Today (3/22/14) Charles M. Blow in an Op-Ed in the NYT deals with the statement from Cong. Paul Ryan regarding inner-city culture and poverty. Below are excerpts from Mr. Blows excellent article. Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said in a statement, Lets be clear, when Mr. Ryan says inner city, when he says, culture, these are simply code words for what he really means: black. Ryan has agreed to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Lees a member and which found his remarks highly offensive. ...Ryan shot back, There was nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all - it had nothing to do with race. That would have been more believable if Ryan hadnt prefaced his original comments by citing Charles Murray, who has essentially argued that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and whom the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a white nationalist. (The centers definition: White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of non-whites.) ...According to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (in Ryans home state), the gap between the poverty rate in inner cities and that in rural areas and small towns is not as great as one might suspect. The inner city poverty rate is 19.7 percent, and the poverty rate in rural areas and small towns is 16.5 percent. Furthermore, as Mark R. Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University, argued several months ago in the New York Times: Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policy making. They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong. ...By suggesting that laziness is more concentrated among the poor, inner city or not, we shift our moral obligation to deal forthrightly with poverty. When we insinuate that poverty is the outgrowth of stunted culture, that it is almost always invited and never inflicted, we avert the gaze from the structural features that help maintain and perpetuate poverty - discrimination, mass incarceration, low wages, educational inequities - while simultaneously degrading and dehumanizing those who find themselves trapped by it. Charles M. Blow NYT Op-Ed 3/22/14 nytimes/2014/03/22/opinion/blow-paul-ryan-culture-and-poverty.html?ref=charlesmblow&_r=0
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 23:11:40 +0000