Is being poor a culture, or just a number?

[imomus]

I found this article by Walter Benn Michaels (he's an English prof at the University of Illinois) in the current London Review of Books very interesting, because it sums up concisely and eloquently some basic reservations I've tried to express myself about identity politics, about equality of opportunity (rather than outcome), and about the PC culture of respect. It also challenges some of my arguments about poverty, arguments I haven't resolved yet. Is poverty a culture of value in itself, or is it just a lack of money? Are there different poverties around the world, or just one?

Walter Benn Michaels is basically recapping, in the article, the arguments in his book The Trouble with Diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality. I want to sum up some of what I thought were his best points in a sort of PowerPoint presentation:

1. Someone called Gregory Marton makes a good general summary on the Amazon page: "This book is aimed at drawing distinctions between subjective matters of identity and objective matters of income and beliefs. Each identity is as good as any other, but being poor is worse than being rich. Michaels accuses the left of having lost its focus on objective equality, to the point of glorifying poverty."

2. After reading the article, I summarised it myself in an email to Lynsey Hanley: "Walter Benn Michaels valuably distinguishes between race and class, and says that one requires us to discriminate, the other requires that we don't. Race, in other words, leads to a discourse of culture, identity and diversity (the anthropological discourse), whereas class leads to a discourse of equality and therefore of the eradication of material differences. The only problem is, I'm not sure that class isn't also culture. What do you think? Is being working class just a lack of money, opportunity, etc, or is it a culture? Or both (a culture based on lack of money, opportunity, etc)?"

3. Gregory Marton again: "Treating poverty as a matter of identity is, according to Michaels, a pernicious strategy for willfully ignoring the problem that increasingly many people are increasingly poor, and have less and less opportunity to move out of poverty. Moreover, by fighting battles of identity -- WalMart and Wall Street women each making some percent less than the men -- we may ignore the fact that all the WalMart workers make a hundredth of what the Wall Street workers make. He does not argue against fighting injustices of identity so much as argue for prioritizing and looking at the problems in perspective. The book draws sharp distinctions between the kinds of arguments that make sense for identities and those that make sense for wealth and ideology."

4. A blog report on Michaels' book: "Nobody claims "poor" as an identity... You can claim any number of racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic identities when job hunting, but you can never simply state that you're poor, really poor."

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5. Diversity is good when it's cultural, bad when it's economic. In the C-Span video above, Michaels puts it like this: "We don't want to just appreciate diversity, we also want -- where it's appropriate -- to minimize diversity. Because after all diversity with regards to money is just a word for inequality; some people have more, some people have less."

6. From the LRB article: "My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity."

7. Celebrating diversity is now our way of accepting inequality. There are left neoliberals as well as right neoliberals: "Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it. The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt."



8. The rise in inequality has -- suspiciously -- gone hand-in-hand with the fall in prejudice: "Increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism."



9. "Even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality... a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics."

10. "The supposed left has turned into something like the human resource department of the right, concerned to make sure that women of the upper middle class have the same privileges as the men." Or as Alan Wolfe put it in an otherwise scathing review in Slate, it's "as if the ideal society were one in which both rich black kids and rich white kids could attend the same elite college".

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11. From Michaels' LRB review: "In a society like Britain, whose GINI coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is the highest in the EU, the ambition to eliminate racial disparities rather than income inequality itself functions as a form of legitimation rather than as a critique. Those writing in this collection understand the ‘re-emergence of class’ not as a function of the increasing injustice of class (when Thatcher took office, the GINI score was 0.25; now it’s 0.36, the highest the UK has ever recorded) but as a function of the increasing injustice of ‘classism’. What outrages them, in other words, is not the fact of class difference but the ‘scorn’ and ‘contempt’ with which the lower class is treated."

12. "What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’." But "it’s hard to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for tracksuits and gold chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by [low-paying] jobs."

13. This seems to me to relate both to yesterday's Richard Hoggart quotes about juke-box boys in milk bars -- Hoggart seemed to propose working-classness as a choice between two cultures, a benign traditional English one and a glitzy imported meretricious American one -- and to the entry the other day about Progress versus diversity. Presumably -- since his argument is entirely posited on the separability of economic progress arguments from cultural diversity arguments -- Michaels would really hate my idea of "diversity-as-progress"; that "diversity do the work of progress by allowing many different systems to co-exist". Because, of course, allowing different systems to co-exist means allowing different levels of income to co-exist.

