the culture of poverty thesis

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Culture of Poverty

Introduction.

• Media Sources
• Foundational Texts
• Empirical Evidence
• Informing Policy
• Early Criticisms
• Urban Ethnography/Neighborhood Studies
• Theoretical Refutations of the Culture of Poverty
• The Underclass
• Critiques of the “Underclass” Framework
• The New Poverty Studies
• Welfare Reform

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Culture of Poverty by Dana-Ain Davis LAST REVIEWED: 11 October 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0004

The term culture of poverty emerged in 1959 to explain why people were poor. The culture of poverty concept delineates factors associated with poor people’s behaviors, and argues that their values are distinguishable from members of the middle class. The persistence of poverty can presumably be explained by the reproduction of this “lifeway,” because the values that the poor have are passed down generationally. Initially the term was primarily applicable in Third World countries and in those nation-states in the early stages of industrialization. Culture of poverty proposed that approximately 20% of poor people are trapped in cycles of self-perpetuating behavior that caused poverty. More specifically, 70 behavioral traits or characteristics are identified with those who have a culture of poverty. These characteristics include weak ego structure, a sense of resignation and fatalism, strong present-time orientation, and confusion of sexual identification. Alternately, intellectual support has been found for various aspects of the culture of poverty concept and for criticisms leveled against the explanatory power of the framework. As it pertains to explaining poverty in US-based urban areas, ensuing research has focused on several areas, including the presentation of empirical evidence that identifies and explicates the absence, or presence, of some of the characteristics found among the poor. These include: social participation, pathological family structure, social isolation, and individual behavioral traits, among others. While the term did have its supporters, the degree of support varied. For example, some argued that while a culture of poverty did exist, the definition of culture was not adequate enough to use the framework effectively. The concept also had detractors, and, in fact, it has served to polarize poverty research scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Some scholars find the concept ill-conceived because it is not empirically or politically contextualized. Others have found that the concept, which centers on individual behaviors, overlooks the interaction of behavior and structure. Still others claim that the urban-centric focus that came to be associated with the concept both subsumed the reality of poverty in urban areas and simultaneously racialized poverty as it became associated with African Americans.

A great number of journals address the subject of poverty, but none is specifically focused on the culture of poverty concept. Anthropology is far from the only, or even the primary, discipline to elaborate or critique the framework. Across disciplines, one will find the issue of poverty covered in a number of peer-reviewed/refereed journals, as well as those that are not peer-reviewed. Many of the journals are focused on policy and research, such as the Journal of Children and Poverty , the Journal of Poverty , and Poverty and Public Policy . However, other journals are more interdisciplinary, such as Race, Poverty, and the Environment and the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice . No anthropological journals are dedicated exclusively to the subject of poverty; however, major journals, such as Critique of Anthropology , American Anthropologist , Ethnology , and City and Society have each attended to poverty issues and culture of poverty debates over the years.

American Anthropologist .

This is the premier journal of the American Anthropological Association. The journal advances the association’s mission by publishing articles that add to, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge.

City and Society

This is the journal of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. The journal is intended to foster debate and conceptual development in urban, transnational anthropology.

Critique of Anthropology .

This is an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the development of anthropology as a discipline that subjects social reality to critical analysis.

Ethnology .

This a quarterly journal devoted to offering a broad range of general cultural and social anthropology. It publishes only articles.

Journal of Children and Poverty .

This journal serves as a forum for research and policy initiatives in the areas of education, health and public policy, and the socioeconomic causes and effects of poverty.

Journal of Poverty .

This a quarterly journal dedicated to research on poverty that goes beyond narrow definitions of poverty based on thresholds. It takes the view that poverty is more than the lack of financial means; rather, it is a condition of inadequacy, lacking, and scarcity. Published by Haworth Press.

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice .

The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice covers poverty-related topics as they are connected to social justice located in the United Kingdom. Contributors include researchers, policy analysts, practitioners, and scholars. Published by the Policy Press.

Poverty and Public Policy: A Global Journal of Social Security, Income and Aide and Welfare .

This is a new global journal that began publishing in 2009. It publishes policy research on poverty, income distribution, and welfare. It begins with the assumption that progress is possible and policy has a role to play in alleviating global poverty. Published on behalf of the Policy Studies Organization.

Race, Poverty, and the Environment .

This twenty-year-old journal is concerned with social and environmental justice. When it was founded, the goal was to strengthen the connections between environmental groups, working people, poor people, and people of color.

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11 Life, Death, and Resurrections: The Culture of Poverty Perspective

Jessi Streib, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Duke University.

SaunJuhi Verma, Assistant Professor in School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University.

Whitne Welsh, Research Scientist, The Social Science Research Institute, Duke University.

Linda M. Burton, Dean of Social Sciences and James B. Duke Professor of Sociology, Duke University.

• Published: 05 April 2017
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This article examines the culture of poverty thesis, focusing on its many lives, deaths, and reincarnations. It first considers the intellectual history of the culture of poverty thesis before discussing how the argument has been interspersed throughout U.S. history and applied to various groups. It then considers the argument’s scholarly reproduction, noting how it is underlain by a binary whereby segments of the poor, racial minorities, and immigrants are positioned as having a deviant, morally suspect culture that undermines their potential upward mobility, whereas white middle- and upper-class Americans are positioned as having a normal, morally upstanding culture that secures their class position. The article also describes four routine scholarly practices that engender a specter of support for the culture of poverty thesis. Finally, it argues that the culture of poverty should either be put to rest or allowed to live based on its own merits, and suggests ways to end its unintentional resurrection.

This chapter is a critical treatise on the culture of poverty thesis. The thesis has lived many lives in scholarship about the poor, mostly in the United States, as it is repeatedly put to rest only to be resurrected again when a new wave of poverty research emerges. For example, a decade into the millennium and over a half century since the thesis emerged in the scholarly literature, sociologists Mario Small, David Harding, and Michele Lamont (2010) edited a volume of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on new ways of studying culture and poverty. After a fierce backlash against the culture of poverty argument in the 1960s and 1970s, the edited volume revived academic and policy interests in the culture of poverty, albeit from a “new perspective.” Selective reactions to the ANNALS volume and its claim of offering a new perspective on culture and poverty were aptly reflected in a statement by an urban anthropologist with whom we consulted: “How many lives has this cat [referring to the culture of poverty] lived anyway? Surely it is more than nine!” This scholar’s sentiments matched our own. The thesis has been resurrected in many forms, some of which merely reflect a play on words, or a reconceptualization of culture, but not the overall thesis ( Vaisey 2010 ). Others attempt to sporadically revive the culture of poverty as a way of thinking about the poor by arguing that the thesis has been deeply misunderstood ( Harvey and Reed 1996 ).

The culture of poverty argument also lives, dies, and is reborn time and again in the public imagination and discourse. For example, shortly after the publication of Small, Harding, and Lamont’s (2010) special issue of the ANNALS, policy-makers, pundits, and average U.S. citizens debated the culture of poverty in the media. Each attached their own meaning to the thesis. A New York Times ( Cohen 2010 ) article seemed to celebrate, or at least eye with curiosity, the idea that cultural explanations of poverty, once “That Which Must Not Be Named” were now being discussed again. An NPR (2010) report raised the issue of whether the culture of poverty argument is an “insult that blames the victims of institutional racism.” An earlier book took a very different stance when it claimed that inner city poverty stems from a culture that devalues work and whose occupants may be genetically inferior ( Herrnstein and Murray 1994 ).

In this chapter we consider the many lives, deaths, and reincarnations of the culture of poverty thesis. We begin with a short intellectual history of the thesis and then show how the argument has been interspersed throughout U.S. history and applied to various groups. We illustrate that while the culture of poverty perspective is used often in the United States, it also ebbs and flows in countries as diverse as England and Bahrain. After discussing the public reproduction of the culture of poverty thesis, we turn our attention toward the main focus of this chapter: its scholarly reproduction. We begin with the observation that at the center of the culture of poverty argument is a binary whereby segments of the poor, racial minorities, and immigrants are positioned as having a deviant, morally suspect culture that undermines their potential upward mobility whereas white middle- and upper-class Americans are positioned as having a normal, morally upstanding culture that secures their class position. We argue that this binary receives little explicit support from academics, but that four routine scholarly practices implicitly and inadvertently reproduce it: (1) missing and false comparison groups, (2) the selection of one-sided research agendas, (3) biased interpretations of research findings, and (4) limited theoretical alternatives. Together, these practices engender a specter of support for the culture of poverty thesis, subtly breathing life into an argument that is regularly declared dead. We then draw upon exemplary work to suggest frameworks for avoiding these issues. We conclude by maintaining that the culture of poverty should either be put to rest or allowed to live based on its own merits, and suggest ways to end the unintentional resurrection of what may be social scientists’ most infamous paradigm.

The Culture of Poverty Argument

The culture of poverty is a loosely formulated theory associated with Oscar Lewis’s (1959 , 1966 ) studies of impoverished Latinos in the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis defined the culture of poverty as a set of adaptations that offer a solution to the problems of poverty in the short term but perpetuate poverty in the long term. Lewis named nearly six dozen adaptations, including feelings of dependency and helplessness, a present-time orientation, unemployment, a lack of class consciousness, out-of-wedlock child-rearing, female-headed households, and a general mistrust of institutions. According to Lewis, these adaptations become habitual for those who live in long-term poverty, are passed down to subsequent generations, and create a cycle of intergenerational poverty that is difficult to escape even when structural conditions change. In the wake of World War II, when theories invoking biological inferiority had largely been discredited, this turn to culture was initially well received. As the perspective gained recognition—first through Lewis’s work, then through Michael Harrington’s best-selling The Other America, and finally through the Moynihan Report—the authors’ claims that the culture of poverty stemmed from structural inequities dropped out of the public discourse, and the poor were viewed as mired in a culture of poverty of their own making (see O’Connor this volume). In addition, in some Americans’ minds, the culture of poverty thesis became tied to race, specifically to African Americans.

That Americans linked the culture of poverty to race was not surprising given that the theory gained popularity during a time of aggravated racial turmoil. The decades following World War II saw a huge migration of African Americans from the American South to the American North (see Wilson this volume). These new arrivals mainly settled in large predominately white cities, making their influx all the more noticeable. Legal and informal residential segregation practices then channeled them into old and rundown neighborhoods near the city center (again increasing their visibility), which were soon bursting at the seams from overcrowding ( Massey and Denton 1993 ). As the demographics shifted, African Americans became more politically active, raising their profiles locally as well as nationally through the Civil Rights and various nationalist movements. African Americans also garnered attention in the 1960s for their participation in urban revolts, which surprised and unsettled the white establishment. In the wake of the revolts, poverty became entrenched in northern African American neighborhoods as the larger community retreated from those precincts, and everyone who could afford to leave left ( Wilson this volume).

Into this charged atmosphere Daniel Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Johnson, delivered his controversial conclusion on class and racial inequality—that is, the African American community was characterized by a “tangle of pathology.” Moynihan designated growing rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing as the center of the pathology, and, like Lewis, believed that the culture of the black poor would preclude their upward mobility even if all structural barriers were removed. The report, meant to bolster support for President Johnson’s War on Poverty initiatives, instead provoked a firestorm of controversy, as academics, community activists, and civil servants alike lined up to dispute and denounce its findings (see, e.g., Billingsley 1968 ; Ryan 1971 ; Stack 1974 ). The backlash was so fierce that no serious scholars of poverty ventured anywhere near culture for decades. The past few years, however, have begun to see a backlash to the backlash, with Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey (2014 :611) lamenting that “sociology did itself a grave disservice when it demonized and ostracized Lewis (1966) following the 1966 publication of his book, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. ” Others, however, still avoid talking about poverty and culture together.

The Public Reproduction of Culture of Poverty Arguments

While the culture of poverty argument is most often associated with Lewis’s and Moynihan’s writings in the tumultuous 1960s, the argument itself was neither new to the mid-twentieth century nor confined to scholarly journals. Rather, we show that these arguments have been deployed and reproduced by the public throughout American history and in countries across the world. Here we name several time periods and locations where the culture of poverty thesis has surfaced, demonstrating that it is repeatedly reproduced even when it is not named as such.

