Culture of poverty

Significance: The term “culture of poverty” has been used to describe the values, principles, and lifestyles associated with people living at the lowest economic levels of society. Because many minorities and immigrants grow up in a culture of poverty, it has profound implications for intergroup relations.

“Culture of poverty” is a term that refers to the pattern of life, set of beliefs, and typical behavior found among people who live in an environment dominated by economic deprivation. Culture is the way in which people live their lives and includes all the habits learned by an individual from other members of the community. In its broadest sense, a culture contains the essential information one needs to live in a given environment. Because the environment found in impoverished communities is built upon deprivation, isolation, discrimination, poor education, lack of jobs, crime, drugs, alcohol abuse, and welfare dependence, these negative forces shape the attitudes, expectations, and behavior of residents.

Oscar Lewis, an American anthropologist famous for his description of the effects of poverty on human lives in La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (1966), believed that the values children learn from their parents about how to survive in such desperate circumstances make them less able to move out of poverty. Lewis suggested that only a violent revolution overturning capitalist society would enable the poor to find dignity and equality. Working within the system would not solve any problems because the values poor people learn include hatred for education (which rarely helps to get a person out of the slums), self-indulgence (since alcohol and drugs offer a quick way out of misery), and unwillingness to save or sacrifice for the future well-being of one’s self or family (since the future offers little hope for improving one’s economic circumstances). None of these values leads to educational or occupational advancement. The culture learned by the poor works against their ever getting out of poverty. For things to change, according to Lewis, the environmental conditions need to change.

Defining Poverty

Poverty takes three forms: social poverty, which is defined as economic inequality, or the lack of means to provide a minimally adequate standard of living; pauperism, a word that signifies an inability of individuals to take care of themselves; and voluntary poverty, which includes those who for religious and philosophical reasons give up material possessions to pursue prayer, meditation, or art. In the United States, most of the poor fall into the first two categories and include the unskilled, the uneducated, and a large number of children. As of 2014, the US government had defined forty-eight different poverty thresholds, based on household size (ranging from one person to nine or more) and number of related children under eighteen years old (ranging from none to eight or more). A family of four with two children under eighteen was considered poor if their combined annual household income was less than $24,008.

According to US Census Bureau figures, in 2013, about 45.3 million Americans, or 14.5 percent of the population, lived below the poverty line. That figure represented an increase of almost 10 million people in just ten years (from 35.9 million, or 12.5 percent, in 2003), though it was still an improvement over 2010, which saw 15.1 percent of the population (46.3 million people) below the poverty line—only the fourth year since 1965 that the proportion reached above 15 percent. According to the Census Bureau, these numbers do not take into consideration government benefits, such as Medicaid and food stamps. The Census Bureau report also included demographic information, showing that 9.6 percent of white people of non-Hispanic origin, 27.1 percent of black and black multiracial people, and 23.5 percent of all people of Hispanic origin lived in poverty, as did 19.9 percent of all children under eighteen. More than half the families labeled poor—4.6 million, of 9.1 million total—were headed by single mothers. About 10.5 percent of poor people between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four worked full time all year, typically in jobs that required few skills, offered no opportunities for advancement, and generally included no benefits such as health insurance. For the “working poor,” jobs themselves seemed to offer no opportunity for moving up the economic ladder. Working hard for forty hours a week or longer did not guarantee success.

Sources of Poverty

In itself, race is not a cause of poverty; however, the American tradition of racial segregation and discrimination has guaranteed that a large proportion of African Americans—about 27 percent in 2013—live under the poverty line. The major causes of poverty in the United States include chronic unemployment resulting from low levels of education and lack of skills; low wages in unskilled entry-level occupations as well as in agricultural labor; old age; and catastrophes such as floods, fires, or large medical bills.

Many see poverty as a sign of wickedness and moral degeneracy, assuming that people are poor because they are lazy and corrupt. These attitudes must be faced and absorbed into a person’s consciousness every day, and they only increase a sense of frustration and hopelessness. In a society that exalts the work ethic, such as the United States, not working becomes a sign of individual worthlessness and insignificance. This attitude represents one of the most devastating nonmaterial effects of being poor.

According to the culture-of-poverty thesis, ending employment discrimination, raising wages, and increasing employment opportunities through job-training programs would all help reduce poverty. However, the attitudes of the poor would change only very slowly because a whole way of life would need to be transformed. Education is the key to changing attitudes, especially by reducing the sense of despair frequently experienced by poor people. Yet dropout rates approach 45 percent in high schools in underprivileged districts, and a majority of impoverished adults are functionally illiterate. A major change in educational outcomes thus would be required before schools could be accepted as a way out of poverty.

In 1987, University of Chicago sociologist William J. Wilson observed that many African Americans live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of people in similarly desperate economic circumstances, with average incomes of less than $5,000 a year. Poor black people, especially, tend to live in areas surrounded by other poor black households and thus have little meaningful exposure to individuals with more secure economic futures. These are the truly disadvantaged members of American society, the people who feel most cut off from the American mainstream, and the people most influenced by the culture of poverty.

Tough Environments

In underprivileged and underserved neighborhoods, cultural patterns emerge that promote survival in the midst of dangerous and violent conditions. Various measures of social disintegration, including crime rates, murder rates, divorce, child abuse, spouse abuse, and levels of drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, and hypertension, are far higher in inner cities than in any other parts of the United States. Survival in these circumstances requires a toughness of spirit and a distrust of others. Because residents of these neighborhoods usually do not receive adequate city services, such as garbage collection and police protection, distrust of government grows, leading to increased levels of hopelessness and helplessness. Not even the schools, historically the institutions most used by immigrant and minority groups as the path to success, typically offer the type of skills and training necessary to make it out of poverty. The dream of college seems very distant to people without enough money to buy food.

The goals of the poor may be similar to those of the more well-to-do in terms of better jobs, improved educational opportunities, and a more pleasant future for their children, but the experience of the poor does not provide evidence that such dreams will ever come true. In many impoverished and racially segregated neighborhoods, crime, usually involving drug sales, offers a far quicker route to material success. Welfare payments, whether through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), general assistance, or other aid programs, are another source of survival for the truly poor, although the welfare reforms of the late 1990s significantly curtailed these resources as long-term options. Such help, inadequate as it usually is, increases dependency and tends to reduce self-respect, as many consider it a sign of personal weakness to receive welfare.

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