A Framework for Understanding Poverty (20 page)

Ibid. P. 134.

Ibid. pp. 175-176.

Ibid. p. 176.

Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1962. P. 99.

An example of two girls who were promiscuous in New Haven was given: "When the girl from Class I [the rich] was arrested, she was provided with bail at once, newspaper stories were quashed, and she was taken care of through private psychotherapy. The girl from Class V [the poor[ was sentenced to reform school. She was paroled in two years, but was soon arrested again and sent to the state reformatory."

"In the slum, conduct that would shock a middle-class neighborhood and lead to treatment is often considered normal. Even if someone is constantly and violently drunk, or beats his wife brutally, people will say of such a person, `Well, he's a little odd.' Higher up on the class scale an individual with such a problem would probably realize that something was wrong (or his family would). He will have the knowledge and the money to get help."

"And finally, the family of the poor lives cheek and jowl with other families of the poor. The sounds of all the quarreling and fights of every other family are always present if there happens to be a moment of peace in one household. The radio and the television choices of the rest of the block are regularly in evidence. Life is lived in common, but not in community."

"In short, being poor is not one aspect of a person's life in this country; it is his life. Taken as a whole, poverty is a culture. Taken on the family level, it has the same quality. These are the people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress."

"A series of drastic alterations in patterns of family living in the United States has occurred in the last 30 years."

"Low income children interviewed by the National Commission on Children, particularly those living in urban environments, were far more likely to fear for their own safety and less likely to enjoy social supports or to feel that neighborhood resources were accessible and safe than children from more affluent families."

Ibid. p. 128.

Ibid. p. 129.

Ibid. P. 136.

Ibid. p. 162.

Zill, Nicholaus. "The Changing Realities of Family Life." Aspen Institute Quarterly. Winter 1993. Volume 5. Number i. P. 29.

Ibid. P. 38.

In a study that "made use of data from two national surveys of families with children," it was found "that only about one-third of children in low-income families received stimulation and support from their parents comparable to that received by most children in families that were neither poor nor welfare dependent."

"'I pray. I talk to God. I tell Him, "Lord, it is your work. Put me to rest at night and wake me in the morning." ' "

"Children who have had the benefits of preschool and one of the better elementary schools are at a great advantage in achieving entrance to selective high schools; but an even more important factor seems to be the social class and education level of their parents. This is the case because the system rests on the initiative of parents. The poorest parents, often the products of inferior education, lack the information access and the skills of navigation in an often hostile and intimidating situation to channel their children to the better schools, obtain the applications, and (perhaps a little more important) help them to get ready for the necessary tests and then persuade their elementary schools to recommend them. So, even in poor black neighborhoods, it tends to be children of the less poor and the better educated who are likely to break through the obstacles and win admission."

Ibid. pp. 38-39.

Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1995. p. 169.

Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991. p. 60.

Chapter Two: The Role of Language and Story

"At the core of the problems of those on or nearly on welfare is the inadequacy of the schools' efforts to teach what they should first and foremost-language." Children must learn to read, write, speak, and listen.

How do we break the cycle? Start literacy enrichment in the delivery room; cognition research and infant development studies show "that early language stimulationfrom the moment of birth-influences brain development and later learning success." There should be "support networks" to help young parents from poor means in developing their child's language abilities.

Lewis, Anne C. "Breaking the Cycle of Poverty." Phi Delta Kappan. November 1996. Volume 78. Number 3. PP. 186-187.

Ibid. p. 187.

"My mother in her broken English could remedy few of the injustices, but she tried."

"In school, they placed Rano in classes with retarded children because he didn't speak much English."

The author says when he went to school he was put in the back of the classroom to play with blocks because he couldn't speak English.

He didn't want to be misunderstood, so he seldom asked questions.

"The fact was I didn't know anything about literature. I had fallen through the chasm between two languages. The Spanish had been beaten out of me in the early years of school-and I didn't learn English very well either. "This was the predicament of many Chicanos. "We could almost be called incommunicable, except we remained lucid; we got over what we felt, sensed and understood. Sometimes we rearranged words, created new meanings and structures-even a new vocabulary. Often our everyday talk blazed with poetry. "Our expressive powers were strong and vibrant. If this could be nurtured, if the language skills could be developed on top of this, we could learn to break through any communication barrier. We needed to obtain victories in language, built on an infrastructure of selfworth. "But we were often defeated from the start."

"One girl wrote in an essay that she experiences rejection and ridicule from schoolmates when she speaks what she considers `proper' English. They accuse her of `acting white' and of trying to deny her African heritage, charges that upset her greatly."

Psychologists know that basic language patterns are formed very early, with the basic language structures firmly in place by age 5. We learn language, perhaps the most complex of all of our systems of knowledge, by imitation rather than by prescription. That is, we make sentences and follow the patterns of language long before we can explicitly state the rules of grammar or syntax, if we are ever able to do so. Childhood errors are replaced, usually without instruction, with standard forms because the child hears the language used by adults. Children in environments where SAE is the language spoken will develop the patterns of that dialect themselves and will do so very early in their lives."

Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993. p. 21.

Ibid.

Ibid. P. 26.

Ibid. P. 27.

Ibid. P. 219.

Fox, Steven. "The Controversy over Ebonics." Phi Delta Kappan. November 1997. Volume 79. Number 3. P. 239.

Ibid. P. 240.

Chapter Three: Hidden Rules Among Classes

Mayer says America has "'vacillated between trying to improve the material well-being of poor children and ... the moral character of their parents'" for 200 years.

