IN THE 1950S AND 1960S events challenged the reigning image of poor people in American social science. In the same years that social scientists described them as passive, apathetic, and detached from politics, all over the world colonized people were asserting their right to liberation. Wars of independence attacked the vestiges of colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Near East; guerrilla movements organized against dictatorships in Central and Latin America; in the United States, blacks who mobilized to claim their civil rights linked their cause to the politics of anti-colonialism and expanded their movement into a militant assertion of racial pride and demand for social and economic justice. And a powerful black feminism incorporated the mounting attention to women’s poverty into its own politics of liberation. By the late twentieth century, the emphasis on gender equity, poverty reduction, and liberation fused in the burgeoning human rights movement represented by the United Nations-sponsored Millennium Goals and began to arc back from the Global South to the United States.
Theories of cultural poverty and deprivation reflected hoary images of lower-class pathology that offended advocates of liberation. For all its surface liberalism, American social science seemed to sanction an image of poor people that denigrated their culture and personality, belittled their capacity for self-mobilization, and reinforced direct or indirect colonial rule. It offered them social work and therapy when they needed economic justice and political mobilization.1 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, social scientists who supported independence movements in the Global South and civil rights, black power, and affirmative action in the United States had challenged the politics, empirical grounding, and theoretical foundation of the culture of poverty.
The implicit politics of cultural theories disturbed many critics. Social scientists sympathetic to national liberation movements argued that the idea of a culture of poverty reinforced colonial domination and obscured the structural sources of exploitation. Randolf S. David, writing from the Philippines, claimed that culture of poverty researchers, “having decided that poverty has reduced people into a sub-species of the human race, proclaim the emergence of a unique and fascinating way of life associated with such extreme deprivation.” With a prurient interest in the more lurid aspects of the lives of the urban poor, social scientists had become “well-equipped peeping toms.” Despite good intentions, their “romantic interest” cast the condition of the poor “as an unalterable given which we can only cope with, adjust to, or build our whole life around.”2 To Alessio Colombis, Banfield’s portrait of a southern Italian village reflected the influence of the Cold War on American social science: “His thesis offers a pseudo-scientific cover justifying relations of exploitation and subjection resulting from the situations of domination and inequality that still exist today.”3 Alejandro Portes identified the culture of poverty as one of three major theories that portrayed Latin American slum radicalism as irrational, a “simplistic emotional response to irrational psychological needs.” These theories attributed the radicalism of the poor to their cultural backwardness: “Extremism permeates these groups to the extent that they are also permeated by ignorance, social isolation, and irrational aggressiveness.”4
David, Colombis, and Portes each proposed an alternative framework for interpreting the behavior of poor people. Portes’s research on a Chilean slum showed the poorest residents most active in neighborhood councils, and he argued for the fundamental rationality of social conduct.5 Colombis contended that Banfield neglected the constraints on villagers’ behavior, misunderstood class structure, and ignored the exercise of power. His interpretation stressed their “economic, political, administrative, cultural and social subjection” and emphasized the importance of placing the local situation in the context of Italian society.6 David also urged the replacement of cultural explanation with structural analyses that linked the roots of poverty to the dynamics of exploitation: Urban poverty “implies a relationship of dependence—a relationship which produced further underdevelopment for the poor and continued development for the affluent.”7
Culture of poverty critics who focused on the United States offered similar objections. Walter Miller underlined the political significance that conceptions of poverty had assumed in the charged atmosphere of the 1960s. Discussions of poverty touched most of the major domestic issues of the time: the urban crisis, welfare, education, the black revolution, white backlash, and violence and crime in the streets. Unsuccessful attempts to respond effectively to these great domestic issues revealed a consistent conceptual failure in thinking about poverty and undercut attempts to formulate a coherent national policy.8 As a result, according to Chandler Davidson, researchers and advocates had “built a one-sided case against an entire social class—the poor.” Whether they were aware of the fact or not, social scientists’ descriptions served the interests of the affluent and justified the inequitable distribution of wealth and income.9 Most writing about American working-class people by sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, claimed Eleanor Leacock, contributed to a “picture of a people who, lacking family organization and reared without consistent and close relations with adults … are passive, have difficulty with abstract thinking and communication, seek escape from problems through relatively uninhibited expressions of sex or aggression, lack ego strength and are unable to plan for the future.” Programs based on this image attempted to reduce poverty by transforming poor people into “solid middle-class citizens.”10 Political criticism of the culture of poverty often remained fuzzy around the edges, abstracting a series of conservative implications (often from writers who considered themselves liberal) and attaching them to a broad array of writers. Some critics lumped Oscar Lewis, Michael Harrington, Frank Riessman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Edward Banfield into one category.11 Clearly, by the late 1960s, the very act of writing about cultural aspects of poverty had assumed political significance.