Decades before Lewis’s (1959) first major writing on the culture of poverty was published, Americans used a similar framework to describe Asian immigrants, including those from the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Japan. Many Asian immigrants entered the United States through Angel Island, an island in the San Francisco Bay known as the “Ellis Island of the West.” Here, American immigration officials detained and processed immigrants. The officials, like many of their contemporaries, considered Asian immigrants to be filthy, immoral, unassimilable, and therefore suitable only for low-wage jobs. More broadly, government officials drew upon beliefs about Asian immigrants’ cultural traits to limit their access to property ownership and citizenship. Some American thinkers of the time, including sociologist Robert E. Park, argued that Asian immigrants’ culture would also keep them in poverty even if legal and informal restrictions were removed ( Lee and Yung 2010 ).

Asian immigrants were not the only group accused of having norms, values, and behaviors that prevented their mobility. For much of the twentieth century, Italian Americans were accused of the same. Italian Americans did not achieve socioeconomic parity with whites until the 1970s—much slower than other ethnic groups ( Alba and Abdel-Hady 2005 ). Before achieving socioeconomic parity, the rhetoric deployed to explain the disparity was strikingly similar to that used decades later by proponents of the culture of poverty perspective: Italian Americans were said to have congenitally low intelligence, no interest in education, and were thus destined to remain in the lower strata of the working class. They were also considered predisposed to criminality, in large part because they lacked self-control and were often at the mercy of their emotions. For the same reasons, they were thought to have many children, and certainly more than they could afford ( Gans 1962 ; Whyte 1943 ). However, once Italian Americans acquired economic parity with their white peers, these cultural condemnations waned and were instead applied to other groups.

In recent decades, the culture of poverty argument has been applied to America’s poor in general and minority poor in particular. In 1996, President Bill Clinton worked with congressional Republicans to sign the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This welfare reform bill was based upon key assumptions embedded in the culture of poverty framework—that poverty resulted from the poor’s inferior work ethic, women’s inability to remain chaste, and the poor’s disinclination to marry ( Daguerre 2008 ). More recently, congressman and 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan was quoted as explaining that poverty derives from a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” ( Isquith 2014 ). Contemporary calls for drug testing welfare recipients and cutting food stamps echo elements of culture of poverty arguments—that the poor are prone to criminality, irresponsibility, and indolence—and that changing their situation through governmental assistance will not improve their outlook but make them worse. Policymakers’ focus on welfare and inner cities also highlights who they think is engaged in a culture of poverty—the black poor.

The culture of poverty argument, however, is not only deployed in the United States. In post-Thatcher England, unions deteriorated, and many working-class jobs disappeared. As the working class’s economic conditions worsened, some British people changed their views of the white working class. Rather than seeing them as the morally righteous “salt of the earth,” they instead came to see them as morally inferior “Chavs.” Chavs—an acronym standing for “council housing and violent”—are framed as having a unique and cohesive culture that is distant from that of the middle class. Men in this group are labeled as aggressive, violent, lazy, and dumb; women are viewed as unruly, loud, tasteless, and promiscuous. The image of the Chav is used to imply that segments of the white working class are primitive, barbaric, morally flawed, and irresponsible. Their class position is viewed as the justified result of their inferior culture, and their culture is viewed as locking them in the lower class even if structural conditions change ( Jones 2011 ). In Scotland, the same phenomena occurs, but the stigmatized group is instead referred to as “Neds” (non-educated delinquents) ( Young 2012 ).

Likewise, the culture of poverty argument is perpetuated in Bahrain, a small country in the Middle East. In Bahrain, nearly 85 percent of the labor force consists of foreign workers, predominately from South Asia. Most lack access to citizenship and to avenues of upward mobility. Nevertheless, locals attribute foreigners’ class position to their culture—foreign workers are framed as violent, uneducated, lacking a work ethic, and from unstable families ( Gardner 2010 ). In a similar fashion, Filipino migrants are framed as deviant by the Philippine state; low-wage workers are characterized as embodying a morally scrupulous culture that is in need of state intervention ( Guevarra 2010 ). National training programs emphasize the need for transforming the domestic workforce into ideal global workers by reshaping their values and behaviors rather than emphasizing their structural exclusion from education and the domestic labor market ( Guevarra 2010 ). In England, Scotland, Bahrain, the Philippines, and countries across the globe, elements of the culture of poverty argument are retold and reproduced. In each case, the poor are blamed for their poverty.

It is not surprising that the culture of poverty argument receives such long and widespread support given the functions it serves. Culture of poverty arguments justify exclusion, relieve agencies and citizens of an obligation to help the poor, and enhance the image of the middle class as morally upstanding citizens who deserve their class position. Policymakers can use the argument as a rationale to leave exclusionary policies in tact; middle-class laypeople can use the argument to feel virtuous and innocent. In scholarly communities, however, there is less incentive to reproduce culture of poverty arguments. Nevertheless, scholars keep the culture of poverty argument alive.

The Scholarly Reproduction of Culture of Poverty Arguments

In the public, the culture of poverty argument is explicitly reproduced through political declarations and repeated stereotypes. Until the last few years, however, the scholarly community took pains to avoid explicitly endorsing culture of poverty arguments. At least since Oscar Lewis (1959 , 1966) published his thesis on the culture of poverty, scholars have criticized both his specific scholarship and the larger idea that the poor, minorities, and immigrants have inferior values, norms, and behaviors that lock them into lower class positions ( Bourgois 2001 ; Duneier 1999 ; Watkins-Hayes and Kovalsky this volume). Nevertheless, we argue that while academics typically lend little explicit support to culture of poverty arguments, key elements of the argument are implicitly reproduced by routine scholarly practices. Thus, while scholars proclaim the death of the culture of poverty, they simultaneously give it life.

At the center of the culture of poverty thesis is a binary: segments of the poor, racial minorities, and immigrants are positioned as having a deviant, morally suspect culture that undermines their potential upward mobility whereas white middle- and upper-class Americans are positioned as having a normal, morally upstanding culture that secures their class position. We argue that although this binary receives little explicit support from academics, four scholarly practices inadvertently reproduce it: (1) missing and false comparison groups, (2) the selection of one-sided research agendas, (3) biased interpretations of research findings, and (4) limited theoretical alternatives. Together, these practices engender a specter of support for the culture of poverty thesis, implicitly reproducing ideas associated with the culture of poverty argument.

Below we provide examples of ways that missing and false comparison groups, one-sided research agendas, biased interpretations of research findings, and limited theoretical alternatives bolster the binary of culturally suspect disadvantaged groups and culturally superior advantaged groups. We then provide examples of research that disrupts these common practices. Our intention is not to single out any particular study but to illuminate general patterns. We also emphasize that many of these patterns are not the fault of an individual scholar but occur due to the theoretical and methodological traditions of academic fields and the collective lack of reflexivity on specific issues. Finally, arguments about the culture of poverty use “culture” to mean anything from a subgroup with shared norms, values, and behaviors to a group with an overlapping set of beliefs and strategies that are used in fragmented, contradictory, and heterogeneous ways ( Small et al. 2010 ). In this chapter, we take an agnostic view of how to conceptualize culture. We often refer to culture as more homogeneous and cohesive than it is, simply because this is the way it has historically been referred to in culture of poverty debates.

Missing and False Comparison Groups

One way that the culture of poverty thesis is implicitly supported is by the failure to use a comparison group. Writing of Oscar Lewis’s version of the culture of poverty, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1993 :35) revealed how this occurs: “Lewis recognized that ‘people with a culture of poverty are aware of middle-class values, talk about them, and even claim some of them as their own, but on the whole they do not live by them’ (ibid: xlvi). The untested assumption is that the ‘middle-class’ live by them ” (italics added). Yet, despite Bonilla-Silva’s criticism and that of others ( Lamont and Small 2008 ; Young 2004 ), the practice of assuming that segments of poor, nonwhite, and immigrant groups are uniquely deviant continues. This occurs not only because individual studies lack a white middle-class American comparison group, but also because existing studies of the white American middle class are not regularly considered in the culture of poverty debate.

One example of this trend is in studies about culture, poverty, and education. One strand of the culture of poverty argument suggests that segments of poor, black, American youth disengage in school and create an oppositional culture whereby status is created through distancing oneself from formal learning ( Fordham and Ogbu 1986 ; Ogbu 2003 ). Many scholars question the accuracy of this claim ( Carter 2005 ; Harris 2011 ). More relevant to this chapter, however, is that white middle- and upper-class youth could also be viewed as having an oppositional culture in regards to education. Many middle- and upper-class students regularly distance themselves from academic learning and publicly sanction their peers who do not conceal their academic investments ( Khan 2011 ; Tyson, Darrity, and Castellino 2005 ). Elite, historically white colleges have long been reputed to be epicenters of academic learning, but students at these universities regularly create status systems that reward distance from academic commitments ( Karabel 2005 ). Today, wealthy students at elite colleges report socializing more than studying ( Arum and Roksa 2011 ), and some upper-middle-class and elite white women report learning more about beauty-work than academic work ( Armstrong and Hamilton 2013 ; Holland and Eisenhart 1992 ). Given that many privileged white students engage in a status system that rewards behaviors that are in competition with school and learning, they could be considered to be engaging in an oppositional culture. They, however, are rarely labeled as having one, nor are many of these studies included in the culture of poverty debate. Leaving them out casts segments of the black poor as particularly culturally deviant as they are seen as uniquely disinterested in education.

A culture of poverty is also thought to be characterized by negative relations between men and women. Prominent works, such as Elijah Anderson’s (1990)   Streetwise , document that young black poor men and women have little trust in each other and use each other to gain status through sexual relations. Again, however, if we look at relationships between the sexes among the white American middle- and upper-classes, we find that the black American poor look less unique. White middle- and upper-class teenagers and young adults also talk about participating in a hook-up culture: one where respect between the sexes can be lacking, hooking up is partly about status, and sexual assault is a regular occurrence ( Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006 ; Wade and Heldman 2012 ). Among these youth, cheating in committed relationships is viewed simply as a normal part of being young and not overly deviant ( Wilkins and Dalessandro 2013 ). Likewise, ethnographies of poor black and Latino men sometimes frame them as culturally deviant due to their drug use ( Anderson 1990 ; Bourgois 2003 ; Vehnkatesh 2008 ), but white youths from higher classes use drugs at similar rates ( Johnston et al. 2008 ; Wightman, Schoeni, and Schulenberg 2012 ). While it is challenging for single ethnographies to study multiple groups, the lack of comparison to extant scholarship on other classes creates a skewed view in which only one group is viewed as culturally deviant.

Variants of the immigration literature also uphold the American white middle-class as culturally upstanding while casting nonwhite and poorer immigrants as culturally deviant. This, however, is accomplished through a false reference group rather than a missing one. In aspects of the American immigration literature, poor immigrants of color are compared to the white settlers who founded the United States. The representation of the white settlers, however, is too often false. Comparisons emphasize that poor immigrants of color unfairly and immorally extract native whites’ resources while overlooking that white settlers did the same to native groups ( Ignatiev 2009 ; Jung 2009 ). Other studies of immigration more explicitly reproduce the binaries present in the culture of poverty argument. Segmented assimilation theory suggests that immigrants will become upwardly mobile if they take on the culture of the American “mainstream”—the white middle class—while they will become downwardly mobile if they adopt the culture of the “underclass”—poor black communities ( Alba and Nee 2003 ). In this case, the cultural distinctions between the white middle class and black underclass are more assumed than tested but are reproduced nonetheless.

One-Sided Research Agendas

The binary of a culturally upstanding white American middle class whose efforts secure their class position and a culturally deviant minority and immigrant poor whose behaviors and values undermine their mobility is reinforced by the types of research agendas repeatedly engaged in and avoided. For example, the central studies in the culture of poverty debate focus on poor blacks and Hispanics ( Anderson 1990 ; Bourgois 2003 ; Hannerz 1969 ; Lewis 1966 ; Liebow 1967 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Rainwater 1970 ; Stack 1974 ; Wilson 1996 ; Young 1999 ). Even though many of these studies conclude that blacks and Hispanics are not mired in a culture of poverty, they engage in the culture of poverty debate when studying these groups. There are more poor whites than poor blacks in the United States ( National Center for Children in Poverty 2007 ), but few studies ask whether poor whites are engaged in a culture of poverty. When studies of poor whites are conducted, they are often regionalized, suggesting that the cultural problems pertaining to poor whites are limited to Appalachia rather than to poor whites as a whole. More often, studies of poor whites avoid the culture of poverty debate altogether as authors stress the structural issues or discrimination that they face ( McDermott 2006 ; Nelson and Smith 1999 ) or praise them for the same behaviors that poor blacks are criticized for, such as understanding structural constraints and creating oppositional cultures (MacLeod 1995; Willis 1977). Classic studies of whites at the lower end of the class structure also tend to focus on the working class—who are popularly coded white—rather than the poor. These books use empathetic frameworks to paint working-class whites as making reasonable and heart-wrenching adaptations to their economic conditions ( Rubin 1976 , 1994 ; Sennett and Cobb 1972; Skeggs 1997 ). The racialized focus and framing of research agendas may reproduce the idea that minorities have a culture of poverty and that whites do not.

