Hunger Awareness Month: The Myth of the Culture of Poverty

Those who go hungry in this country do so for a very simple reason: it’s isn’t famine or war – it’s poverty.

Today, more than 46 million Americans live in poverty. In Allegheny County, about 156,000 people, including roughly 42,000 children, live at or below the poverty line according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

How does one then explain the lack of widespread outrage that in a country as rich as ours one in five children live in households facing hunger? The justification for policies that either fail to address – or worse, perpetuate – hunger in this country has to do with hard feelings towards those who are poor, blaming them for their own poverty.

The term “culture of poverty” was coined in 1959 by the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his book Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. Lewis contended that poor people share a subculture of deviant values as well as individual characteristics, such as a propensity for domestic violence and substance abuse, a lack of interest in education, and no work ethic.

Although Lewis’s conclusions were based on a very small population of slum dwellers living in a third world country, over time decision-makers and elected officials began to generalize the notion of a “culture of poverty” as being applicable to all low-income people.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Johnson administration and a chief architect of LBJ’s “War on Poverty”, introduced the concept of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a report entitled “The Negro Family: the Case for National Action“. Moynihan’s study blamed the predominance of out-of-wedlock births in the African-American community as the cause of black poverty and inadvertently perpetuated the stereotype of immoral low-income blacks.

In the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan further promoted the vilification and scapegoating of low-income African-Americans with his anecdotal stump speeches about the sexually promiscuous and public assistance-dependent “welfare queen”.

However, studies conducted over the years have concluded that values and behaviors among the poor vary just as much as they vary between the poor and the wealthy. In other words: there is no such thing as a “culture of poverty“.

Let’s take a hard look at the basic assertions underlying the supposed “culture of poverty” :

That all said, does growing up poor cause problems for children that persist to later in life? Undoubtedly, as study after study shows.

And those problems get passed on to future generations. The best predictor of whether someone will be poor is whether, through no fault of their own, they were born to a poor family. For them, there is no American Dream.

The real problem is not a “culture of poverty” but our overall culture of classism – the discrimination against an individual or group based on their education, occupation, income and wealth – or lack thereof. Classism leads to a society set up to benefit the privileged at the expense of the less so.

Current near historic levels of income and wealth inequality are neither accidental nor the natural outcome of a capitalist economy – they are a direct result of public policies designed to benefit the rich.

Only by supporting policies that reduce income inequality – such as raising the minimum wage, protecting the formation of labor unions, protecting the funding of and access to programs that help lift people out of poverty, making our tax system more progressive – will we be able to end poverty and with it, hunger.

Be a part of the organization working to end poverty and hunger!