Many of the culture of poverty’s professional critics chose to fight limited engagements. Instead of sweeping political attacks, they attempted to disprove components of the theory with empirical research. The result was a raft of case studies. For example, Leonard Davidson’s and David Krackhardt’s study of a large manufacturing firm’s special training program for poor blacks found that employees’ behavior reflected “situational realities” rather than the personalities of minority workers.12 Frederick Jaffe and Steven Polgar lamented the cooptation of the culture-of-poverty concept as an explanation for slow progress in family planning programs. Using data from American cities, they argued the opposite case: Accessibility, rather than culture and motivation, determined program success.13 Harlan Padfield, who examined an industrial training program for hard-core unemployed men in San Diego, also asserted that his research results undermined the culture of poverty thesis.14
Some of the most important empirical studies that tried to chip away at the culture of poverty idea drew on Hyman Rodman’s influential notion of “value stretch,” which asserted that lower-class people, without abandoning the general values of mainstream society, developed an alternative set of values that helped them adjust to their circumstances.15 Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner, an ethnography of street-corner men in Washington, DC, portrayed a “shadow system” of values that qualified Rodman’s and others’ “alternative system of lower-class values” in two ways. First, alternative or stretched values differed from the general system of values because they are “derivative, subsidiary in nature, thinner, and less weighty, less completely internalized.” Second, its users could not automatically invoke the alternative value system; instead, it was “a shadow cast by a common value system in the distorting lower-class culture.” Liebow explained the behavior of poor black men “as a direct response to the conditions of lower-class Negro life rather than as mute compliance with historical or cultural imperatives.” The street-corner man did not carry an independent cultural tradition; rather his behavior reflected his attempt to achieve many of the goals and values of the larger society and his attempts to conceal his failure from others and himself.16
Although other scholars added empirical evidence that contradicted the culture of poverty thesis by discovering indigenous organizations and a capacity for political mobilization among poor people, the generalizability of their work remained uncertain. Ingenious defenders could reinterpret their data, dismiss them as exceptions, or incorporate them as subtle modifications within the larger culture of poverty. By itself, the empirical evidence was too limited, fragmentary, and sparse to support either side in the controversy—which made theoretical and methodological criticism all the more important. Could the assumptions, logic, and research methods of the culture of poverty thesis withstand intense scrutiny? Critics said no.
Theoretical and methodological criticisms of the culture of poverty made several arguments:17
1. What does the culture of poverty mean by culture? Critics point to the absence of a uniform or consistent definition and argue that culture usually becomes a synonym for subculture, itself a slippery concept. Of what is the subculture of poverty a subset? What are its boundaries? Does it evolve from a larger culture or arise as a reaction to it? Is there more than one subculture of poverty? These questions lack satisfactory answers.
2. No uniform set of characteristics identify the culture of poverty as it is used by different writers. The long lists of traits usually offered have an ad hoc quality and do not separate indicators of material deprivation from descriptions of behavior and personality. By and large, they do not identify the core characteristics which give shape and coherence to the whole.