Similarly, many studies analyze how the culture of the poor prevents their mobility ( Bourgois 2003 ; Harding 2010 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Smith 2007 ; Wilson 1996 ; Young 1999 ). Few, however, ask how the culture of the middle class encourages downward mobility or prevents upward mobility. Surely, however, this is a possibility given the relatively high rates of mobility of individuals born into the middle of the class structure ( Urahn et al. 2012 ). As noted, middle-class individuals engage in some of the same behaviors as the poor, but studies do not attribute them to their lack of further upward mobility.

Another way that the one-sided nature of research agendas offer implicit support for the binary embedded in cultural of poverty arguments is by repeatedly asking how the practices of the white American middle class would benefit minorities and the poor but not asking how the practices of minorities and the poor would benefit the white middle class. For example, middle-class children are more likely to be involved in organized—usually fee-paying—activities whereas poor children are more likely to create their own informal activities ( Lareau 2003 ). Many studies have examined the potential academic—thus potentially mobility enhancing—benefits of organized activities for children of all classes ( Bodovski and Farkas 2008 ; Cheadle 2008 ; Henderson 2013 ; Roksa and Potter 2011 ). Few have done the same for unorganized activities despite that these activities may teach skills that are useful for upward mobility such as creativity, initiative, and the ability to get along well with an age-diverse group ( Lareau 2003 ). Similarly, working-class parents’ more hands-off and hardened parenting style is thought to teach children resiliency and perseverance ( Kusserow 2004 ). Though these traits may be widely beneficial to people across classes, scholars tend not to study whether middle-class children suffer from a lack of resilience. In these cases, aspects of the culture of the middle class are cast as potentially universally useful whereas aspects of the culture of the poor are not.

Similarly, there is a long history of considering poor families dysfunctional ( Moynihan 1965 ). On average, the poor now marry less and divorce more than their middle- and upper-classes counterparts ( Cherlin 2010 ; Ellwood and Jencks 2004 ). Researchers often ask why the poor marry less (e.g., Edin and Kefalas 2005 ; Wilson 1996 ). While a legitimate question, researchers tend not to also ask how middle-class families could benefit from the strengths of poor families. For example, poor families tend to spend more of their leisure time with each other ( Lareau 2003 ; Petev 2013 ), and women at the bottom of the income distribution report warmer relationships with their mothers than those at the top ( Wharton and Thorne 1997 ). Indeed, among married couples in which each spouse was raised in a different social class, those from privileged class backgrounds tend to cast their spouse’s poor family as warmer, more fun, and less emotionally distant ( Streib 2015b ). These advantages may be linked to mobility as families that are emotionally close may share more economic, social, and cultural resources. Yet, despite these potential advantages, researchers tend to ask why poor families do not look like middle-class ones without also asking the reverse.

In another example, people of color, compared to whites, tend to have more accurate perceptions of structural constraints to mobility ( Kluegel and Smith 1986 ; Hunt and Bullock this volume). Research questions often center on whether and how blacks’ insights prevent their mobility ( Ogbu 1983 ). Even when scholars answer that blacks’ realism about the opportunity structure does not minimize their academic striving ( Harris 2008 ), the question is rarely reframed to ask how whites might benefit from more accurate perceptions of the class structure. Similarly, college students from minority, poor, and working-class families tend to view college as primarily about academic learning and credentials, whereas upper-middle- and upper-class white students tend to place greater emphasis on using college for socializing and self-discovery ( Armstrong and Hamilton 2013 ; Grisby 2009 ; Stuber 2011 ). Academics, however, seldom ask whether disadvantaged groups’ orientation toward college offers benefits to all class groups.

Similarly, the selection of research questions concerning immigrant and native populations tend to assume that the former’s behaviors are potentially problematic while the latter’s are not. Classic assimilation theory positions immigrants as having a potentially problematic culture unless they adopt the cultural practices of the white American middle class ( Park 1925 ). For instance, the skill set of immigrants in navigating multiple countries, cultural norms, languages, and political structures is overlooked ( Ong 1999 ; Lan 2006 ). Instead, their cultural asymmetry to the white middle class is critiqued as a hindrance to upward mobility ( Alba and Nee 2003 , Bean and Stevens 2003 ). More recently, segmented assimilation theory suggests that poor blacks are mired in a culture of poverty and that immigrants’ own culture can help them avoid it ( Alba and Nee 2003 ; Brubaker 2004 ). In addition to problematically assuming that poor blacks live in a culture of poverty, these theories also suffer from assuming that whites have cultural elements that could help immigrants’ mobility projects but not vice versa. Such assumptions may not be accurate. For example, immigrant groups tend to engage in grassroots organizing, collective claims making, legislation reform, and public demonstrations for basic rights to a greater extent than American middle-class whites, and these strategies may facilitate opportunities for social mobility ( Das Gupta 2007 ). Research agendas, however, tend to focus on why immigrants engage less in white middle-class forms of political participation such as voter registration and holding political office ( Calavita 1992 ; Das Gupta 2007 ; Hing 1993 ). Without focusing on the reverse, only one group’s culture is problematized.

Biased Interpretations of Research Findings

Interpretations of research findings also lend implicit support to the culture of poverty binary when they assume that the cultural practices of poor people of color are problematic whereas those of middle- and upper-class whites are beneficial. For example, when poor women engage in hook-up culture they are viewed as jeopardizing their chances of mobility ( Anderson 1990 ); when upper-middle and upper-class women engage in hook-up culture they are viewed as using hook-ups as a strategy to secure their mobility ( Hamilton and Armstrong 2009 ). When poor black teenagers party, they are viewed as not thinking about their future ( Anderson 1990 ); when upper-class white teenagers party, they are portrayed as networking and entering into marriage markets ( Armstrong and Hamilton 2013 ). Working-class parents are more likely to value conformity and obedience in their children; these values are thought to train their children for jobs in which they are managed ( Kohn 1969 ). Middle-class parents are more likely to value self-direction in their children; these values are thought to teach children to be managers ( Kohn 1969 ). Although values and practices can contradict—in aspects of their lives, working-class parents allow their children more self-direction whereas middle-class parents emphasize greater obedience ( Weininger and Lareau 2009 )—it is rarely suggested that working-class parents teach their children to be managers and middle-class parents teach their children to be managed. In addition, one could surmise that the experience of being raised by a managerial parent teaches children to follow their managerial parents’ orders, making them easily managed rather than managers. Without detailed longitudinal data, it is impossible to know which assumptions are correct. In the absence of the data needed to make these claims, it is remarkable that the common interpretations problematize only the culture of the poor and working class.

Similar interpretations privilege American whites over immigrant groups. When white middle- and upper-class Americans consume a large variety of culture they are viewed as engaging in a practice that maintains their privileged position ( Khan 2011 ; Peterson and Kern 1996 ). Immigrants hold a large variety of culture—some from their original country, and some from their new one—but their cultural omnivoreness is generally viewed as a liability to their upward mobility rather than an asset ( Agarwal 1991 ; Das Gupta 2007 ; Grewal and Kaplan 1994 ). In a more specific example, traveling abroad is viewed as an asset for the class reproduction of middle- and upper-middle-class Americans, but traveling across national borders and knowing home and second languages is viewed as a potential barrier to upward mobility for poor immigrants ( Alba and Nee 2003 ; Brubaker 2004 ; Rivera 2011 ). It is possible that these similar activities have different implications for different groups, but, again, in the absence of evidence, it is remarkable that privileged groups’ culture is so often viewed as maintaining their privilege whereas disadvantage groups’ culture is viewed as a cause for their disadvantage.

Limited Theoretical Alternatives

Though the culture of poverty theory has been proclaimed dead, theories that exist in its stead also posit that the poor’s use of culture locks them in poverty whereas the middle class’ use of culture keeps them in the middle class. For decades, social isolation theory ( Massey and Denton 1993 ; Wilson 1987 , 1996 ) suggested that segments of the poor were geographically segregated from the middle class, and as a result the segregated poor developed distinct cultural norms, values, and behaviors. The types of alternative culture the poor developed offered them avenues for status and the ability to navigate their social milieu, but deterred their upward mobility as their new culture was at odds with that of the middle class. Social isolation theory has been challenged as scholars have demonstrated that the poor are never fully isolated from middle-class culture ( Duneier 1992 ; Edin and Kefalas 2005 ; Newman 1999 ). Instead, scholars now argue that the cultural landscape of the poor is marked by cultural heterogeneity ( Harding 2007 , 2010 ). That is, the poor are viewed as having access to both alternative and mainstream cultural elements. However, such variety is considered problematic. The frames and scripts in alternative and mainstream culture are conflicting and contradictory, and the poor sometimes go back and forth between using both. Without sticking to mainstream culture, the poor are unlikely to be upwardly mobile.

In a different vein, Bourdieu’s (1977 , 1984 ) mismatch theory also maintains that the culture used by the poor prevents their mobility. He argues that individuals internalize aspects of culture—worldviews, perceptions of reality, and practical strategies—that help them succeed in their own classed environment. The poor and middle class then develop some distinct aspects of culture due to their different class locations. He emphasizes that institutions which serve as gatekeepers to the middle class reward the culture the middle class uses while penalizing the culture that the poor uses. Due to this institutional bias, cultural differences between the poor and middle class are likely to lead to class reproduction for each social class.

Social isolation, cultural heterogeneity, and cultural mismatch theories are all theories of how culture is used by the poor (and the middle class) to maintain the poor’s poverty. Theories of how the poor may use culture for upward mobility are more limited. Cultural mobility scholars ( DiMaggio 1982 ) argue that those born into social class disadvantage can learn to use the culture rewarded by middle-class institutions. Code-switching theory ( Pattillo 1999 ) suggests the same. However, these theories do not disrupt the binary inherent in the culture of poverty argument. Instead, they reinforce it by suggesting that some poor people can use the culture associated with the middle class to gain mobility, but that the culture associated with the poor is only associated with remaining impoverished. Only by assimilating can the poor become middle class.

Though each of these theories of culture and social class inequality has much to offer and effectively describes many instances in the social world, the existing theoretical landscape is unbalanced. None of the theoretical alternatives to the culture of poverty argument explain how in instances when the culture of the poor and middle class differ, the poor can use culture in any way other than to trap themselves in poverty. None explain how the middle class can use culture to deter their further upward mobility or to facilitate their downward mobility. The default assumption is that when the poor and middle class use culture in different ways, the poor’s culture will keep them poor and the middle-class’ culture will prevent them from being poor. Without theories that explain how cultural differences between the classes can facilitate the poor’s upward mobility and the middle class’ downward mobility, scholars are likely to unreflexively interpret their data in ways that reproduces the binary at the heart of the culture of poverty argument regardless of if it is true.

Disrupting the Binary

Aspects of the culture of poverty argument are then implicitly reproduced by scholarly practices that uphold the notion that white middle-class Americans have a culture that maintains their privilege while nonwhite, poor, and immigrants possess cultural traits that detract from theirs. However, not all scholarly practices have missing or false reference groups, one-sided research agendas, biased assumptions, or theoretical limitations. Many of these practices are challenged. For instance, researchers no longer see the culture associated with the middle class as entirely beneficial to the poor. This is partly because researchers have found that the same culture held by different groups does not necessarily yield the same outcomes. For example, poor black women are often criticized for entering parenthood at “young” ages, where young is defined in relation to the age when middle-class white women tend to give birth. Researchers have found, however, that poor black women who give birth at “young” ages tend to have equal or better health and academic outcomes for themselves and their children compared to if they gave birth at the same age as their white middle-class counterparts ( Geronimus 2003 ). Similarly, poor parents and parents of color who adopt the parenting style associated with the white middle class are not rewarded and may even be penalized by their children’s teachers ( Dumais et al. 2012 ). Poor children who go to a museum may see little change in their grades; middle-class children who go to a museum may benefit more ( Meier Jaeger 2011 ). Bangladeshi immigrants in the United Kingdom ( Blackledge 2001 ), Turkish immigrants in Germany ( Becker 2010 ) and former Soviet Republic immigrants in Israel ( Leopold and Shavit 2013 ) are not rewarded by teachers for their cultural capital, even if it is high cultural capital in their home countries.