The test of "welfare reform" is fewer teen pregnancies, more marriages that are stable and children living in "better homes," not a reduction in welfare cases.

"Mayer writes: `The parental characteristics that employers value and are willing to pay for, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health, and reliability, also improve children's life chances, independent of their effect on parents' incomes. Children of parents with these attributes do well even if their parents do not have much income."'

Reference to "middle class things."

A character in a story/scenario knows the "rules of middle-class life."

Children at the Watson School did not feel that the time in the classroom was "'real time.'" Instead "they would come alive" when they were able to go to work and be "on their own." Adults on the job view their time at work the same way. In an example, one individual felt that "`the job's just cash to live; the things that matter every day to me are at home ... the family, people ... the neighborhood."'

Ibid.

Sennett Richard, and Cobb Jonathan. The Hidden Injuries of Class. London/ Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993. First published in U.S.A. in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. p. 18.

Ibid. P. 21.

Ibid. p. 93.

Samuelson, Robert J. "The Culture of Poverty." Newsweek. May 5, 1997. Volume 129. Number 18. p. 49.

Ibid.

Goal for most individuals: "[M]aterial things are aids to creating an inner self which is complex, variegated, not easily fathomed by others-because only with such psychological armor can a person hope to establish some freedom within the terms of a class society."

Theories of why poor children fail more often than rich children: (1) "Parents who are present-oriented, fatalistic, and unambitious raise children who are the same. Both generations tend to be jobless and poor." (2) Material deprivation and parental stress of poverty cause failure because children can't compete if their basic needs are not met.

The definitions of class by each group: People at the bottom define class by your amount of money; people in middle class value education and your line of work almost as much as money; at the top, people emphasize "taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior"-regardless of money, education, or occupation.

Middle class is characterized by "'Correctness' and doing the right thing."

A sign of middle class: desire to belong and to do so by a "mechanical act," such as purchasing something.

Middle class: believes in the "likelihood of selfimprovement."

Upper middle class: The emphasis of cookbooks, and books about food and food presentation addressed to them, was about "'elegance."' At their dinner parties, the guests are an audience.

"At the very top, the food is usually not very good, tending, like the conversation, to a terrible blandness, a sad lack of originality and cutting edge."

Middle class is the main clientele for mail-order catalogs; "the things they buy from them assure them of their value and support their aspirations."

Buying things, especially from mail-order catalogs, is a way "the middle and [proletarian] classes assert their value."

Mayer, Susan E. What Money Can't Buy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

p. i6.

Fussel, Paul. Class. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1983. P. 3.

Ibid. p. in.

Ibid. p. 113.

Ibid. p. 132.

Ibid. p. 131.

Ibid. P. 258.

Ibid. P. 34.

Ibid. P. 35.

Ibid. P. 37.

"If it's grammar that draws the line between middles and below, it's largely pronunciation and vocabulary that draw it between middle and upper."

The farther down socially one moves, the more likely that the TV set will be on.

A sign of the upper classes is silence; proles are identified by noise and vociferation.

A Chicago policeman, probably a high prole, said, "'If my mother and father argued, my mother went around shutting down the windows because they didn't want the neighbors to hear 'em. But they [i.e., the lower sort of proles] deliberately open the doors and open the windows, screaming and hollering...' "

Proles like to be called "'Mr. [First Name] Prole."'

Low-income families differ from higher-income families in more ways than just economics (i.e., they're not as likely to have the two biological parents living in the household, to have adults with college degrees or high-status jobs present); "they are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, receive income from welfare, contain adults with mental or physical problems, and so on."

"In communities with limited resources like Humboldt Park and East L.A., sophisticated survival structures evolved, including gangs, out of the hone and sinew tossed up by this environment."

The author says that in the first Christmas his family had (the presents were from a church group), "I broke the plastic submarine, toy gun and metal car I received. I don't know why. I suppose in my mind it didn't seem right to have things in working order, unspent."

When the family moved from South Central L.A. to Reseda after their dad obtained a substitute teaching job, he writes, "Even my brother enjoyed success in this new environment. He became the best fighter in the school..."

Ibid. p. 178.

Ibid. p. 196.

Ibid.

Ibid. p. 197.

Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Duncan, Greg J., and Maritato, Nancy. Poor Families, Poor Outcomes: The Well-being of Children and Youth. Duncan, Greg J., and BrooksGunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 14.

Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993. p.8.

Ibid. pp. 22-23.

Ibid. pp. 30-31.

Ibid. p. loo.

Rodriguez says his dad "went nuts in Reseda," buying things such as new furniture, a new TV, a new car. He went into debt to do so, but "his attitude was `who cares.' We were Americans now." But then his dad lost his job, and these things were repossessed.

"It seemed Mama was just there to pick up the pieces when my father's house of cards fell."

During the time in Reseda, his mother was "uncomfortable." ... "The other mothers around here were good-looking, fit and well-built. My pudgy mom looked dark, Indian and foreign, no matter what money could buy."

"It seems to me that the culture of poverty has some universal characteristics which transcend regional, rural-urban, and even national differences. In my earlier book, Five Families (Basic Books, 1959), 1 suggested that there were remarkable similarities in family structure, interpersonal relations, time orientations, value systems, spending patterns, and the sense of community in lower-class settlements in London, Glasgow, Paris, Harlem, and Mexico City. Although this is not the place for an extensive comparative analysis of the culture of poverty, I should like to elaborate upon some of these and other traits in order to present a provisional conceptual model of this culture based mainly upon my Mexican materials."