3. Presentations of the mechanisms perpetuating the culture of poverty are usually incomplete because they reflexively assume the primacy of socialization. In other words, families pass on the culture of poverty to their children. An alternative, situational explanation is equally plausible: each generation re-adopts the behaviors associated with the culture of poverty as it adapts to similar constraints. The policy implications of this question are important because they lead either to social work and therapy or to politics and redistribution as the method for breaking up the culture of poverty.
4. Culture of poverty theories are tautologies. The pathological behavior of poor people causes their poverty, which is the source of their pathological behavior. This lack of clearly specified independent and dependent variables leaves the reasoning circular. Most presentations of the culture of poverty, therefore, leave cause and effect hopelessly tangled.
5. The purpose of culture of poverty theories often remains ambiguous. What exactly are they supposed to explain? Family patterns? The persistence of poverty? Political apathy? The answer usually is unclear, and theories become catchalls for a loosely associated set of behaviors and material conditions.
6. Links between subcultures, social institutions, and social structures remain unspecified. The culture of poverty, if it exists, does not float in a vacuum. How is it shaped by the distribution of power and resources? How is it affected by the political and institutional structure in which it is embedded? The culture of poverty literature remains relatively silent on these questions.
7. The boundaries separating culture, class, and ethnicity remain vague in most presentations of the culture of poverty. Is the culture of poverty synonymous with the lower class? Does it penetrate other classes? What distinguishes the definition of class from the definition of culture? Are some of the behaviors identified with the culture of poverty in fact attributes of ethnic groups? Are there distinct subcultures of poverty among different ethnic groups, or does ethnic variation in the behavior of poor people contradict the idea of a culture of poverty?
8. The culture of poverty is an ethnocentric idea. It takes one set of standards—usually white, middle-class, and American—and applies them universally. In the process, it defines differences as pathologies, thereby failing to appreciate their positive, adaptive significance and the validity and coherence of other cultures or subcultures.
9. Most culture of poverty research is static: It examines its subjects at one point in time or throughout a period in which the circumstances that constrain their behavior do not alter. Its predictions about how poor people will react to a change in their constraints and opportunities rest on deductions, not evidence.
Critics of the culture of poverty raised fundamental questions, but most of them did not want to discredit attempts to link culture and poverty. Rather, they exposed weaknesses in existing formulations and pointed to questions left unanswered. Politics also shaped these debates about theory and method, as the participants well knew. Those committed to the idea that the unequal distribution of power and resources shaped and constrained the behavior of poor people wanted to redirect research and policy. In the culture of poverty literature, poverty remained a problem of persons: a set of individual and family-based traits that perpetuated poverty and inhibited achievement. To most critics of the culture of poverty, poverty was either a problem of resources—a lack of money, good education, health care—and/or a problem of political economy—a by-product of capitalist economies. For them, culture remained at best a tangent, interesting and in some vague way important, but a distraction; at worst, it justified the perpetuation of colonialism abroad and inequity at home. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the political climate favored the critics and pushed cultural questions to the margins of poverty research for roughly two decades. Writing in The New York Times in 2006, the Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson pointed to “a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960s: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes—its distinctive attitudes, values and tendencies, and the resulting behavior of its members—and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.”18 However, sociologists and anthropologists who studied poverty failed to replace culture as an organizing concept, thus marginalizing their disciplines among policy makers and facilitating the passage of leadership in poverty research to the economists (discussed in Chapter 3).
