The poor are different from you and me. Maybe.
By Megan Crepeau
Fifty years ago, America discovered poverty.
That's Barbara Ehrenreich's theory, anyway, as she commemmorates the publication anniversary of "The Other America." Its effects have been mixed, to put it mildly.
Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty -- inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.
At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”
Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious -- qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.
That view - that the poor are somehow a different species, that "poor" is synonymous with "lazy and dumb" - took root. We see it every day. Politicians lecture single mothers for being irresponsible while at the same time slashing funds for family planning. They require urine tests for everything from unemployment benefits to subsidized housing. If you don't like it, they seem to say, why don't you just stop being so poor?
Ehrenreich concludes that we're overdue for another "discovery of poverty," one that would help us realize that it could happen to any of us. But really, she's behind the times - it already has.