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Cycles of Poverty In a world that's broken, the brokenness of any one system reinforces the brokenness of another. Consider the chart below. It's a schematic picture of some of the main themes that recur, again and again, when people look at urban poverty. I've drawn the chart to show an interaction between the external and the internal - the external systems that tend to push people into poverty, or prevent them from escaping - and the internal culture of poverty, the picture of the world that many who are poor end up telling themselves. I haven't drawn the chart to say that change is impossible. Exactly the reverse. I think every element on this chart can be changed. And - because all of them can be changed - all of them need to be part of an agenda for change. A future that's not broken arises from an agenda that reworks each of these areas. |
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Start here in the lower left. Left to its own, the housing market tilts toward homebuyers with money. Without public guidance, builders in a hot market will leave lower income homebuyers behind. When they do build for the less prosperous end of the market, they continue the patterns of ghettoization that have been this society's norm since way back in the days of Jim Crow. What happens to children in low income families? They end up living in low income neighborhoods. The culture of poverty is not a culture of middle class ambition. For an excellent description of the inner workings of this culture, find yourself a copy of Ruby Payne's excellent book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. When you're poor and on the edge, barely scraping by, how you socialize with others counts for a lot, but being goal-driven is just not on the radar screen. Follow the path of the arrows to the upper left. School systems know how to educate middle class children. On the whole, however, they've yet to figure out a successful formula for educating large numbers of low income children. There are exceptions - principals whose schools perform extremely well in educating children from poor families - but these successes are generally ignored by the education establishment as a whole. So children finish school with much less learning than they need. The job market is not kind to lower income workers. The minimum wage has been stuck for about a decade now. The bottom end of the labor market is filled with low-paying jobs. The weaker a youngster's education, the worse he or she will do in the hunt for a decent job. How are young men to earn enough money to be good husbands and good fathers when schools don't educate them and employers pay them so poorly? It's not a family-friendly situation. And the bias of the welfare system, over the years, has been helping the neediest, and the single mom is defined as being more needy than a married couple. Creating an economic incentive not to get married may not seem like a smart idea, but if single parent families in black America was the public policy goal behind the welfare system, then one must say, with more than a little cynicism, that welfare has been a screaming success. Recall the figures I cited on a previous webpage - here in the Annapolis area, roughly seventy percent of all the African-American households with children are single parent households. Single parent households are much more likely to be poor than two parent households. Which means the teenage girl who has a baby without being married will almost surely end up just as ghettoized as her mom was. There are any number of influences not shown on this chart, and I welcome feedback on how it might be changed. Next, let's think through the same cycle from a success perspective. |
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Imagine a public school system that's cracked the puzzle. Imagine a public school system that's redesigned the way it does business. Imagine a public school system that educates virtually all its students, even students from low income neighborhoods. Imagine these children taking the bull by the horns, taking their studies seriously, graduating from high school, and, in many cases, moving on to college for additional years of schooling. Imagine a labor market that pays a reasonable wage even to entry level employees. Imagine a labor market that's capable of sharing America's prosperity with all the American workforce. Imagine young men who might have fallen by the wayside now earning enough to think of themselves as breadwinners. Imagine young women looking at young men with more optimism and pride. Imagine a supporting culture. A culture - even among the poor - that endorses education. That's excited by the jobs people can hold. That believes, once again, in the value of the two-parent family. That turns its back on drugs, that turns its back on petty crime. Imagine a social policy that provides incentives for marriage instead of incentives to those who are unmarried. Imagine a marriage bonus in the tax system for lower income couples. With significant tax breaks during the first two, or three, or four years of marriage. Imagine a society in which the number of single parent households starts shrinking dramatically, while the number of two parent households grows. And imagine a housing market that's designed to provide affordable housing in all neighborhoods. Imagine the slow disappearance of neighborhoods people call "bad neighborhoods," the slow disappearance of neighborhoods that people call ghettoes. Imagine towns and cities and suburbs whose older neighborhoods have been restored, gentrified just a bit, turned into vigorously healthy mixed income neighborhoods. When we imagine this - when we feel the contrast between America as we'd truly like it to be, and America as it is now - we realize that Jim Crow is still alive and well in the American city. The name is no longer called out. The White Only signs have been taken off the restroom doors. Instead, the implicit White Only signs are the real estate signs, the For Sale signs, in suburban neighborhoods. The prices are high enough to exclude lower income minority families just as effectively as old fashioned Jim Crow used to do. No, today's practices aren't called Jim Crow anymore. But many of them still bear the Jim Crow imprint. And when we imagine an America that's truly moved beyond its Jim Crow past, we imagine an America whose housing markets are fair, whose schools educate, whose labor market pays well, whose family support policies reinforce two parent families, and whose ethnic groups endorse a middle class commitment to working hard, being good neighbors, and raising kids in two-parent families. The first step is the hardest, I think. Being brave enough to name a truly decent vision. For our housing markets. For our schools. For our labor market. For our families. For our ethnic cultures. And owning this vision. Making it ours. In our hearts. In our heads. In our guts. Committing to it as our understanding of what it means to be an American, or a citizen of any country that shares the same values. If we don't own the vision, for ourselves, nobody else can own it for us. Once we do own the vision, though, nobody can take it from us. It becomes a part of who we are, as individuals. It becomes a part of who we are as a culture. It becomes a part of what our country is becoming. America is on the move to becoming the country we want it to be, once we - one person at a time - commit ourselves to a clear vision of what a decent America is capable of being. Steve Johnson |