Sociologists and anthropologists never gave up on culture. In the early twenty-first century, in fact, culture staged a remarkable comeback in poverty research. The timing reflected frustration with the seeming inability of purely structural theories to account for the growth and persistence of urban poverty and family patterns among the urban poor—the increase in out-of-wedlock births, decline in marriage, absent fathers, and violence, which are discussed in Chapter 5. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged sparked the revival of research on urban poverty, tried to point poverty research toward a balance of structure and culture, albeit a culture stripped of the major weaknesses of the culture of poverty idea. In his 2009 More Than Just Race, Wilson called “for reexamining the way social scientists discuss two important factors associated with racial inequality: social structure and culture.” He predicted the book would “generate controversy because I dare to take culture seriously as one of the explanatory variables in the study of race and urban poverty—a topic that is typically considered off-limits in academic discourse because of a fear that such analysis can be construed as ‘blaming the victim.’”19 Wilson takes a grounded view of culture intended to absolve it of blaming the victim or to allow it to float unmoored from institutional and economic contexts, as in too many variants of the culture of poverty thesis. For Wilson, culture “refers to the sharing of outlooks and modes of behavior among individuals who face similar place-based circumstances (such as poor segregated neighborhoods) or have the same social networks (as when members of particular racial or ethnic groups share a particular way of understanding social life and cultural scripts that guide their behavior).” Social structure and culture each exert independent influence on the production and reproduction of poverty, but, importantly, “they interact to shape different group outcomes that embody racial inequality.”20
But the matter is not quite so straightforward. In their introduction to a special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2010) supporting the use of “culture” in poverty research, Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont also highlight the new legitimacy of culture in poverty research. “Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” they write. “Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors.” They point out that a new generation of researchers who employ culture in the study of poverty differentiates itself from the older culture of poverty scholarship. “Contemporary researchers,” they report, “rarely claim that culture will perpetuate itself for multiple generations regardless of structural changes, and they practically never use the term pathology.” This “new generation of scholars … conceives of culture in substantially different ways. It typically rejects the idea that whether people are poor can be explained by their values. It is often reluctant to divide explanations into ‘structural’ and ‘cultural,’ because of the increasingly questionable utility of this old distinction.” Even as they advocated for the reintroduction of culture into the study of poverty, Small, Harding, and Lamont curtailed its reach and problematized its distinctiveness.21
Small, Harding, and Lamont offer three persuasive motives for why scholarship on poverty should concern itself with culture. The first motive is “to understand better why people respond to poverty the way they do—both how they cope with it and how they escape it.” The second motive “is to debunk existing myths about the cultural orientations of the poor,” which rest on an astonishingly weak empirical foundation. The third motive “is to develop and clarify exactly what they mean by it—regardless of whether they believe it helps explain an outcome.” Ignoring culture, they stress, can lead to bad policy—and they offer a number of examples to support this observation, and argue that, like it or not, culture is very much a part of the “policy discourse on work, marriage, crime, welfare, housing, fatherhood, and a host of other conditions related to poverty.”22
But these reasons for using culture in the study of poverty do not answer the question, exactly what is culture? If its boundary with structure has collapsed, what remains to be pulled out of the wreckage and deployed in research? The literature on the definition of culture, of course, as they report, is huge and not all that helpful as a guide to working scholars. In fact, their advocacy of culture in poverty research ends up rejecting the usefulness of the term. “While the umbrella term ‘culture’ might serve as a useful shorthand to point to a constellation of issues to which poverty scholars should pay greater attention, ultimately it masks more than it reveals. At least when the purpose is to understand a specific problem.” In place of culture, they recommend using “seven different but sometimes overlapping perspectives, based on seven different concepts—values, frames, repertoires, narratives, symbolic boundaries, cultural capital, and institutions” that are “narrow and distinct analytical devices … far more useful than … the concept of ‘culture,’ which is generally used in too vague a fashion.” In the end, they stage a complete retreat, describing their editorial intent as assembling not a series of essays on “culture” but, rather, a collection designed “to convey a composite and multileveled picture of how meaning-making factors into the production and reproduction of poverty.” Culture emerges as a vague umbrella term for analytic devices that show how people make meanings. This is a sophisticated, subtle, and heuristic framework for poverty research, but it is not a rehabilitation of “culture.”23
The bad odor that wafted from “culture” in the intellectual politics of liberation stemmed from its appropriation as a tool for “blaming the victim”—the means with which to trace the poverty of individuals and families to their own shortcomings, a new method for identifying and stigmatizing the undeserving poor. Even the new culture researchers by and large failed to transcend the individualistic bias in poverty scholarship. In six of the seven analytic frames they describe, observe Small, Harding, and Lamont, “the unit of analysis.… is typically located in individuals or in groups or in interpersonal relations; by contrast, institutions are typically located either in organizations or in society at large.”24 The implicit question remained, how are poor people different and what can be done about it? Culture carried a taint, as well, because of its entanglement with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family, with its unfortunate metaphor of the “tangle of pathology.” The rehabilitation of Moynihan, in fact, was a precondition for the reentry of culture into poverty research.