Other approaches also challenge the idea that the culture of the middle class is necessarily advantageous for mobility. Older studies conceptualized the teaching of middle-class culture to the poor via role models as helpful for the latter’s mobility ( Anderson 1990 ; Wilson 1996 ). Now that approach is questioned. Middle-class “role models” who attempt to teach the poor to be more “cultured” are viewed as potentially harming the poor’s mobility options ( Pattillo 2007 ). Similarly, studies of upward mobility—though rarely incorporated into the culture of poverty literature—also undermine the idea that middle-class culture is a necessary precursor to mobility. People born into poverty who enter the middle class as adults regularly maintain many of the values, frames, and scripts they learned in their class of origin but are upwardly mobile anyway ( Karp 1986 ; Streib 2015b ; Stuber 2005 ).

Taking a different approach, economists and psychologists have also disrupted the binary. Economists find, for example, that both the rich and the poor use culture to their detriment. When either group faces scarcity—often time-scarcity for the rich and money-scarcity for the poor—they act in ways that worsen their situation ( Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir 2012 ). Psychologists highlight that people in the middle class tend to be independent, whereas people in poverty tend to be interdependent. They argue that both approaches are associated with some mobility-enhancing and some mobility-detracting strategies ( Piff et al. 2010 ; Snibbe and Markus 2005 ; Stephens, Markus, and Townsend 2007 ; Stephens, Markus, and Phillips 2014 ). The binary that the culture of the poor is problematic whereas the culture of the middle class is not is then destabilized as the culture of the latter is not viewed as universally good or necessary for upward mobility.

Scholars are also able to dismiss the binary inherent in the culture of poverty argument by taking a more macro and historical perspective that includes an analysis of power. By focusing on how poverty is made likely for some groups and not others via national policies, laws, histories, and hegemonic forces, it is possible to see any deviant behaviors among disadvantaged groups as having a minimal impact on their class position compared to broader social forces ( Brady 2009 ). For example, when Lewis (1966) and Moynihan (1965) were writing, black women had children out of wedlock more than white poor and middle-class women. Yet, whereas each author locates single motherhood as part of a culture of poverty and as responsible for keeping black families locked in poverty, neither fully takes into account the many forces that were likely to keep black women in poverty regardless of their motherhood practices. Educational apartheid, employment discrimination, white violence against blacks, and the remnants of legal segregation combined to make upward mobility unlikely regardless of family structure. The laws, polices, and economic conditions that have changed—ones that Lewis predicted a segment of poor individuals would not be able to take advantage of—include those such as deindustrialization and mass incarceration that continue to lock groups in poverty with little regard to their behavior.

In addition, scholars have moved beyond the culture of poverty debates by examining how groups are constructed as culturally superior and inferior through their relationship to one another. This literature looks at how groups are labeled, evaluated, and reconstructed through micro- and macroprocesses. British social theorists, for example, show how the middle class constructs the poor as excessive and disgusting in order to maintain their own position as normal and deserving ( Lawler 2005 ; Skeggs 2004 ). Studies on migration patterns show that female employers construct domestic migrant workers as docile, obedient, and less agentic, while positioning themselves as skilled professionals entering the workforce ( Lan 2006 ). States also engage in labeling processes that uphold the binary. The Philippines, for example, constructs its emigrants as national heroes for working abroad and sharing remittance that alleviate poverty at home ( Rodriguez 2010 ). At the same time, the Filipino state constructs emigrants as commodities for export, facilitating other states’ ability to label Filipinos as a stigmatized group that is undeserving of high pay ( Rodriguez 2010 ). These studies draw our attention away from the values and behavior of the poor and to the ability of groups in power to label the poor in ways that reaffirm existing hierarchies. Thus, whereas some sets of studies inadvertently provide implicit support for the binary embedded in the culture of poverty thesis, others undermine it.

The culture of poverty argument casts a specter on poverty scholarship—a specter that lurks in the background even when not named, and one that continues to live on despite widespread declarations that the idea has been put to rest. That the idea continues to be a part of public discourse is not surprising as it justifies the position of those in power while leaving them unaccountable for assisting the economically marginalized. That the culture of poverty argument continues to infiltrate scholarly discourse, however, may be more surprising, as the same segment of scholars who proclaimed its death keep it alive. In this chapter, we argued that scholars have not killed the idea as thoroughly as they believed. Instead they unintentionally breathe life into it.

In the following, we lay out several ways that the routine reproduction of the culture of poverty argument may be avoided by scholars. Our point is not that the binary inherent in the culture of poverty argument is never correct, but merely that it should not be unintentionally reproduced through missing comparison groups, one-sided research agendas, biased interpretations of research findings, and limited theoretical alternatives. Others have suggested countering culture of poverty arguments by emphasizing frames rather than values or considering culture as a loose collection of elements rather than a cohesive whole ( Small et al. 2010 ). These approaches, while having other commendable attributes, will not disrupt the unreflexive and unintentional reproduction of the binary central to the culture of poverty argument. In addition to following the lead of the scholarship that is disrupting the binary, we suggest the following alternatives.

1. Develop theories of how culture facilitates upward mobility for the poor . A key reason why research agendas are one-sided and interpretations of research findings are biased is that the theories available to researchers are also one-sided. Theories of how culture is used in class reproduction dwarf theories of how culture is used for mobility. This theoretical bias primes researchers to ask some questions and not others, and to consider their findings as having some implications and not others. Developing a toolkit of how culture is used both for class reproduction and mobility would challenge scholars to weigh their evidence rather than unreflexively applying theories that suggest cultural differences between the classes keeps the poor in poverty.

2. Expand the cannon. While the above strategy is difficult, this strategy is not. Just as women’s studies became gender studies and race studies expanded to include research on whites, the study of culture and poverty should be reframed as the study of culture and class. Reimagining the canonical culture and poverty literature in this light would force comparisons to existing studies of how culture is used by poor people who become upwardly mobile and to how middle- and upper-class people deploy culture. Such comparisons would raise questions about the conclusions drawn in some of the culture and poverty literature and force a partial reinterpretation of the role of culture in the class reproduction of the poor. Furthermore, given that poverty is often coded black while other classes are coded as whites, broadening the cannon may also remind researchers that the study of culture and poverty should include the study of all racial groups.

3. Consider counterfactuals. Another easy strategy to avoid unreflexively reproducing the binary that the poor’s culture prevents their mobility and the middle-class’ culture secures their privilege is to ask counterfactual questions. If we lack the evidence to substantiate how cultural differences between the classes matter, would we interpret our results differently if the cultural strategies were used by members of different classes? Given the constraints the poor face, if they refrained from using specific cultural strategies or did more to mimic the middle class, would their mobility prospects change? If the poor did resemble the middle class more, would the middle class reinvent itself to create greater cultural distance from the poor?

4. Generate more sophisticated understandings of when cultural similarities and differences between the classes facilitate the poor’s mobility. One of the assumptions in the culture of poverty thesis is that if poor people resembled middle-class people their chances of upward mobility would increase. However, gatekeepers may not reward culture equally for all classes, and the same culture used in different-classed environments may lead to different results ( Geronimus 2003 ; Meier Jaeger 2011 ). More work should be done to understand when cultural similarities between classes are associated with similar outcomes for all class groups. Similarly, some work shows that cultural differences between class groups may be associated with mobility-enhancing outcomes ( Streib 2015a ). Asking when cultural similarities and differences are rewarded by gatekeepers and for whom may lead to research agendas that challenge the binary at the center of the culture of poverty argument.

5. Consider cross-national variation in culture and class. Much of the culture of poverty literature is based on American subjects. Americans, however, are the most individualistic people in the world, place an unusually strong emphasis on self-sufficiency, and exhibit comparatively little class consciousness ( Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010 ). The implications of culture may vary in settings in which gatekeepers have less individualistic views. Cross-national studies could also reveal which cultural adaptations to poverty, if any, are universal, which are context specific, and which are most associated with the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Given different structural, economic, institutional, and demographic contexts of countries around the world, cross-national research (or even cross-context research within countries) could be used to generate theories of the scope conditions under which culture plays a causal role in keeping the poor in poverty.

6. Include comparison groups and check one-sided research agendas . The need for these strategies is clear. However, implementing them requires substantial changes to current research practices. Ethnography, for example, is typically single-sited. Multisite ethnographies, however, would better allow researchers to compare how culture is used across class and to what effect. Similarly, researchers tend to avoid asking questions about how the middle class could more effectively use culture, as scholars’ concern lies more with the poor. While we sympathize with this reasoning, we believe it has the unintended consequence of further problematizing the poor and valorizing the middle class.

7. Test the culture of poverty argument. Despite many heated debates about the culture of poverty perspective, some of its key claims have gone untested. Lewis argued that (1) a small segment of individuals in deep poverty develop and internalize cultural adaptations that (2) are passed down through generations and (3) prevent upward mobility even when structural conditions change. Much evidence has indicated that the poor do adapt to their class conditions (just as the middle class adapts to theirs) while also maintaining many mainstream values ( Bourgois 2003 ; Dunier 1992 ; Edin and Kefals 2005 ; Geronimus 2003 ; Liebow 1967 ; Stack 1974 ). Some research has demonstrated that parents attempt to, and sometimes successfully do, pass down cultural adaptations to their class conditions ( Calarco 2014 ; Lareau 2003 ; Kusserow 2004 ). However, research has generally ignored the last claim—that the poor cannot adapt to structural change. To fully understand the theory, this must be tested.

The culture of poverty argument should be maintained or defeated based upon its empirical accuracy. In this chapter, we have instead argued that scholars unintentionally maintain the theory through routine research practices. If researchers wish to dampen the argument’s unintentional resurrection, scholarly routines must be changed and greater reflexivity must be enforced. If these and other changes do not happen, the culture of poverty argument will go through more cycles of life, death, and resurrection.

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Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty

Clare Callahan is assistant lecturer at Sacred Heart University, where she teaches courses in poverty and literature and the health humanities. She is currently working on her first book project, “Abandoned Subjects.” Her writing on women and poverty in modernist American literature has been published in Twentieth Century Literature .

Joseph Entin is professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is coeditor of three books and the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007) and Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work , which is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in its Class: Culture series.

Irvin Hunt is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (2022). His writing on class and social movements in the Black radical tradition has been published in American Literary History, Public Books, American Quarterly , and in the collection African American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 (2022).

Kinohi Nishikawa is associate professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018). His writing on class and gender politics in African American print culture has been published in American Literary History , the Edinburgh History of Reading , and in the collection Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (2020).

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Clare Callahan , Joseph Entin , Irvin Hunt , Kinohi Nishikawa; Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty. American Literature 1 September 2022; 94 (3): 383–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084470

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Public rhetoric tends to present poverty as a static condition, often a condition of abject and total deprivation, rather than recognize it as an ongoing act of dispossession. Yet the word poverty itself has the potential to open up quite different connotations. Based on a somewhat uncommon etymology, poverty derives from the Old French poeste , which means power, and poeste gives form to in poustie , which means possibility. 1 As possibility, poverty is a dilemma for governance and, likewise, for the way poverty studies often treats the poor: as “a discrete and singular category,” as apprehensible and governable (Goldstein 2018 : 83). This special issue is a call to reflect on interpretive approaches: to consider how the very attempt to govern people betrays the way poverty poses a problem not only for governance but also, by exuberant extension, for representation itself. We say exuberant , productively overflowing, to mark how literature gives us the elasticity to think poverty beyond the disciplinary walls that segregate thought around it and beyond the representational need to make the poor, and even impoverishment, apprehensible. We have put together this special issue because we believe literature can renovate the word poverty in ways that illuminate conditions it has been wielded to hide, as well as the new coalitions and forms of relationality poverty makes possible. Across two centuries, literature has unsettled the term poverty , and we need this disruption now more than ever. The essays in this special issue show that literature uniquely exceeds the terms of poverty’s representation. It alights our attention on our manner of attending, beyond attempts to reduce, resolve, or otherwise impoverish our understanding of these terms.

