Is the Culture of Poverty Myth Keeping Us from Eradicating Actual Poverty?

[NOTE: I became obsessed — slightly — with including the report on poverty in America from the United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston (pictured below, who teaches law at NYU when not reporting for the UN), even though it was released *the same day* my paper was due. Including it made my paper overlong (per the assignment) and, overall, my usual weakness of including too much from the sources may have muddled my paper’s argument — which was meant to put the Coates and Chait March 2014 debate front and center. Sigh. I’m still working on all these things.]

When do we dispense with the myth of the culture of poverty — ? When will being black and poor in America stop being a political football for political parties and be resolved with actual solutions of better housing, regular meals, and opportunities to strive in the land of the free for the descendants of the enslaved?

What keeps black people in poverty is a maze of obstacles combined with a dungeon of threats, both rooted not in some kind of historical and cultural apathy but in decades of racism and discrimination, that make poverty all but impossible to escape.

For example, it’s not some lack of personal responsibility that has residents of Lowndes County in the state of Alabama living in unsafe sanitary conditions, including open sewage, infecting every third person with hookworm, but simply a lack of money to implement what is for most other Americans an automatically…