Conventional ideological labels fail to capture the complex political response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.25 Moynihan, after all, identified himself with liberal politics and wanted to encourage the Johnson administration to devote more attention and resources to the problems of northern blacks. Many of the critics to Moynihan’s political Left—who joined in demonizing him—were themselves, as Rainwater and Yancey point out, trying to modify the way government responded to the needs of African Americans and poor people. As much as Moynihan, they wanted to influence the president. Had the report suited their interests, these critics “would have swallowed their ideological distaste and used the report as an argument for their programs. As with civil rights leaders, the opposition of the Permanent Government (a loose synonym for the civil service, here officials concerned with welfare and labor) to the report stemmed “from organizational threats to their existence and tactical requirements” instead of ideology.26
Civil rights leaders applauded President Johnson’s Howard University speech with its reference to the “breakdown of the Negro family structure,” and they welcomed the idea of a national conference devoted to the needs of black Americans.27 They became increasingly uneasy, however, as rumors about Moynihan’s report and the conference circulated in Washington. Was it, in fact, to be a conference about the black family? Press commentary on the report, which had not been released, only fueled speculation. Then, in the summer of 1965, the Watts riot riveted attention on black ghettos and signaled the end to the first phase of the civil rights movement. Its focus on the legal foundations of discrimination required broadening outward to social and economic issues. A new generation challenged the movement’s leaders and questioned both their goal of integration and nonviolent tactics. Newspaper and magazine writers fueled anger among blacks by invoking Moynihan’s report (still under wraps) as an explanation of the riot, which they attributed to the deterioration of the black family.
Civil rights leaders could not subscribe to an interpretation that substituted family pathology for unemployment, inadequate housing, poor schools, and police brutality. Nonetheless, leaders’ reactions to Moynihan’s thesis were not uniform. Younger, militant leaders emerged as most critical. Floyd McKissick, CORE’s new director, observed that Moynihan’s report “assumed that middle-class American values are the correct ones for everyone in America.” McKissick accused Moynihan of thinking that “everyone should have a family structure like his own,” and of blaming individuals “when it’s the damn system that needs changing.”28 Older leaders stressed the report’s strengths as well as its dangers. Martin Luther King, Jr., for one, emphasized the opportunity afforded by public awareness of problems with black family structure “to deal fully rather than haphazardly with the problem as a whole—to see it as a social catastrophe and meet it as other disasters are met with an adequacy of resources.”29
Civil rights leaders increasingly distrusted Johnson’s administration, which did not include them in the conference planning. In fact, the president threatened to leapfrog over civil rights leaders and take leadership of the movement himself.30 Shaken and surprised by the Watts riot, increasingly concerned about the implications of the administration’s activities, civil rights leaders began to attack the Moynihan Report and to redirect the forthcoming conference. The black family, they argued, should not even be on the agenda.