• The Pervasiveness of Poverty

In December 2017, Australian professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, arrived in Los Angeles for a two-week tour of the United States to investigate the contours of economic suffering in the world’s wealthiest nation. Accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the London-based newspaper The Guardian (but not, notably, a representative from the New York Times ), Alston traveled from California to Alabama; Washington, DC; West Virginia; and Puerto Rico. 2 He found, The Guardian reported, “a land of extreme inequality,” and his conclusions were blunt: poverty in the United States is pervasive; “contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound” (Pilkington 2017 ). Drawing on statistics provided by the US Census Bureau, Alston reported that, as of 2016, 41 million Americans, almost 13 percent of the population, lived in poverty. Forty percent of those lived in “deep” poverty, with incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty threshold. In addition, he noted, the United States had the highest infant mortality rate in the so-called developed world; 18 percent of American children lived in poverty, comprising over 30 percent of the nation’s poor (Alston 2017a ).

Alston presented economic hardship and deprivation in the United States as a striking paradox: expansive poverty amid America’s affluence and its foundational dedication to equality and opportunity. In the report on his findings, Alston ( 2017b ) noted that, during his tour, “American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.” This notion, that American poverty is a paradox of plenty, is a venerable, common framing. Noted poverty scholar Mark Robert Rank ( 2011 : 16) likewise describes poverty as “a fundamental paradox: in America, the wealthiest country on earth, one also finds the highest rates of poverty in the developed world.” Challenging the deeply embedded notion that poverty is a product of individual faults or pathologies—a refusal to work hard, a lack of adequate skills, a psychology of dependency—Rank contends that “American poverty is largely the result of failings at the economic and political levels.” While contesting the idea that poverty constitutes an individual rather than an institutional problem is laudable, the assertion that poverty is a structural “failing” nevertheless suggests that economic deprivation is a contradiction rather than a constitutive element, a bug and not a design feature. Such framing obscures the possibility that poverty is endemic to US capitalist society—a predictable, integral, even necessary, outcome of the way America’s profoundly racialized economy is structured.

Despite the undeniable statistical evidence for economic privation and suffering in the United States, poverty continues to be “poorly understood” and too-little discussed, especially in the humanities and certainly in literary studies (Rank, Eppard, and Bullock 2021 ). Poverty presents not only a policy problem but also a conceptual problem of seeing and representation; if and how poverty can be addressed as a collective social and political concern depends on how it is depicted and understood. Historian Alice O’Connor ( 2001 ) contends that the institutionalized study of poverty, which she calls “poverty knowledge,” has privileged the expertise of professional researchers and academics while largely excluding poor people themselves as sources of insight. In the twentieth century, poverty emerged as an object of intense public interest and debate in key moments: the Progressive era, when muckrakers and reformers set out to uncover and remedy the contradictions roiling an emerging industrial modernity; the 1930s, when writers, artists, and documentarians, many employed by the US government, surveyed economic hardship across the country and forged support for New Deal policies; and the 1960s, when the federal government launched a “war” on poverty. But the public’s attention to poverty has waned over the past fifty years, under neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the war on poverty became a de facto war on the poor, as liberals and conservatives alike breathed new life into long-standing ideas about the “unworthy” poor to focus policy on individual pathology and dependency, infamously personified in President Ronald Reagan’s spurious image of the “welfare queen.” Mobilizing the “culture of poverty” thesis to blame the poor—especially poor people of color—for the poverty they faced, this line of thinking was weaponized to justify the 1996 passage, under President Bill Clinton, of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which aimed to “end welfare as we know it.” In the ensuing neoliberal era, US social policy, under the guise of promoting “hard work” and “healthy marriages,” has functioned effectively to punish, humiliate, and control the poor, especially those who are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous. 3

Propped up by corporate and academic interests, the neoliberal consensus on economic inequality has shown significant cracks since the turn of the century. Over the last decade in particular, economic inequality and extreme wealth have emerged as prominent topics of American political and public discourse, from Occupy Wall Street and its framing of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent; to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, which openly criticized corporate greed and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires; to the swelling membership of the Democratic Socialists of America. All of these developments raised spiking economic disparity to national prominence. Yet such attention to the growing inequality of our society seems to go hand in hand with relative silence on poverty, whether from voices of the poor or voices for the poor. 4 We may be living in a second Gilded Age, but it seems that our capacity for critique has not kept up with the intensified, and ubiquitous, realities of economic hardship in the United States. The fact that images of dependency, poor choices, and individual and communal pathology continue to represent the most readily available ways to understand poverty suggests that our contemporary political and media cultures are suffering a poverty of the imagination.

The same might be said of our literary culture. In a 2009   Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis would lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” More than a decade later, poverty remains stubbornly marginal to literary studies. While poverty constitutes an enduring topic of research in the social sciences, with numerous efforts to correct for the biases embedded in the shockingly durable “culture of poverty” thesis devised originally by Columbia University–trained anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the late 1950s, 5 literary studies and the humanities more broadly have had little to say about it. To be sure, there is a growing, and important, focus in criticism and theory on wealth inequality, precarity, dispossession, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and other forms of domination and subordination. Yet poverty is not reducible to the dynamics named by these keywords, even as it is connected to them. There is a lacuna in humanistic inquiry around not so much the conditions that create poverty as the very recognition of impoverishment as such.

This special issue of American Literature addresses that blind spot by asking what literary culture distinctively has to offer an understanding of poverty in the United States. What theories and methods of reading does literature about poverty demand? What language for talking about poverty does literature provide? In turn, what kinds of demands and pressures do efforts to address poverty, dispossession, and extreme economic inequality place on literary form and language? If the social sciences have claimed this area of inquiry for decades, what can literary studies do to help complicate and challenge dominant forms of poverty knowledge? Might literature offer a poverty knowledge of its own?

In addressing these questions, we build on critical work that has attended to the vexing dilemmas of literary and cultural representation raised by poverty as a category of analysis. Gavin Jones’s American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2007) suggests that poverty has generated “a sophisticated literary strain” (Jones 2007 : xv) that has not been adequately examined because the focus in literary studies “on oppressed subject positions has tended to evade the problems of economic inequality by centering social marginalization on the cultural identity of the marginalized” (7). Gandal, author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum ( 1997 ) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film ( 2007 ), and Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Trouble with Diversity ( 2007 ), agree with Jones that the problem of economic privation in US literature has been subsumed by the language of identity. Elsewhere, Michael Denning ( 2007 ; 2010 ) argues for reassessing the categories of labor and class to account for global poverty, precarity, and unemployment. This special issue contributes to these reassessments. Yet rather than juxtapose identity and economics, marginalization and class, subjectivity and structural power, we aim to explore the literary interplay of these categories.

As an economic and social condition, poverty is often perceived as a static state of lack, exclusion, and invisibility rather than, more actively, as a process, a relation, and a matter of “predatory inclusion” or “organized abandonment” (Taylor 2019 ; Gilmore 2015 ). As a form of structured economic deprivation, poverty is always contextual, defined by and against specific social and national norms and expectations; the poor are always conceived against the well-to-do, although individuals often move across those economic categories over time. (In fact, Rank [2011: 18] and his colleagues have found that most Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line during the course of their lives.) Where to draw the “poverty line” is a subject of debate and struggle. In this special issue, we are concerned with poverty not only as a material condition but also as an object and source of knowledge and art; poverty presents an epistemological and representational problem as well as an economic and social one. To be sure, a great deal of American writing has tended to reinforce the abject incapacity of the poor and the seemingly intractable boundary between the poor and well off. By contrast, this special issue turns primarily to the work of writers who expose the damaging incapacity of those very literary frameworks, suggesting both the failures of top-down efforts to render the poor legible and the possibilities that literature can render poverty otherwise, beyond the conventional liberal categories and conceptualizing lenses that have come to dominate representations of poverty in the United States.

• Reading Poverty Otherwise

Several critics have turned to literature as a wellspring for thinking through such alternatives. Asking, after Jones’s American Hungers , why scholarship in the United States has so far failed to produce “a theoretical discourse that describes the contemporary experience of poverty,” Gayle Salamon ( 2010 : 176) calls for a theory that would enable thinking about the lives of the poor in terms of “their conditions of possibility otherwise,” suggesting that literary scholars are in a position to produce such a theory. The relentless present that seems to organize the experience of poverty and beyond which Salamon calls on literary theory to think is, we suggest, not only a temporal but also an ontological problem, one that has often encouraged the bare life conception of poverty that this special issue seeks to contest. 6

In an effort to understand poverty in terms of power and potentiality, Patrick Greaney takes up this ontological problem by turning to literature. “The thematic representation of the poor,” Greaney ( 2007 : xv–xvi) writes, “as an actual individual or group characterized by socioeconomic misery alternates with the non-representative moments in which literary language . . . reduces itself to the potential for representation.” Greaney turns to literary language, then, precisely because it does not seek to capture and negate the agential aspects of poverty that seem otherwise to evade representation. “Literary language,” he continues, “acknowledges in moments when it becomes poor that poverty creates not an identity but a capacity, even if it appears,” through the lens of deprivation, “as an incapacity.” In other words, for Greaney, literature, in its juxtaposition of theme and form, understands the ontological contingency of poverty as both less and more than the possessive individualism of the neoliberal subject. This special issue calls for literary scholars to take up the work of navigating this persistent conflict between the ongoing ontological dispossession that denies the poor the right to exist—even as they perform productive social and material labor that is critical to society and the economy—and the ongoing emotional, psychological, and physical labor by impoverished people of ontological repossession in the form of covert capacities and potentiality. By ontological repossession , we mean the ways in which poor people are continually reclaiming their status as social and human subjects despite sociopolitical systems that would deny them such status.

Greaney’s reading calls to mind the writer Dorothy Allison’s ( 1992 ) observation, in the context of her coming out as a lesbian when she was a young girl in a poor and working-class churchgoing community, that being an “endangerment to society . . . gives you a lot of power.” Along these lines, this special issue suggests that the literature of poverty does not merely represent poverty but in effect offers a theory of reading poverty otherwise—a theory that might help us to recognize the forms of social, epistemological, and even material power the poor possess despite their active dispossession. The United States has an especially rich tradition of literature by and about the poor, from its inception and extending into our contemporary moment. 7 Contemporary texts that surpass the paradigm of representation as a mode of objectification, pathologization, or surveillance, or of imagining a futurity for the poor only by way of uplift, include fiction by Allison, Gloria Naylor, Jesmyn Ward, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Junot Díaz, and Tommy Orange, as well as poetry by Rafael Campo and C. D. Wright, to name only a few. Analyses of these authors’ writing has focused primarily on issues of race and gender and only secondarily on poverty. This trend has had the perhaps inadvertent effect of treating poverty as a socioeconomic condition or circumstance in which more organic forms of identity are grounded. In such readings, poverty becomes background rather than an active subject, process, or relation.

Together with the contributors to this special issue, we want to ask how an academic conversation around such a set of texts might be transformed if the question of poverty became a primary critical framework through which they were read. One challenge this possibility poses is that, while writers and scholars have sought to recuperate minoritized racial and gender identities through affirmative and celebratory narratives, a similarly recuperative approach to understanding poverty seems to run a greater risk of romanticizing material deprivation; at the same time, lamenting these material realities of poverty risks framing the poor as abject. 8 Extending poverty studies to include literary studies, or vice versa, offers the opportunity to reflect on how the literary as a unique mode of representation can elucidate the ways in which scarcity is manufactured in order to disinherit targeted populations, while also valuing the alternative epistemologies, forms of sociality, and aesthetic and cultural practices that communities produce in response to disinheritance.