14. It's interesting that Michaels' 2006 book The Shape of the Signifier makes the case for re-instating the ideology of the author's intentions at a time when questions of identity have become the primary concern; it "anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe." You may remember that my justification of diversity-as-progress specifically invoked the Intentional Fallacy -- the idea that it's wrong to pay too much attention to a writer's intentions (or, on a broader level, a politician's). Human fallibility, I argued on Tuesday, makes diversity the best guarantor of progress. It's Friday.

Comments

class: still the dirty little word in america

[(Anonymous)]

if you help the poor, you're called a saint; if you ask why they're poor, you're called a communist.

and finally, hopefully someone (or sire momus) can add a link to the "homelessness chic" entry from a while back. pertinent to this stuff, i'd say. in the case of that entry, it was: aestheticize their (the poor's) style, but don't ask why they're poor.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The famous Chinese Zen master Tengetsu of the T'ang dynasty once said "Poverty is your treasure". Not only is he extolling the Buddhist virtue of non-attachment but he's hinting at the benefits of learning to adapt to and accept life at its most challenging.

One thing I've never seen eye-to-eye with you on is your unwavering belief that people shall and should gauge their intrinsic value by comparing their lives to the lives of others. Your belief that contentment in life basically boils down to keeping up with the Joneses. I understand that this belief of yours stems from your Marxist coloured perception of the world, and yet ironically there's something inescapably bourgeois about it all -- that materialism is happiness. "I'm not equal enough, I'm not happy" is just another version of "I'm not rich enough, I'm not happy".

[(Anonymous)]

That's not a belief, it's a basic fact of human life. People (at least un-enlightened non-Buddhists) are unhappy when their neighbors have more than they do. This has been proven to occur across different cultures and income levels. But you're right; it's both bourgeois (the abnormal person's word for 'normal') and inescapable.

[lazy-leoboiko.livejournal.com]

The controversy seems to me from the fact that there’s poverty, and then there’s poverty. Surely starvation and malnutrition obliterate all thinking about «culture».

Let’s put this in another way: is poverty desirable? Obviously no one wants starvation-poverty. But, in fact, some people do eschew money to a lesser degree — think of simple life movements, of religious communities, downshifting, the old beats and hippies, the art people who voluntarily stay away from class-changing jobs. I don’t think anyone would have trouble in letting voluntary poverty be called cultural diversity. The trouble is, of course, that most poor people — even SUV-poor, not food-poor — would like to be rich.

[(Anonymous)]

I think Michaels' valid point is that perhaps we've let our campaigning for diversity get in the way of our campaigning for equality. However, I don't agree with the implication that the two are somehow at odds.

Seeing as we're not gettng an equal society overnight, I don't see how it's an obstacle to any cause to accept and respect (and admire? adopt?) the culture of the low classes. I do believe there are certain valuable things to be learnt from the low class, which have perhaps stemmed from their economic conditions but which could be adapted to new, better conditions. Besides the unattachment mentioned above, a culture of saving would be a good antidote to the extreme consumist societies. Not to mention the romantic "working class hero" idea which has been lost to extreme formalism in elite art.

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

"we may ignore the fact that all the WalMart workers make a hundredth of what the Wall Street workers make"

Which gets to a question that seems to come up often in discussions about "social justice": should everyone make the same amount of money regardless of what they do? It's easy to say yes and then promptly feel all warm and fuzzy about yourself, as often seems to happen in discussions about "social justice." But should you say yes? Should, for instance, a hipster bartender in some hipster bar earn as much as a school janitor or a trash collector?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

"In a society like Britain, whose GINI coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is the highest in the EU..."

With the exception of Poland, Lithuania and Portugal, according to this map (http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/04/income-inequality-in-europe.html).