Clearly, this reaction to the family issue worried the Johnson administration. At the November planning conference, only one of eight agenda papers focused on the black family. One government official quipped that “he had been reliably informed that no such man as Daniel Patrick Moynihan existed.” Speakers attacked Moynihan, who responded vigorously. At the conference itself in February, the black family did not appear on the agenda, and Moynihan’s report did not appear in a bibliography that included fifteen references to Department of Labor documents.31
The Permanent Government’s interests differed from those of the civil rights leaders. Moynihan’s report threatened the reputation and influence of the welfare establishment, which emphasized improving existing programs. For Moynihan’s not-so-hidden message was “that existing federal programs in labor and in welfare were inadequate to deal with the problems of the Urban Negro.” The report also challenged the welfare establishment’s approach to civil rights, which acquiesced in “subtle and blatant discrimination and inadequate labor and welfare services to Negroes.” Welfare officials tried to obscure their complicity in discriminatory treatment by stressing their “color-blind” approach; they called Moynihan’s emphasis on color “reactionary rather than radical.”32 Because government officials, unlike civil rights leaders, could not publicly denounce the report, they used other tactics. They circulated criticisms within government circles and developed alternative statistics. They also turned to their contacts in universities, sending summaries of the report to faculty members and soliciting replies, which they then used to reject the report’s validity. They also leaked accounts of the report to the press.33
It would be misleading to dismiss the controversy surrounding the Moynihan Report as solely a mix of organizational politics and ideological differences, for the report raised substantive issues of national importance. Was Moynihan correct about the explosive growth in the proportion of black female-headed households, out-of-wedlock births, and teenage pregnancy? Elizabeth Herzog, chief of the Child Life Studies Branch of the Children’s Bureau Division of Research countered that exaggerations had distorted much less alarming patterns revealed by the data. Black families, it is true, were about 2.5 times as likely as white to be “fatherless,” but the statistics did not reveal a rapid increase in recent years. After a gradual increase from 1949 (19 percent) to 1959 (24 percent), the rate remained relatively stationary at 23 percent in 1964. Therefore, contrary to Moynihan’s claims, the statistics showed that “during the past twenty-five years there has been a gradual rise, preceded and followed by a plateau, but not an acute increase in the over-all proportion of broken homes among Negroes.”34
The question, of course, was how to interpret a rise of 5 percentage points. To Herzog, it represented a minor increase, but, as Moynihan later replied, it would also be construed as a 25-percent leap. Had the issue been unemployment, this increase would have been considered catastrophic. Other critics, such as William Ryan, argued that under-counting, racial biases in statistical reporting, the differential availability of birth control, and the limited options available to poor, black, pregnant young women so qualified official rates that the trends Moynihan reported could be fictitious. In any case, events soon would undermine arguments that Moynihan had misread the trends. If he had overstated what had happened in the recent past, he was right about the future (as Chapter 5 explains).
Moynihan’s exclusive focus on black domestic pathology, as his critics repeatedly pointed out, obscured the rise in female-headed families, divorce rates, and out-of-wedlock birth among whites and variations by income within ethnic groups. References to “the Negro family” casually glossed over the varieties of black families and did not compare the incidence of female heads (or other characteristics) among whites and blacks of comparable economic standing. Had he done so, critics argued, he would have discovered more similarities than differences. As it was, critics contended, Moynihan’s report fueled an ideology that condemned black families in general and displaced blame for their problems from segregation, discrimination, and poverty onto alleged cultural pathology. Critics on the political Left themselves were not always consistent on the relation between class and race because they argued in opposite ways when they attacked Moynihan and Oscar Lewis. Moynihan, they claimed, confounded class and race by failing to observe the similar family patterns of blacks and whites within the same social classes. Lewis, they asserted, had erred because he assumed universal cultural patterns within social classes, when in fact they varied by ethnicity.35