Literature and literary studies can, moreover, shape an understanding of poverty by theorizing a mode of address that can resist forms of representation that have historically enabled, for example, criminalization of the means of survival among the poor; at the same time, literature can navigate the critical representational structures through which the poor demand resources necessary for more durable, less provisional modes of living. That the literary as a form of representation grapples with its own conditions of possibility situates it as having a privileged relationship to modes of being, like poverty, that have historically and methodologically posed a problem of representation. Consider, for instance, the scene from Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) in which the early flash technology of Riis’s camera causes him to set fire to one of the tenement buildings he’s touring and attempting to document. How the Other Half Lives depicts a city riven between genteel society and the tenements. Riis’s ( 1997 : 38) voyeuristic tour through the tenements’ “dark bedrooms” frequently followed the police, who at times burst into apartments and rooming houses at night to expose the dangers lurking within. In the cited scene, Riis acknowledges that “once, in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars . . . I managed to set fire to the house” (30). Riis’s incendiary mode of expression here betrays the violence that underlies certain forms of representation: in attempting to bring to light—to expose and enclose—the dark spaces of the tenements, he nearly burns one down. Only the thickness of dirt on the walls, a violation of standards of hygiene, keeps it from burning (30). What Riis ultimately illuminates, then, is the capacity of impoverished spaces themselves to interfere in their negation. In this way, literary language, as a reflexive form that mediates what escapes or resists representation, speaks to the mechanics of this interference. This scene acts as a reminder that poverty , in its etymological relation to aporia , suggests both a without and also a kind of exuberance, what we have evoked here as the “sociality” and “potentiality” and what might also be called the threatening alterity or “collective living otherwise” of the poor (Goldstein 2021 : 117). If certain literary, photographic, and journalistic texts and traditions have variously sought to enclose the poor through exposure, then the work of literary criticism in poverty studies today is twofold: to identify contemporary rhetorical practices of such enclosure and to elaborate narrative countermovements and alternative vocabularies.

• Beats per Minute

In many respects, centering poverty in literary studies is work that remains to be done. We consider this introduction, as well as the essays assembled here, a collective step toward that work. In taking that step, we believe a broad range of criticism may begin to find common ground where it is otherwise siloed into disciplinary knowledge formations. Literary poverty studies might bring together scholarship on financialization and debt; settler colonialism and dispossession; racial capitalism and the carceral state; foreclosure and homelessness; class and proletarianism; and the psychic lives of precarity. It also has the potential to bridge period studies on the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the War on Poverty era, and our present moment. But in order to do these things, critics must be willing to name, address, and engage poverty in literary and cultural representation, even and especially when it refuses to identify itself as such. For why should it not be the case that, given the trajectory of poverty discourse over the past century, literature would struggle to represent an alternately pathologized and obscured life experience? As critics delve into the literary and historical archives of forgotten or buried experience, perhaps we ought to train our senses on a population whose very existence challenges the norms by which we assign value to social and political identities.

As we worked on this project, we considered how we might convene a special issue in which much of the editorial work involves bringing that field into critical discourse. Our method of curating the articles and review essays that appear here identifies poverty as a critical keyword in literary studies. This process of identification is open-ended, carried out with contributors as they presented and revised their work. The articles represent original research across two centuries of American literary history, drawing on sundry subfields. Likewise, the review essays reflect on recent monographs that address questions of poverty and dispossession in literature and criticism even if not all are explicitly about those topics. In bringing these pieces together, neither we nor the authors proceeded from a predetermined set of disciplinary or even interdisciplinary moves. The task was to think together about what it means to center poverty in literary studies at all. A welcome result of that work is five articles that do much to expand the critical imagination. In their own ways, they approach poverty not only as a socioeconomic condition but also as a mode of experience that exceeds racialized and capitalist taxonomies.

Jean Franzino’s “Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing” begins the issue. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials, from street-corner ephemera to federal pension files, Franzino analyzes the textual forms and reception contexts of printed media sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support. These so-called mendicant texts, whose first-person literary accounts lent support to face-to-face financial transactions, highlight traits of authenticity, individuality, and agency in a process Franzino theorizes as a scene of “prosthetic narrative.” Not coincidentally, such traits lie at the heart of how scholars value life writing as both validating and informing the critical orientation of disability studies and poverty studies alike. Yet the powerful connection between material impoverishment and literary creation in mendicant texts means that these traits cannot be taken at face value: some disabled people had to invent the truth they knew people wanted to hear. Thus mendicant texts are, in Franzino’s terms, canny performances of need to a public that risks becoming indifferent to disabled veterans’ plight. In a remarkable critical turn, she contends that approaching mendicant texts precisely for their fictionality and serial or generic authorship allows us to apprehend the actual deprivation from which these people suffered. Moving beyond the need to find “proof” of intersectional oppression, Franzino suggests that mendicant performativity outlines the social dynamics that produce disabled, impoverished subjects in the first instance.

In her article, “Picturing Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Lori Merish similarly enlists the archive; here, she uses the photographic archive of the same era in order to trace a correspondence between the emerging conception of poverty as a social problem, rather than as an inevitable condition, and the emergence of the modern conception of childhood as a state of dependency. Tracing this correspondence in philanthropic photographic images of poor children, Merish shows that the modern appreciation for childhood innocence surfaced simultaneously and dovetails with the perceived innocence, which is to say, the representational authority, of the photographic medium. In this way, philanthropic photography of poor children in the mid-nineteenth century seeks to void what we have already described here as the threatening alterity of the poor. Merish, considering the work of pioneering urban reformer Samuel B. Halliday and his collaborator, the photographer Richard A. Lewis, before she turns to an examination of “the literary afterlife” of Halliday’s images in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), argues that mid-nineteenth-century visual and literary imagery of poverty configured the poor as morally legible by picturing their deprivation; in this sense, she advances Franzino’s reading, with regard to Civil War writing, of the fraught deprivation narratives of mendicant texts. “Picturing Poverty” thus also contributes to this special issue’s taking issue with historical and ongoing efforts to render the poor and poverty itself apprehensible through narratives of incapacity and privation. Merish builds on our critique not only in showing how philanthropic photographs of poor children act as a form of capture but also by further arguing that this body of photography and the literature it haunts, as seen in Alger, signifies a willingness on the part of the subject to be captured, to be made visible, a willingness that renders its subject worthy of philanthropic resources.

In “‘Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business’: Poverty, Race, and Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels,” Emily Gowen picks up where Merish left off, with a resonant study of what, she argues, is literature’s historical dependence on—rather than transcendence of—a mass print culture supported by the economic exploitation of another group of urban minors: newsboys. Like Merish, Gowen contends that Alger valorizes the impoverished adolescent who surrenders to surveillance, a willing capitulation that Alger associates with Anglo-Saxon whiteness. But in her readings of Ragged Dick and Rough and Ready (1869), Gowen takes a different tack, seeing in these novels a challenge to the nineteenth-century notion that cultural literacy could be a source of upward mobility for the newsboy. She thus interrogates and departs from the dominant reading of Alger as an apologist for philanthropic paternalism. Alger’s imagining of “a workable path up and out of poverty” through self-making, Gowen claims, actually functions to expose the impossibility of any class or individual transcending social and economic forces. In this way, Gowen’s reading of Alger’s novels treats literature as a reflexive mode capable of autocriticism in its laying bare the bankruptcy of the liberal notions of progress and the self on which literary value has historically been predicated. In this treatment of literature, Gowen does the work for which this special issue calls, that of identifying rhetorical practices of enclosure within a set of texts and recognizing narrative countermovements within the same set of texts.

Such reflexivity is expertly on display in Cody C. St. Clair’s “The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession.” St. Clair locates the problems of housing and homelessness at the center of modernism during the 1930s. Against the backdrop of newspaper reports on proliferating evictions (such reportage was a genre growing popular by the day with its pathologization of the poor), St. Clair compares eviction scenes in H. T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), with passing but perceptive treatment of works by Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, and others. This comparison produces both a material and aesthetic intersectionality: according to St. Clair, Tsiang uses a “flat” Cubist aesthetic, Ellison a “thick” collagist one, and together these horizontal and vertical approaches reflect the entanglements of racial and class mechanisms. St. Clair ultimately shows how these authors exploit the internal contradictions of dispossession. Forms of reification, St. Clair argues, are both marks of structural violence and means for being otherwise, for practicing alternative and potentiating ways of relating to housing and of building coalitions.

Continuing this vein of transfiguration, Crystal S. Rudds explores the manner in which literary representations bring to light individual and collective capacities that are typically rendered invisible by dominant discourses of urban poverty as a form of pathological failure. Rudds’s essay, “On Perspective and Value: Black Urbanism, Black Interiors, and Public Housing Fiction,” examines literary representations of one of the most recognizable, highly charged, and racialized spaces of poverty in US society—public housing, which prevailing depictions tend to render as a realm of abject Blackness, crime, and human incapacity that is effectively beyond repair or redemption. To exceed these reifying frames, Rudds contends, is a matter of both literary history and literary critical method; it requires knowing not only where to look—in this case, Frank London Brown’s novel Trumbull Park (1959) and Jasmon Drain’s short story collection Stateway’s Garden (2020), both part of a larger tradition of public housing fiction—but also how to read, in this instance, phenomenologically, through the grounded, subjective perspectives of public housing residents themselves, rather than through an exterior perspective that sees “the ghetto” as a symbol of material and cultural impoverishment. Reading public housing fiction phenomenologically, Rudds contends, makes visible what Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Black interior,” interior spaces of relation and sociality that lie beyond, and implicitly refuse and refute, the often condescending or castigating disciplinary gaze of the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, writing the social life of physical spaces—apartments, hallways, kitchens, and bedrooms—produces “a countercultural value system that speaks back to outsider rhetorical claims.” Public housing fiction offers an encounter with and an understanding of poverty, but it does so through the place- and value-making practices, relations, and struggles of residents rather than the pity, contempt, or fear of external commentators.

Together, these essays stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see. This work of reflection brings us to the art that graces this issue’s cover: Kevin Lane’s “Beats per Minute.” Lane’s painting mimics a mirror. It is an abstraction sensitively grounded in the material conditions of poverty, which have everything to do with the conditions of perspective. His inkblot technique, a paper fold (hold) that becomes a kaleidoscope, brings looking into crisis: color under duress should not be able to do that. The sheer visual force of it, its exuberance, its use of brown that fades with surprise into purple, pink, yellow, and green, all figured as a heart—to enter these pages this way is to disrupt all of poverty’s knee-jerk associations: darkness, deprivation, and so on. It is to look at vibrant forms of life and living hidden behind structures of confinement. We see wings that are more than wings, hence a heart that is more than a heart, more than what a body bears behind a cage. With Lane, as with everyone else in this volume, we mean not only to look again. We mean to look differently.

Oxford English Dictionary , “Poverty,” https://www-oed-com.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/149126?redirectedFrom=poverty#eid (accessed April 14, 2022).

A search of the New York Times reveals no coverage of Alston’s American sojourn, although the paper did cover Alston’s ensuing trip to the United Kingdom.

See Wacquant 2009 and Goldstein 2021 .

A notable exception here is the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign, which aims “to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country.” https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/ .

See Lewis 1959 , 1966 .

Salamon ( 2010 : 175) argues that poverty works to force the poor “relentlessly into the present.”

John Marsh ( 2011 : 606) notes that “American literature itself could be said to begin with the problem of poverty and inequality,” while “countless American writers . . . have at one point or another turned their thinking or their art toward the question of poverty.”

John Allen ( 2004 : 11) similarly notes that criticism on themes of homelessness has largely taken up literary romanticism or realism, categories, he argues, that should be questioned.

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Re-evaluating the “Culture of Poverty”

Despite its great wealth, the United States has long struggled with poverty. One popular theory for the paradox suggests that a “culture of poverty” prevents the poor from economic betterment despite social programs designed to assist them. The phrase was originally coined by Oscar Lewis , who believed that children growing up in poor families would learn to adapt to the values and norms that perpetuated poverty. The children would replicate these in their own lives, creating a cycle of intergenerational poverty. It wasn’t until Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous 1965 study on the black American family (often dubbed “ The Moynihan Report ”) that the “culture of poverty” idea set off a firestorm. Moynihan described the problems of inner-city black families as stemming from a “tangle of pathology,” characterized by single-mother families and unemployment. His claims were harshly criticized by many black and civil rights leaders, among others, for explaining black poverty as a product of black culture rather than deeper structural inequalities. Because of this criticism, social scientists have since generally avoided discussing cultural factors when studying poverty, though the “culture of poverty” rhetoric has remained a popular topic in public and political spheres. The debate about its relevance has re-emerged with controversial comments by politician Paul Ryan, as well as numerous editorials in the Atlantic , The New York Times, and elsewhere.