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

The definition of "working class" in Britain certainly seems cultural, and loosely if at all correlated to wealth. (A multi-millionaire owner of a chain of building firms or a university professor could claim to be "working class", by virtue of having grown up in the East End/Salford/the Gorbals/wherever, coming from a family that followed a football team for generations, eating pies and mash before it became acceptable for the middle classes, &c.). Class in Britain (or at least in England) is a somewhat vestigial system of signifiers which used to indicate one's wealth, level of education and breeding, but now are less significant in this respect. Of course, a lot of these traditional working-class signifiers became valuable tokens of "authenticity" to be consumed by affluent "white" people (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com), while the British working classes (or, some would say, the underclass) looked to stereotypes of (largely Black and Hispanic) American proletarian culture (the gold chains, the wholesale appropriation of "gangsta" archetypes).

Or, to paraphrase a Cat And Girl (http://www.catandgirl.com) comic from some years ago, class is about how much money your grandparents had.

how timely...

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

GA Cohen obit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/10/ga-cohen-obituary

Re: how timely...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

a good case can be made for saying that unequal distribution destroys, rather than enhances, freedom, and that liberty actually requires equality, and therefore redistribution

Why do I only hear about this guy when he dies? It's a media conspiracy!

Let them eat books!

[(Anonymous)]

Doesn't it boil down to education? Read somewhere that inequality in education is terrible and getting ever worse in GB.

Educationalism and lazism

[(Anonymous)]

A Devil's advocate writes: factors involved in diversity (race, class) are fixed whereas the factors involved in equality (study, choose a lucrative career, work at it) are fluid. Of course society spends more time on the former. Regarding the latter it can only offer the opportunity. It can't force people to study law, or make the best decisions in their business.

To bring equality into the same arena as diversity is to say that stupidity and sloth are now -isms like racism and sexism. So companies can't apply educationalism when they hire, nor can they tick people off for lazism!

Re: Educationalism and lazism

[imomus.livejournal.com]

the factors involved in equality (study, choose a lucrative career, work at it) are fluid

Well, firstly, you put class and race together on the "diversity" side, which Michaels absolutely doesn't do -- he thinks class is determined by money (or lack of it). But secondly I doubt he or anyone leftish would ever agree that equality / inequality is determined voluntarily, via hard work or laziness. That's an optimistically meritocratic view (which is maybe why you called it devil's advocacy!). All studies show that social mobility in societies like the US and the UK is falling, and that your class status is determined, above all, by the class status of your parents. No matter how hard they work, or how lazy they are (George W. Bush), the majority of people will retain the class status of their parents. Equality of opportunity is a mirage.

[(Anonymous)]

What about the exemplary effect of diversity? Sure, letting a few women or ethnic minority people join the corporate or academic elite is not going to change the fact that there's an elite. But people's possibilities are also circumscribed by what they think their possibilities are. If it no longer looks weird to be both black and a professor or board member, then that may have a knock-on effect on how people perceive their possibilities.

I'd be interested to know your position on race- or gender-based positive discrimination.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not in favour of advancing certain categories of people "just to make up the numbers" (ie the Gorilla Girls and their quota-based art protests) regardless of ability.

I am in favour of Prof Macfarlane's description of justice systems which take off their blindfolds and judge according to context, circumstances, size, means, and social role (I think this is called "rohannon" law).

I agree with Michaels that positive discrimination is a cosmetic sticking plaster and in fact just ends up legitimising the class inequalities we have. You're right to talk about it in terms of an "exemplary effect" and people "thinking" there are possibilities, and what it "looks like". Obama being president makes it "look like" black people in general and en masse in America can do anything; they can't. Again, a mirage, unless you work on making all outcomes more equal.

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

interesting stuff.

"When you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity."

So it's about alibis and excuses - only they don't feel like alibis and excuses because it's 'cultural' -and I suppose he would define 'culture' as something neo-liberals do habitually and semi-unconsciously rather than conspiratorially.

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

That Stump record cover always makes me think of this, from Marvell's Upon Appleton House:

But now the Salmon-Fishers moist
Their Leathern Boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in Shoes,
Have shod their Heads in their Canoos.
How Tortoise like, but not so slow,
These rational Amphibii go?
Let's in: for the dark Hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Before the 80s the masses mostly worked in mass production - factories, coal mines etc. I'm not going to romanticize those jobs. But one effect of having large numbers of working class people gathered together in a single factory was class solidarity. That's what made mass trades unions possible. Working class whites could certainly be racist towards black and Asian immigrants. But working together in one huge factory probably softened the racism. Collective bargaining sought to raise wages for all, black and white.

