This week there were two New York Times articles that caught my eye. If I knew how to link to them, I'd do just that - unfortunately I do not. One, titled "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It" looks at a particular county in Minnesota where workers are depending on tax refunds like the Earned Income Tax Credit, but disavowing the programs themselves. The other article, "The White Underclass," by op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, uses his own hometown in rural Oregon to examine the larger issues of white poverty in America.
In "Even Critics..." the emphasis is obviously on the hypocrisy of these people being afforded 'government handouts' while decrying them. Some profiled say they are not asking for the credits, that they could easily get along without them. The issue here is that these people can get along without them - what about the rest of the country? Of course the rural poor face different obstacles than the urban poor, but so do the Caucasian poor vs the minority poor. I in no way mean to disrespect the hardships of the men and women and families in this article, simply to point out that while one or two of them alludes to not needing the government, others do.
Kristof's article had less that spoke to me, but it echoed the issue I found in the first article: what is so special about white poverty? While I believe all people struggling should be represented, I often feel like writing on income inequality is so racially or ethnically divided that it never gets to issues at the heart of poverty; it merely lingers on the fringes, pitting one group against another. I recognize differences in the way various people experience poverty, but I also think there has to be a way to discuss these issues without a game of who-has-it-worse.
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ReplyDeleteI really like the conclusions you reach about the emphasis of the article, the hypocrisy of the subjects, and the people who get left behind and forgotten when we focus on these things. Your writing is beautiful and your subject matter important. Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteI think that one of the policy problems facing this issue, besides republicans, is that we forget that, while these issues cannot have one solution, there are overlapping needs and solutions for the different groups. We either decide that there is absolutely no continuity between the different subgroups (ethnicities, rural/urban/suburban, male/female, age and family unit), or we decide that we can tackle all of the subgroups equally. While we have a theoretically great framework to discuss the intersectionality in philosophical or literary terms, we have failed to implement any understanding of intersectionality in the policy making process. If we backed off our impulse to hierarchize anectdotes and focused on addressing overlapping needs (dis here is dee intersectionz I referred to earlier), we would have better policies. Good stuff, sorry for the book I wrote about your blog.
ReplyDeleteI hate the fact that race is mentioned and even emphasized in the arguments/discussions of poverty. Whether one is white or black, why does it matter? I think that the solutions to eradicate poverty should do so with a color blindness. Otherwise, I don't think it should sound unusual to hear about a poor white or rich black.
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