"'Culture of Poverty' Makes a Comeback." So read
the headline of Patricia Cohens
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?scp=1&sq=Patricia%20Cohen%20Culture%20Poverty&st=cse>front-page
article in the October 17, 2010 edition of The
New York Times. The article was prompted by a
recent issue of the Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science under the
title,
"<http://books.google.com/books?id=hV8A1Ptk8xcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Reconsidering+Culture+and+Poverty&source=bl&ots=E8NZPjcVHY&sig=MHt_A0seIq0UeRdErVnfS1GIh7E&hl=en&ei=mw8uTYWvDY2usAOXlvWIBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false>Reconsidering
Culture and Poverty." In their introductory
essay, the editors, Mario Luis Small, David J.
Harding, and Michèle Lamont, strike a triumphant note:
Culture is back on the poverty research agenda.
Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers,
and even economists have begun asking questions
about the role of culture in many aspects of
poverty and even explicitly explaining the
behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors.
Cohen begins with a similar refrain:
For more than 40 years, social scientists
investigating the causes of poverty have tended
to treat cultural explanations like Lord
Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. The
reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that
erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an
assistant labor secretary in the Johnson
administration, introduced the idea of a culture
of poverty to the public in his 1965 report on 'The Negro Family.'
Cohen uncritically accepts two myths woven by
William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard
sociologist, and repeated by his acolytes: first,
Moynihan was clobbered for bringing to light
compromising facts about black families, and
second, that this torrent of criticism
constrained a generation of social scientists
from investigating the relation between culture
and poverty, for fear that it would be pilloried
for "blaming the victim." Thus, a third, patently
self-serving myth: thanks to some intrepid
scholars who reject political correctness, it is
now permissible to consider the role that culture
plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities.
<http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.1/steinberg.php>Link