The UK has now massively de-industrialized. This wasn't just economic change. It was politically engineered to fragment the working class. Now, the indigenous working class sees foreign-born workers as a threat to their wages. The big problem for the left is how to create a new solidarity of the poor to take on the rich. It's hard.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

But none of this (labor unions, etc) is necessary in a system that already has equality. So what you're saying is that inequality had to exist in order for people suffering from inequality to fight for greater equality.

[bennycornelius.livejournal.com]

Paul Bohannan is well-worth reading.

Have you read much Edmund Leach? Be interested to see what you made of works like Political Systems...

Sophists

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Just working on a hunch, but I wonderd if identity politics might play a similar role today, or be linked to phenomena that play a similar role, to that of the Sophists in Ancient Greece. From The Passion of the Western Mind:

Other problems were presented by the Sophists' views. Despite the positive effects of their intellectual training and establishment of a liberal education as a basis for effective character formation, a radical skepticism toward all values led some to advocate an explicity amoral opportunism... More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis -- the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenian leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster. Daily life in Athens saw minimaly humane ethical standards unscrupulously violated -- visible not least in the exclusively male Athenian citizenry's routine and often cruel exploitation of women, slaves, and foreigners. All these developments had their own origins and motives, and could hardly be laid at the feet of the Sophists. Yet in such critical circumstances, the philosophical denial of absolute values and sophistical commendation of stark opportunism seemed both to reflect and to exacerbate the problematic spirit of the times.

Well, there are differences in this situation, too, but I suppose that one dilemma that seems similar is that relativism can militate against social justice.

Re: Sophists

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I would say that there cannot be social justice without relativism, and that it's a common misconception that relativism requires moral nihilism or cynicism.

[palux-negro.livejournal.com]

I win

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha!

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I agree with Michaels's perspective, that poverty is not a "culture" in the same way that, say, the African-American experience/history/tradition is a "culture." A black woman could internalize herself as part of the African-American culture, and embrace/display that culture in her words, actions, etc. But nobody says "I love being part of the culture of poverty." It just doesn't happen, and even if it did, that would be an extreme anomaly.

And I think he also explains quite well the problem I've had with how the issue of poverty is framed. You have people who despise the impoverished, because they are supposedly living examples of the worst vices that cause humans to fail in life (laziness, etc); and then you have people who glorify poverty, who act like it's a virtuous way out of life's hustle and bustle, who praise the ingenuity, the fashion of the homeless, etc.

What both of these groups do--and I believe I said this way back in that homeless chic thread, or the one in which we discussed homeless architecture--is transplant intentionality onto the condition of the impoverished whom they discuss. They are arguing different points (that the impoverished are to be either despised, that the impoverished are to be admired), but both points are based on the same ideology, that the impoverished are in their positions willfully, that they've largely chosen this life for themselves.

And I mean, how can we possibly believe that these arguments aren't utter bullshit? Poverty is not some natural condition. Rather, it is the direct product of wealth distribution systems in which some take more of the pie and others take less. When you take more of the pie than somebody else, there's a guy at the bottom living in poverty as a result. There just isn't enough pie to go around with people taking more than their equal share. So, if we looked at the history of an individual, while it could very well seem that she drove herself to poverty through any number of actions (or plain old inaction), that such an end was even possible is not a feat of magic. We can't say that anybody chooses poverty if the system itself has as a fundamental condition that poverty must exist for someone, somewhere. These people don't fall through the cracks. They are led through them, by the hand.

[thedr9wningman.livejournal.com]

I think that no one consciously says that they love being a part of a culture of poverty, but if one understands the links between certain cultures (cultures of poverty), the values that they embody, and the changes that would be necessary to change that culture into one that doesn't have poverty as an integral part of it, no one would deny membership in that culture just because being a part of that is integrally linked to poverty. (That was worded terribly, I apologise. Summary: Poverty is beyond consciousness, poverty is linked to culture, identity is linked to culture, therefore identity is linked to poverty.)

Poverty, I assert, in rich countries is a state of mind. There's a defeatism or a fear of success (something I have, myself), of 'selling out' or of losing integrity because you chase money, rather than your own integrity, that keeps people poor. And, really, the rich of rich are amoral and sociopathic, because they have sold out. People don't hate the rich for being rich; they hate them because they whored themselves out to get to that point (at least that's the perception, not necessarily the truth). That selling out, of your culture, your identity, your integrity, whatever, is a deeply troubling thing.

