12 Feb Culture of Poverty and Vanity Fair

I just spent the morning crafting an email to Vanity Fair’s editor. Yes, yes, i know – i’m exposing something terrible – this academic indulges in a subscription to Vanity Fair. But in my November issue, there was a tiny little side bar article about Daniel Patrick Moynihan that left me fuming. It was only half a sentence, really, that left me fuming: “He took flak for his 1965 report on the crisis of the black family—but he was right.” (my emphasis). I let it go until i received news of the new movement to bring back Culture of Poverty studies…so here’s my letter:

Dear Editor (?):

I’ve read Vanity Fair with delight since my mother bought them on family trips for airplane rides. 20 years later, i giggle when i explain to my colleagues that Vanity Fair is my “dirty little secret” – the one piece of popular culture i make time for each month in the midst of my studies. Mostly i get strange looks of horror or angst, but once in a while, someone will giggle and nudge or even blurt out, “Me too!” I’ve used your articles in classes, other scholars in my field have used your Africa issue to discuss Millennial Development (please see Ananya Roy‘s book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the making of development or watch one of her lectures on youtube or even the University of Washington Geography department’s website).

But your November issue’s overture for Daniel Patrick Moynihan startled me. Gabe Pressman very obviously does not understand poverty, poverty politics, or the incipient racism he oozed when he commented: “He [Daniel Patrick Moynihan] took flak for his 1965 report on the crisis of the black family—but he was right.” Right about what, exactly? That African Americans are inherently lazy, stupid, poor, and degenerate, as Moynihan attempted to portray them? Please, Mr. Pressman – read the report. Then read the rebuttals. Then, and only then, should you consider what you are saying. For those of us who study poverty and racism and their interconnectedness, Moynihan represents the very kind of illogical framing of politics against those who fail to fall into some kind of Kantian rubric of cosmopolitanism that we work so hard to disentangle.

I let this go. I threw the magazine in the garbage, stormed off to school and fumed for three days. And it would have ended at that except for one thing: the return of the Culture of Poverty arguments flying out of Sociology. The culmination of the fanfare around the rolling out of this pronouncement was a splashy front page New York Times article. But please note, that this form of “blaming the poor” mentality that seeks to find the culture of poverty in an a-historical cultural vacuum of blackness is a rude reminder of the blatant racism of the Post-Racist ideological moment that has both prematurely ended meaningful discussions about racism and equally excuses the rather poor behaviour of conservatives both with regard to race (and here i point to Professor Christopher Parker’s work on the racism rampant in the tea party) and to poverty, in general. Culture was never off “the poverty agenda,” as the NYT article states. It has always been at the forefront, thanks very much to Moynihan. His report was the beginning of the end for programs like the Model Cities Program that built 100’s of clinics, community centers, learning centers, and a host of other necessary projects in America’s “blighted neighborhoods” (as they were called). His report began, in Congress, a tirade against funding much-needed inner-city projects. These projects were seen as a “blueprint for revolution” and purportedly financing an attack on city halls across America (for more, on this, please see the special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1969).

That NYT article came out in October – but it wasn’t until i received an email from Jeff Maskovsky, co-author of  The Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States (with Judith Goode), pointing me to another article in the Boston Review by Stephen Steinberg which eloquently refutes the re-rolling out of poverty culture as a frame of study as well as Moynihan’s original report, that i finally took the time to write this letter. In fact, seeing that Mr. Pressman is entirely too lazy to bother to read Moynihan’s report or the rebuttals, perhaps he could save himself some time and read just this article. It does all the work for him.

That half-sentence by Pressman is enough to make me not renew my subscription. The blatantly off-handed racist acceptance of a report that even the raggiest magazine today would not dare publish is enough to destroy the integrity of the entire magazine in my eyes. And it can’t all land on Pressman – where were the editors and fact checkers? I know that short article did not simply fly from the fingers of Pressman onto the page – it had to go through revisions and rounds of editing to get there. How on earth did this get through so many pairs of hands and eyes?

Sincerely,
Patricia J. Lopez, PhC
University of Washington
Department of Geography
Smith Hall 408
Box 353550
Seattle, WA 98195
www.maoquai.com