Curiously, critics neglected a crucial empirical weakness in Moynihan’s case. Moynihan showed that trends in unemployment rates and AFDC cases had diverged after 1962. Although nonwhite male unemployment had declined, the number of new AFDC cases had increased. Moynihan assumed this showed the emergence of a self-perpetuating tangle of pathology. “The steady expansion of this welfare program, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady deterioration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.” Here, Moynihan clearly was wrong. Until the mid-1960s, the number of AFDC cases had not reflected the size of the population eligible for cash assistance. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, in fact, only a relatively small proportion of eligible families received AFDC. During the years about which Moynihan wrote, advocates of welfare rights led a campaign to broaden eligibility requirements. As a consequence, the proportion of poor families receiving AFDC began to increase dramatically. Moynihan did not consider the extent to which the rising number of welfare cases opened resulted from an expansion of AFDC to previously eligible families. In fact, though, changing rates of use and eligibility standards undercut any attempt to use AFDC rates as an index of increased family disintegration.36
Moynihan’s report also skated over normative issues. It assumed but by no means proved that matriarchal family structure and the absence of a father were “pathological.” As Herbert Gans pointed out, sociologists had demonstrated an extended and surprisingly stable kinship system of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other female relatives among blacks. Many women who headed families, moreover, raised boys who adapted successfully and entered into stable marriages. Indeed, a family headed by a “capable if unmarried” mother could provide a healthier environment than “a two-parent family in which the father is a marginal appendage.” Nor should out-of-wedlock births among blacks be evaluated in the same way as among whites, because they carried different meanings for each group.37
Both Moynihan and most of his critics assumed that the increase in female-headed black families resulted from choice. Moynihan wanted to find ways to break up a matriarchal culture; critics asserted its validity and strength. Few, however, asked, as did Christopher Jencks, whether in fact “the families in question are matriarchal by necessity or by choice.” Jencks could find little evidence that poor blacks preferred matriarchal families; on the contrary, “there is considerable reason to suppose that they eagerly adopted the more patriarchal middle-class norm whenever they can.”38 Writing about four decades later—with the same issue still in play—Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas showed a strong commitment to marriage among young single mothers whose domestic aspirations remained frustrated by the unemployment, incarceration, and unavailability of marriageable men.39
In All Our Kin, anthropologist Carol Stack offered the most influential alternative view of poor black families. Like most other social scientists, Moynihan, she wrote, remained trapped within conventional definitions of family that failed to capture the domestic experience of poor black Americans. Stack’s ethnographic study of families supported by welfare found “extensive networks of kin and friends supporting, reinforcing one another—devising schemes for self-help, strategies for survival in a community of severe economic deprivation.” As she studied these kin networks, Stack argued for the inadequacy of the conventional definition of a family as the husband, wife, and their children. Instead, she defined family “as the smallest, organized durable network of kin and non-kin who interact daily, providing domestic needs of children and assuring their survival.” Using this definition, families extended across “several kin-based households.” Stack claimed that her definition made possible the identification of supportive kin networks and offered insight into how the people she studied actually “describe and order the world in which they live.” Indeed, her study of kin networks convinced Stack not of the weakness or pathology of black families supported by AFDC, but rather of the “stability and collective power of family life.”40
Controversy also swirled around the sources of the trends identified by Moynihan. Critics argued that he had substituted matriarchy for unemployment, discrimination, and racism. Benjamin Payton, director of the Office of Church and Race of the Protestant Council of the City of New York, wrote that Moynihan’s greatest error lay in his “analysis of the Negro family as ‘the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.’” Payton located the root instead in urbanization, “its conflicts, inadequate resources and injustices.”41
In part, critics blamed Moynihan for neglecting unemployment and related sources of black disadvantage because of early press reports about what he had written. Based on leaks from government officials and summaries, press reports highlighted the report’s emphasis on family pathology and largely ignored its analysis of the economic sources of trends in black domestic life. In fact, Moynihan agreed with his critics’ stress on unemployment, but his rhetorical emphasis on family structure along with the unavailability of the report’s actual text fueled misconceptions and obscured potential consensus. As a result, much of the public debate on the report reflected not what it said, but what people thought it said.