I will also assert that, at least in America, having an accent that is associated with being poor (southern, black English) is to your economic disadvantage. It is identity politics in the extreme. But if someone who claims that identity changes their accent, their peers will pressure them into returning to it, and thus poverty, reinforcing that poverty is cultural. In order to break out of poverty, you have to leave behind your culture: your identity, your friends, your family. And, as we all know, trading all that in for money isn't really worth it, at least for the non-sociopathic and the moral.

What does it take to break out of 'where you come from'? It takes a lot. And most reasonable people aren't willing to shed all of that identity and leave all that behind: that's the state of mind that I am asserting. It's reasonable, really. And I won't judge it as negative in the slightest. It is simply what it is.

Systematic poverty (poor white South) and historical racism (non-white poverty) in America lives on, perpetuated by identity politics because expecting people to 'pull themselves out of poverty' one at a time, leaving behind all their valued relationships with those who are poor is not a fair expectation to have on others. The transgressions of the past live on in culture, a living entity that spans individuals and generations. Changing a culture through education or overt means never really works, and if it does, you've probably killed too many in that group for them to exist as a cohesive element any longer.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Last night I watched The Death of Respect (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ls7h7/sign/Death_of_Respect_Episode_1/) which was a Daily mail-esque rant about how society is going to the dogs. That said, The presenter John Ware made an interesting argument.

He argued that the social liberalism of the 60's and 70's combined with the economic liberalism of Thatcher's 80's, which has given birth to an ugly form of rampant individualism spurred on by consumerism for which the Left and the Right are equally to blame. This in turn has lead to higher rates of crime, more economic inequality and the break-down of communities.

What's your take on that stance?

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw that too - and enjoyed it. You can't fail with a title like that! (well.... you can)

This post is blowing my mind... Part 1

[thedr9wningman.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, with the deluge of 50 comments, I'm afraid I'll probably be lost in the noise on this one. Nevertheless...

Is poverty a culture of value in itself, or is it just a lack of money? Are there different poverties around the world, or just one?
I've had this discussion once today, and I will assert that there are elements within poverty that can almost abstract it as a demon. And I will also assert that there is a difference between this demon choosing to inhabit you (poverty by social force/pressure in a rich country) and living in a poor country where you simply don't have access to making it out of poverty (the non-living version).

Let me explain. Unfortunately, most of this stuff, at least to me, boils down to an ego. A sense of self/pride. And egos are delicate, fragile, prideful beings.

A friend of mine (a white, late-twenty-something) moved from Oregon to Baltimore 4 years ago to be an art teacher. Upon her return, for a visit, she illuminated this ego-demon of poverty within the black culture of urban Baltimore. This Poverty Demon, though, is not unique to blacks in America; it is everywhere where poverty is something to be proud of, or where success is considered a threat.


American high school culture has this demon running in its midst: there's a lot of pressure to be stupid. Why? Because this ego is delicate and doesn't like to be challenged. I can't tell you how many people were threatened by me because I didn't play along and didn't aspire to pump gas in a cow-town in rural Oregon and shoot out 15 kids. My very physical being was threatened often because of this.

In Baltimore, you cannot score, in the end of it, anything less than 49%. So, if you fail one term of high school, as long as you get 72% the next term, you can average out and eke by with a passing grade. The inherent intelligence of human laziness plays its hand here, though, because (this baffles me) these children min-max the amount of work they will have to do to pass with a low D (61%). They simply refuse to do homework because the social pressure to not is so high. So, the vast majority of kids wear their lifetime of suffering (and their continued path toward abject poverty, violence, and a very low quality of life) as a badge. That reeks of ego to me.

Watch any high school movie, and you'll see this demon: the pressure to be average or to not be smart. It takes an incredible amount of courage to overcome the essential default-case of humanity: poverty.

