The Vicious Circle of Poverty: A Response to Barbara Ehrenreich

[xchrom]

http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=720

Barbara Ehrenreich has published an article in the Nation titled, “Michael Harrington and the ‘Culture of Poverty.’” In it, she quotes a passage from my father’s book The Other America in order to argue that he “offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable.” “‘We’—the always presumably affluent readers—needed to find some way to help the poor,” writes Ehrenreich, “but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them.”

This is the passage Ehrenreich cites: “There is…a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.” This has been taken out of the context of the subchapter in which it appeared, and the context of the book as a whole. My father introduced the idea that economic circumstances make a class of people different from others by retelling the famous (and apocryphal) exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. “The rich are different than you and me,” said Fitzgerald. Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” My father then wrote:

'Fitzgerald had the much better of the exchange. He understood that being rich was not a simple fact of life, like a large bank account, but a way of looking at reality, a series of attitudes, a special type of life. If this is true of the rich, it is ten times truer of the poor…And this is sometimes a hard idea for a Hemingway-like middle-class America to comprehend.'

He was not arguing that economic circumstances have made the poor alone different from and inferior to a virtuous middle class, but that economic circumstances shape every aspect of the lives of every member of every social class. And the reason, according to The Other America, why Fitzgerald’s assertion is “ten times truer for the poor” is that their circumstances are so brutal.

But the social vision of the “Hemingway-like middle-class” is also limited by that class’s economic circumstances. Indeed, rather than “comforting the middle class,” The Other America repeatedly criticized it for applying its values to circumstances in which they do not apply: “The definition makers, the social scientists, and the moralists come from the middle class”; “The middle class does not understand the narrowness of its judgments”; “The middle class looks upon this process and sees ‘lazy’ people ‘who just don’t want to get ahead.’”