In this roundtable, we asked three renowned scholars to discuss the lasting significance of the “culture of poverty” rhetoric, and what social scientists could do to contribute to (or end) this debate. 

How has the culture of poverty debate evolved over the years?

Mario Luis Small: There has been some evolution, but it has probably been less in the political sphere than among social scientists. Political commentators seem to think of culture as the sum of people’s norms and values and of “the culture of poverty” as the norms and values that cause people to enter or remain in poverty. This model is much more common among commentators on the right than among those on the left, for whom this kind of explanation merely “blames the victims” for their problems. Both positions are quite old, dating at least to 1960s.

Few social scientists use the term “culture of poverty” in a scientific sense. Those who study poverty rarely think about cultural questions in this way, instead tending to focus on basic structural factors, such as the quality of schools or the availability of jobs, as explanations for poverty. Those who study culture—and these are largely a different group of scholars altogether—tend to think of culture in far more sophisticated and diverse ways than as the “norms and values” of a group. Few social scientists have attempted to understand poverty through these alternative conceptions. Many of those who do focus on questions such as the impact of poverty on culture or cultural practices, rather than the impact of culture on poverty.

Kaaryn Gustafson:  Early writings on the culture of poverty, for example those by Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington, suggested that the culture of poverty was an effect , namely an effect of economic and social exclusion. Those writings suggested that people who faced few economic opportunities in society grew hopeless. In many ways, the early discussions of the culture of poverty were a call for action, a demand that the United States, a country that prides itself in economic opportunity, take notice of the many who could not realize those opportunities.

In the mid-1960s, the culture of poverty became associated with African Americans living in concentrated pockets of poverty in urban areas. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), noted high rates of divorce, non-marital childbearing, and welfare use among black families in urban centers and described these families as exhibiting a “tangle of pathology.” During a radio address in 1986, then-President Ronald Reagan quipped that while a War on Poverty had been famously declared in 1964, “you could say that poverty won the war.” His reason for reaching this conclusion? He noted that a lot of families were using federal anti-poverty programs, or, in his terms, were “dependent” upon federal programs–a not-so-subtle reference to the culture of poverty.

Since then, the idea that social and economic well-being ought to be measured by how few people are using government programs and not by the well-being of American families themselves has come to guide government programs. For example, the success of the federal welfare reforms passed under President Bill Clinton has been measured by the dramatic decline in the number of families receiving cash benefits. What is forgotten is that the number of American families living in poverty has risen since the welfare reforms.

Why have culture of poverty arguments been so persistent?

Small: The notion of a “culture of poverty” remains part of the conversation for a number of reasons. Some are political. For some people, the idea that people’s poverty results from their own choices and values seems to explain a lot, regardless of whether that particular idea is actually consistent with the available evidence. The term itself, “culture of poverty,” is also broad enough that it can be taken by different people to mean different things. The term is easy to reinvent from year to year.

Mark Gould: Since the Civil Rights Movement, almost everyone in the USA has come to believe that all citizens deserve equal opportunity and most have come to believe that all have equal opportunity. Most of us believe that our values are actually implemented.

If most Americans believe that African Americans should be treated as if they are the same as whites, given equal opportunities, and if most Americans believe that poor African Americans have equal opportunities, the disproportionate failure of African Americans to “succeed” can only be attributed to traits internal to them and their communities. Logically, it does not matter on what traits we focus, but often it is a “culture of poverty” that is seen as inhibiting success, as inhibiting the inability of poor blacks to take advantage of the opportunities open to them. (I limit myself here to a discussion of African Americans.)

“Culture of poverty” arguments persist given our dominant values and our dominant social science, when they are coupled with the conviction that those values are implemented effectively—that equal opportunity exists. In consequence, it is no surprise that “culture of poverty” arguments recur over and over again; nor is it a surprise that they tend to be manifest in multiple variations, focusing on one or another “cultural” attributes.

In addition, there is apparently empirical support for “culture of poverty” arguments. African Americans do less well than otherwise comparable whites on many measures of performance; poor people do less well, by definition, economically, but they also do less well educationally and are incarcerated at higher rates (whatever their actual criminal activity). Recognizing this and thinking within the dominant values in our society, many Americans think that they are “facing facts” when invoking “culture of poverty” arguments. [T]he same thing is true of many social scientists who study poverty. Social scientists are, however, less likely to believe that equal opportunity is in place, which immunizes many of them from falling into this trap.

Gustafson:  The appeal of the “culture of poverty” is that it offers a clear explanation for poverty, an explanation that removes both individual agency and collective responsibility from the equation. This simplistic account of poverty—one that suggests that certain populations have developed settled social and economic sub-cultures outside the mainstream—blinds us from the historical contingencies and the political decisions that have led to a high rate of poverty relative to most wealthy nations. The current understanding of the culture of poverty suggests that poverty is intractable and dismisses that idea that policy changes can lower the rate of poverty in the United States or address the concentration of poverty in certain populations such as African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and recent Asian immigrants; the disabled; and the parents of young children.

How has the idea of a culture of poverty affected politics and society?

Gould:  The consequences of “culture of poverty” arguments have been disastrous. These arguments result in policies that seek to change blacks. If there is equal opportunity, their “culture of poverty,” in its various guises, means that African Americans are unable to take advantage of that opportunity.

Such arguments miss the nature and consequences of contemporary discrimination. While there is plenty of overt discrimination, disparate treatment, the more important form of discrimination in the USA today, is disparate impact. This is where ostensibly neutral structures and organizations, organizations that treat blacks and whites as if they were the same, generate adverse consequences for blacks. The consequences of “culture of poverty” arguments have been disastrous. They result in policies that seek to change blacks rather than change organizational constraints and persistent discrimination.

Think about the discussions of “acting white.” If African Americans who act black are expected to perform poorly, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and (almost) only those blacks who “act white” perform well. When blacks and whites perform different cultures, act out different cultural identities, there is no reason to think that the differences are intrinsically relevant to educational performance; however, they may well affect performance when taken in conjunction with how students who perform these cultural differences are regarded and dealt with in organizations. African Americans may have a different subculture than whites, but if they perform less well than whites, it is not because of that subculture, but because of how they are processed in organizations because of it.

This discussion is, of course, too simple. It ignores the structurally-different positions blacks and whites occupy in American society, but perhaps it suggests that just because black culture correlates with “deficient performance” does not mean that black culture is deficient. We have learned to see black culture as deficient, as something we ought not to value, because of “culture of poverty” arguments, because our commonsense understanding precludes our comprehending that the problem is not intrinsic to the culture, but to the way bearers of that culture are constrained organizationally.

Gustafson:  The pathologizing of the poor, the popular belief that poverty is a result of individuals’ failings to exercise personal responsibility, and the belief that government programs are by nature wasteful and breed dependency remain widespread and influential today. This perpetuates the illusion that those people —the poor people who lack a real work ethic—are poor for a reason, but that others, particularly hardworking members of the middle class, are invulnerable to economic risk so long as they are working hard enough. The persistence of the culture of poverty theory also distracts the public and lawmakers from celebrating the policy decisions that have been successful in ameliorating poverty. As a result, popular and governmental commitments to fighting poverty are slight.

Does talk about the US as a post-racial society influence the rhetoric around the culture of poverty?

Gould:  Before the Civil Rights Movement, when discrimination against African-Americans was overt, liberal-minded people could explain differential performance between blacks and whites as due to overt discrimination.

In post-Civil Rights Movement America, which some erroneously see as a post-racial society, the logic of this argument changes fundamentally. In the absence of overt discrimination… liberals either have to think social structurally about the nature of discrimination, or they fall into “culture of poverty” arguments. Likewise, social scientists, even when claiming to eschew “culture of poverty” arguments, fall into them.

There is a paradox here. Participants in the Civil Rights Movement fought for the inclusion of African Americans, and derivatively others (within the American Creed), for their inclusion as full citizens. The success of the Movement, the inclusion of African Americans, including the poor, within the egalitarian values dominant in American society, and given the reality of African Americans performing less well than whites in many areas, has resulted in the construction of a New Racism. This New Racism does not result primarily in invidious biological distinctions between African Americans and whites as explanations for the “facts,” but instead in the characterization of African Americans as performing less well than whites (including in their concentrated poverty) because of their “cultural attributes.”

What is missing from the current public discourse about the culture of poverty? What can sociologists contribute to the discussion of poverty policies?

Gustafson: Social scientists concerned about social inequality should turn their attention to poverty, especially child poverty. Scholars can play a role in informing students and the public of the very fact that child poverty is widespread, can take opportunities to study the long-term effects of child poverty on families and society, and can use their skills to study the effectiveness of particular policies in reducing child poverty. More work needs to be done in tracing and examining the successes of government led-anti-poverty efforts, from the drop in poverty among elderly Americans to the documented, long-term effects of Head Start programs.

We tend to focus on failures and ignore successes. Sociologists keen on historical and comparative work might promote awareness that the United States is an outlier and that policies common in other countries—universal health care, paid family leave for workers with young children, and universal child allowances—are effective in reducing poverty there. We tend to focus on failures and ignore successes. Sociologists might promote awareness that the United States is an outlier, that policies common in other countries—universal health care, paid family leave for workers with young children, and universal child allowances—are effective in reducing poverty.

Finally, qualitative sociologists can serve an important function in carefully and critically documenting the experiences of the poor, particularly because there is little in the popular media about the experiences of the poor and poor people have little political access in a country where money is speech. While most Americans are overexposed to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, we rarely hear about how poverty affects daily lives and how it limits choices and life chances.

Small:  I think three things are missing:

First, a broader understanding of the many ways that anthropologists and others who study culture (but not poverty) have conceptualized culture, its impact on behavior, its response to intervention, and its limitations as an explanatory factor.

Second, better data.

Third, more dispassionate analysis.

The one advantage of the new generation of scholars working on these questions is that they were not part of the highly acrimonious debate over culture during the 1960s and 1970s. The debate was so contentious and the rhetoric so heated that it has been difficult to address even basic empirical questions from a scientific perspective. [Now] there is space for a new round of clear, disinterested research that can illuminate much more than the old models have found. A lot of people assume that social scientists who examine the relationship between culture and poverty must have a particular political agenda. This shows how far we need to go.

For example, a lot of people assume that social scientists who examine the relationship between culture and poverty must have a particular political agenda. Some even believe that studying culture necessarily implies a particular political posture. Yet notice that entire academic disciplines—most notably, anthropology—are fundamentally devoted to the study of culture. The fact that anyone believes that studying culture means rehashing that old idea shows how far we need to go.

Gould:  There are a number of conceptual distinctions we need to make before we can formulate effective policies. So far, I have been using the term “culture” as if we knew what it meant. In reality, “culture of poverty” arguments are a hodgepodge that confuse much more than they illuminate.

Implicit in many “culture of poverty” discussions is a notion of social values. Social values regulate what is desirable; they constitute obligations. If folks do not find a good job desirable, if they do not feel the obligation to work, they will not seek out jobs when the opportunity to do so arises. If students do not value education, do not feel an obligation to do well in school, they will not orient themselves to educational opportunities. In contrast to these contentions, there is a lot of evidence that inner-city blacks share the dominant values of USA society, including the positive evaluation of hard work and a commitment to education. If this is correct, we would expect them, for example, to seek work when it is available, and they do so. Implicit in many “culture of poverty” discussions is a notion of social values. Social values regulate what is desirable; they constitute obligations. There is a lot of evidence that inner-city blacks share the dominant values of hard work and a commitment to education.

The notion of an “oppositional culture” is important here. Often, an oppositional culture is understood to inhibit intrinsically educational or occupational success; it may be seen, for example, as devaluing educational success. It is treated as a “culture of poverty.” If, instead, black culture inhibits success not because of its inherent traits (it is not the case that poor blacks devalue educational success), but because of the way a black man wearing baggy jeans is treated, the question becomes why many African-Americans, unlike some immigrant groups, are unwilling to give up their culture and their cultural performances, unwilling to “act white.” The answer, I think, is because for African-Americans, this cultural identity and the performances that actualize it (in dress, music, language, speech act and style) are crucial; they represent, if in a form more fractured than previously, the collective solidarity that has enabled African-Americans to endure and to excel culturally. This is an oppositional culture, but only in the sense that African-Americans do not want to sacrifice it. As an oppositional culture, it is fully compatible with the values dominant in United States society.

