’ real and dearly-held ambitions. ..... That tendency to speculate about the emotional or psychological state of young black men is emblematic of the way that “race” functions in America. In translating discussions of questions like crime and violence into explorations of group psychology, we effectively shift the focus from the social context for street violence in lower-income, predominantly black urban areas to the character of black people. That not only reinforces a blame-the-victim politics that refuses to acknowledge racism — embodied in the cynical use of the category “black on black crime” to dismiss concerns about police violence during the Ferguson protests — it also leads to a distorted view of the sources of elevated violence and chronic insecurity in black neighborhoods. https://jacobinmag/2014/09/the-poverty-of-culture/
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 21:48:02 +0000
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