That's the root of it, I think. Poverty is our default case; it is the place of ultimate disorder. It requires no effort to be poor, and it doesn't challenge or threaten anyone when you're poor. Being rich, you're a target for hatred, and I share that hatred of the greedy-rich. But is that the Poverty Demon in me that actually does the hating? I'm not sure. (As an aside, I think it is not jealousy that motivates me, but my disdain for greed and the ability to exploit others for one's own gain that makes me not like the upper crust. Excuse? I don't know. I'll look into it further.) It seems to me that a part of the hatred for the rich is this notion of scarcity, though. If 1000 poor could just kill a millionaire, then they could share that wealth. Of course, the inherent me-ism of the ego means that they would probably destroy themselves instead of share the winnings equally, leaving us, paradoxically, with a couple of 1/2 millionaires, who would just set the cycle in motion again.

This post is blowing my mind... Part 2

[thedr9wningman.livejournal.com]

You can claim any number of racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic identities when job hunting, but you can never simply state that you're poor.

I think, though, that this is due to conditioning and to the status of the Poverty Demon. Most are not aware of their demons and their ego-responses. It is so unconscious, that we confuse our outside shape as identity.

And the mind makes correlations all the time, which impacts judgement. Richer white middle-class people are afraid of being poor; they associate immigrants and African-Americans with poverty, and are therefore afraid of the form, the symptom, if you will, rather than the root issue. White people, you're not afraid of black people: you're afraid of being poor yourself. You're afraid of violence, of a lack of security, of a lack of control that you (think you) have now. But it is all an illusion.

Celebrating diversity is now our way of accepting inequality. There are left neoliberals as well as right neoliberals: "Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.
This is disturbing in a way. I think it is because it challenges my beliefs about myself and about my beliefs in general. Thank you for that! My goal is to find and challenge every belief I have.

That said, as a leftist, I do have issues with inequality, but only as a social force. I take issue with a systematic decay in wages, a systematic decline in life quality. I accept that there will be inequality, and the elimination of inequality entirely would actually mean that no one would have any sense of success in their life (the ultimate fear of the Right, which is why even poor Right-wingers vote against policies that would pull them up). I'm OK with certain levels of inequality, but I don't like seeing barriers erected so the second class on the Titanic can't escape.

And I'm a paradox with my take on poverty. Those begging on the street I find to be consumed with the Poverty Demon (because they're so witty and (I think) they think they're so fucking cool), yet I support unemployment and welfare and all these other socialised programs (especially healthcare, which benefits all of us). I don't support Poverty Demon, in essence, as a matter of policy.

But if it comes to a vote, I will vote to get Poverty Demons off the street and into homes; the problem is, the Demon isn't treated. I need to re-evaluate how I think about this topic.

as if the ideal society were one in which both rich black kids and rich white kids could attend the same elite college
This quote is exactly why I feel that poverty is a culture, at least in developed countries, unto itself. I think it would be insulting to tell the Congolese or Somalis or Sudanese that they're a culture of poverty, when it is a systematic failure of global economics, governmental policy, and even weather, that is to blame for their poverty.

Nevertheless, as I asserted earlier, the symptom (the identity, the body, the form, the skin colour) is not what makes one rich or poor. The threat heard in Baltimore (and apparently Pennsylvania) schools (which leads me to believe the Poverty Demon is everywhere) is that black kids who try to succeed are 'being white'. They're calling the CULTURE by its symptoms. But really, those kids are trying to succeed, and under ego-threatened logic, you blame the symptoms, not the cause. Because, how stupid would it sound if someone who thinks of themselves as successful, but wants to reign in others' behaviours via a semi-tribal motivation says: "You shouldn't do your homework, you're on the path to success."?

The unconsciousness of the ego is wily, intelligent, and pervasive. I'm in awe of its intelligence, to be honest.

My struggle now is to accept and not judge those who wish to revel in their own poverty and not treat them with disdain. And, of course, that's not being racist, but on the surface, it could be perceived that way. Yet, in the lily-white state that I live in, I was able to identify this demon without the mistaken association with skin colour. I guess that's the luxury of the lack of diversity that we have here.

[getmeaway.livejournal.com]

i read this piece in work on a quiet saturday. i thought he summed it up really well when he said the bit about the low earning black cleaner lady who cleans the office of the black lawyer lady but doesnt feel bad that the lawyer earns 20 times what she does because she is proud that a black woman has became a lawyer. i thought that was pretty funny.

[(Anonymous)]

Right. And all African-Americans are proud of Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, too.