Thus, while the black subculture is not a “culture of poverty”—it does not inhibit success due to its inherent attributes—it may inhibit success, due to how people who share it are considered in the larger society. This distinction, between a “culture” that inhibits success because of qualities inherent to it (e.g., for example, not valuing hard work), and a culture that inhibits success, not because of its inherent qualities, but because of the (racist) orientation of a dominant (and sometimes others in the subordinate) group towards people within that culture, is crucial, but too often missing from discussions of culture and poverty.

If this analysis makes sense, our concern should be to construct opportunities for the inner-city poor to succeed, ladders of achievement that facilitate their success in school, that make it possible for them to find jobs that will support their families in dignity, and to reconstruct organizations in a way that makes it possible for African-Americans to share in organizational governance so that African-American cultural identities might be actualized to the benefit of all Americans.

Mark Gould is in the sociology department at Haverford College. A social theorist, one of his areas of interest is  the nature of contemporary racism, culture, opportunity structures, and poverty in the inner-city US.

Kaaryn Gustafson is at the University of California–Irvine’s School of Law, where she is also the co-director of the Center on Law, Equality, and Race. She is the author of  Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty .

Mario Luis Small is a sociologist at Harvard University. He studies  urban neighborhoods, social networks, inequality, organizational capacity, and the sociology of knowledge.

Should the U.S. provide reparations for slavery and Jim Crow? | Complete World News — May 6, 2016

[…] African-Americans fall at the bottom of America’s racial and social hierarchy. That reality has routinely and popularly been explained as a result of their inferiority. Initially the claim was rooted in genetics. Today it is based primarily on a theory of cultural deficiency. […]

#Should the U.S. provide reparations for slavery and Jim Crow? | THE PRESS — May 7, 2016

Should the us provide reparations for slavery and jim crow — may 10, 2016, should the u.s. provide reparations for slavery and jim crow - — may 27, 2016, siddhartha — october 31, 2016.

Sir, Perhaps you do agree that we are least concerned or ashamed of our deep rooted corruption, degraded Environment, dirty Politics, poor public work place, non-stop consumption of Social Space. Most of us (of all communities - Tamil/Bengali) in this Indian sub-continent are infected by ‘Culture of Poverty’ (Oscar Lewis), irrespective of religion/sex, dwells in pavement or apartment. Hopelessness syndrome is one of the prime factors causing our harsh, indecent living. The common practice of ours - parenting only by self-procreation (animal instinct/cheap consumerism), deliberately deprive to all our children the basic rights of a dignified living. Force the entire generation survive within a society where quality Space is almost nil. All of us do nurture Poverty right inside our own home. If freedom is desired sincerely from the very vicious cycle of poverty has to change lifestyle - restrict ourselves from procreation to any child by any means (discontinue the corruption legacy) till the society improves, co-parenting (adopt) children those are born in extreme poverty, instead. Something needs to begin somewhere to ignite a movement ‘Production of Space’ (Henri Lefebvre) to establish hope/love, a participation to take control over the present situation. Decent & efficient Politics would certainly come up. +91 9051147375.

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Kaaryn Gustafson is at the University of California--Irvine's School of Law, where she is also the co-director of the Center on Law, Equality, and Race. She is the author of  Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty .

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Guest Essay

Many Patients Don’t Survive End-Stage Poverty

By Lindsay Ryan

Dr. Ryan is an associate physician at the University of California, San Francisco, department of medicine.

He has an easy smile, blue eyes and a life-threatening bone infection in one arm. Grateful for treatment, he jokes with the medical intern each morning. A friend, a fellow doctor, is supervising the man’s care. We both work as internists at a public hospital in the medical safety net , a loose term for institutions that disproportionately serve patients on Medicaid or without insurance. You could describe the safety net in another way, too, as a place that holds up a mirror to our nation.

What is reflected can be difficult to face. It’s this: After learning that antibiotics aren’t eradicating his infection and amputation is the only chance for cure, the man withdraws, says barely a word to the intern. When she asks what he’s thinking, his reply is so tentative that she has to prompt him to repeat himself. Now with a clear voice, he tells her that if his arm must be amputated, he doesn’t want to live. She doesn’t understand what it’s like to survive on the streets, he continues. With a disability, he’ll be a target — robbed, assaulted. He’d rather die, unless, he says later, someone can find him a permanent apartment. In that case, he’ll proceed with the amputation.

The psychiatrists evaluate him. He’s not suicidal. His reasoning is logical. The social workers search for rooms, but in San Francisco far more people need long-term rehousing than the available units can accommodate. That the medical care the patient is receiving exceeds the cost of a year’s rent makes no practical difference. Eventually, the palliative care doctors see him. He transitions to hospice and dies.

A death certificate would say he died of sepsis from a bone infection, but my friend and I have a term for the illness that killed him: end-stage poverty. We needed to coin a phrase because so many of our patients die of the same thing.

Safety-net hospitals and clinics care for a population heavily skewed toward the poor, recent immigrants and people of color. The budgets of these places are forever tight . And anyone who works in them could tell you that illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies.

Neglecting this fact can make otherwise meticulous care fail. That’s why, on one busy night, a medical student on my team is scouring websites and LinkedIn. She’s not shirking her duties. In fact, she’s one of the best students I’ve ever taught.

This week she’s caring for a retired low-wage worker with strokes and likely early dementia who was found sleeping in the street. He abandoned his rent-controlled apartment when electrolyte and kidney problems triggered a period of severe confusion that has since been resolved. Now, with little savings, he has nowhere to go. A respite center can receive patients like him when it has vacancies. The alternative is a shelter bed. He’s nearly 90 years old.

Medical textbooks usually don’t discuss fixing your patient’s housing. They seldom include making sure your patient has enough food and some way to get to a clinic. But textbooks miss what my med students don’t: that people die for lack of these basics.

People struggle to keep wounds clean. Their medications get stolen. They sicken from poor diet, undervaccination and repeated psychological trauma. Forced to focus on short-term survival and often lacking cellphones, they miss appointments for everything from Pap smears to chemotherapy. They fall ill in myriad ways — and fall through the cracks in just as many.

Early in his hospitalization, our retired patient mentions a daughter, from whom he’s been estranged for years. He doesn’t know any contact details, just her name. It’s a long shot, but we wonder if she can take him in.

The med student has one mission: find her.

I love reading about medical advances. I’m blown away that with a brain implant, a person who’s paralyzed can move a robotic arm and that surgeons recently transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a man on dialysis. This is the best of American innovation and cause for celebration. But breakthroughs like these won’t fix the fact that despite spending the highest percentage of its G.D.P. on health care among O.E.C.D. nations, the United States has a life expectancy years lower than comparable nations—the U.K. and Canada— and a rate of preventable death far higher .

The solution to that problem is messy, incremental, protean and inglorious. It requires massive investment in housing, addiction treatment, free and low-barrier health care and social services. It calls for just as much innovation in the social realm as in the biomedical, for acknowledgment that inequities — based on race, class, primary language and other categories — mediate how disease becomes embodied. If health care is interpreted in the truest sense of caring for people’s health, it must be a practice that extends well beyond the boundaries of hospitals and clinics.

Meanwhile, on the ground, we make do. Though the social workers are excellent and try valiantly, there are too few of them , both in my hospital and throughout a country that devalues and underfunds their profession. And so the medical student spends hours helping the family of a newly arrived Filipino immigrant navigate the health insurance system. Without her efforts, he wouldn’t get treatment for acute hepatitis C. Another patient, who is in her 20s, can’t afford rent after losing her job because of repeated hospitalizations for pancreatitis — but she can’t get the pancreatic operation she needs without a home in which to recuperate. I phone an eviction defense lawyer friend; the young woman eventually gets surgery.

Sorting out housing and insurance isn’t the best use of my skill set or that of the medical students and residents, but our efforts can be rewarding. The internet turned up the work email of the daughter of the retired man. Her house was a little cramped with his grandchildren, she said, but she would make room. The medical student came in beaming.

In these cases we succeeded; in many others we don’t. Safety-net hospitals can feel like the rapids foreshadowing a waterfall, the final common destination to which people facing inequities are swept by forces beyond their control. We try our hardest to fish them out, but sometimes we can’t do much more than toss them a life jacket or maybe a barrel and hope for the best.

I used to teach residents about the principles of internal medicine — sodium disturbances, delirium management, antibiotics. I still do, but these days I also teach about other topics — tapping community resources, thinking creatively about barriers and troubleshooting how our patients can continue to get better after leaving the supports of the hospital.

When we debrief, residents tell me how much they struggle with the moral dissonance of working in a system in which the best medicine they can provide often falls short. They’re right about how much it hurts, so I don’t know exactly what to say to them. Perhaps I never will.

Lindsay Ryan is an associate physician at the University of California, San Francisco, department of medicine.

Source photographs by Bettmann and Fred W. McDarrah via Getty Images.

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In this powerful, digressive book, the award-winning writer and poet considers basketball’s greats, the struggles of Black men and the ‘emotional politics of place’

T he literary stamina of Hanif Abdurraqib is impressive. He is the author of two poetry collections and three nonfiction books, plus countless articles, reviews and essays as a music journalist and culture critic for the New York Times, among others.

He is also much lauded. Earlier this month he was announced as one of the recipients of a Windham-Campbell prize, and in 2021 was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” as well as the Gordon Burn prize for A Little Devil in America : In Praise of Black Performance – a book in which all his talents came together. Structurally inventive, it is a well-balanced mix of memoir and ruminations on Black American music, culture and history. Some of the essays are built on loose poetic forms and the result is audacious, energetic and playful (and sometimes painful), conjuring the feeling of a writer running for his life, running out of time, running circles around his traumas and joys. There’s Always This Year : On Basketball and Ascension is about “the emotional politics of place” and what it means to honour (and sometimes be honoured by) our home towns when we leave, and the demons we may have to reckon with when we return.

His gaze is turned upwards towards the gods and kings who are basketball players at the top of their game – men such as LeBron James and Michael Jordan , who are ordained on the court, their image pasted on the walls of bedrooms and prison cells, their performances defying the laws of what is and isn’t possible for mere mortals.

As they were born and raised in Ohio a year apart, Abdurraqib blends his own biography with that of James, contrasting the star’s rise with his own less obvious ascent. Abdurraqib was at one point “unhoused” and jailed for petty theft, while the teenage James drove to school in expensive cars even before he made it to the NBA. For him, basketball was “his way out the hood”, while Abdurraqib’s writing talent and emotional intelligence allow him to reframe his circumstances and shortcomings, to honour and grieve them in equal measure.

There’s Always This Year stands in opposition to disappearing into depression by revising the rules for Black men, whether they are exceptional or not. Abdurraqib’s approach is at times whimsical and meandering, at others sober and reflective, but almost always self-aware. The American dream promises material rewards for those who strive and hustle hard but, conveniently, doesn’t factor in poverty, race, gender, sexuality, education, disability and neurodiversity, and how they may affect your rise or fall.

I read this book while in ascension myself, on a plane to New Orleans, where I first attended an NBA basketball game. There I sat facing the shiny maple wood floor of the Smoothie King Center, home of the New Orleans Pelicans, struck by the athleticism of a sport I knew little of but had read many poems about – by Terrance Hayes and Inua Ellams , Jim Carroll and Natalie Diaz . Now Abdurraqib, too, captures the experience in the heightened mode of the poet. So much so that by the time my plane descended, I felt invigorated, as if I had been called to reckon with my own gentrified home town and the nostalgia and survivor’s guilt I feel for having left it, despite sometimes longing to return.

There’s Always This Year also contains the stories of basketball’s forgotten players, such as Kenny Gregory and Estaban Weaver, the one-time rising stars who fell by the wayside. I felt their tales as powerfully as those of the anointed kings, because Abdurraqib has found an entertaining way to make the act of watching sport akin to witnessing miracles. If you are looking to read something that “pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere”, I recommend this title.

Raymond Antrobus is a poet. His next book, Signs, Music (Picador), is out in September and available for preorder

• Autobiography and memoir
• The Observer

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