In the years following the report, its historical underpinning crumbled under the weight of historical research. Moynihan’s reliance on the legacy of slavery as a partial explanation of the alleged matriarchal structure of black families came under withering attack. Historian Jacqueline Jones showed how inappropriately matriarchy describes the many-sided roles of black women. Other historians discovered remarkably resilient family structures among slaves. Slavery did not destroy blacks’ sense of family. To the contrary, slaves made heroic efforts to preserve family ties; during Reconstruction, freedmen traveled to find mates from whom they had been separated by slave owners, and thousands greeted the opportunity for legal marriage, denied under slavery, by solemnizing longstanding relationships. Herbert Gutman discovered a high proportion of two-parent families among blacks in the post–Civil War South and in early-twentieth-century cities. Theodore Hershberg and his associates demonstrated parallel structures among black and white families of similar wealth in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia and traced increasing rates of female-headed black families to the early death of black men forced into unhealthy and dangerous work and to the inability of poor black women to marry. Stuart Tolnay’s careful analysis of census material found higher rates of two-parent families among southern- than among northern-born blacks.42 It was conditions within the cities to which they had migrated, not slavery, that strained blacks’ ability to maintain two-parent families.
Other historians demolished the “last of the immigrants” thesis by showing that black migrants to northern cities faced obstacles not encountered by any immigrant groups. Blacks entered cities in large numbers as unskilled and semiskilled manufacturing jobs were leaving, not increasing. The discrimination they encountered barred them manufacturing jobs to which earlier immigrants had been recruited and which, now, were filled much more often by white migrants from the Appalachian South. Public schools had defined their mission in part as the assimilation and “Americanization” of immigrant children; by contrast, they excluded and segregated blacks. As for welfare, white European immigrants received far more generous benefits than African Americans. Racism and federal mortgage underwriting standards enforced housing segregation. As a result, residential concentration among blacks increased at the same time as it lessened among immigrants and their children. Political machines that embraced earlier immigrants and incorporated them into the system of “city trenches” through which cities were governed excluded blacks from political power until cities had been so abandoned by industry and deserted by whites that resistance to black political participation no longer mattered. All the processes that had opened opportunities for immigrants and their children broke down for blacks. The last of the immigrants joined the legacy of slavery as another myth that had diverted attention from the origins of black poverty and excused the inaction of government.43
The assault on what Moynihan was alleged to have written was no surprise. His report appeared at precisely the wrong moment, if its potential receptivity is the measure. Surfacing in the heyday of the politics of liberation, its inflammatory language and whiff of cultural chauvinism guaranteed that the report would become an instant target—an example of white colonialism—for the politics of liberation and a cautionary example to poverty researchers who have troad lightly and carefully around the black family for decades. One might have expected the Moynihan Report to take its place as an episode in the intellectual politics of poverty and, over time, fade into the embrace of history. But this is not what happened. In the early twenty-first century, not long after Moynihan’s 2003 death, the Moynihan Report staged a stunning comeback, refurbishing Moynihan’s reputation as prescient and a seer.
A 2007 conference on the legacy of Moynihan’s report at Harvard sponsored by the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and Harvard’s Sociology Department and DuBois Institute testified to the rehabilitation of Moynihan as a dishonored prophet before his time. The conference papers were subsequently published as a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences edited by Douglas Massey and Robert Sampson, two giants of American sociology.44 From all quarters came praise for Moynihan and regret that his findings had not been heeded. “When the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan first warned of the social dangers in the decline of black families back in the 1960s, and called for government policies to help deal with these dangers,” conservative sociologist Thomas Sowell recounted, “he was attacked viciously for saying something that everyone now recognizes as true because the problem has grown even worse than it was when he issued his warning. The denunciation and demonization of Pat Moynihan marked a major turning point in public discussions of racial issues. From then on, the test of what you said was no longer whether it was true but whether it was politically correct. This silenced the faint hearted—which is to say, most of academia and virtually all of the media.”45 For most researchers, black family structure and behavior—unless celebrated for its resilience and agency—became a third rail, touchable only at great risk.
In both the late 1960s and early twenty-first century, anxiety centered on the number of out-of-wedlock births and their consequences. But at the time Moynihan wrote and for the next twenty years or so, this concern was linked to a panic over a spurious “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy.46 When even the family Cassandras no longer could deny the decline in teen pregnancy as a source of increasing out-of-wedlock births, attention shifted to the institution of marriage itself and its growing disconnection from parenthood. In both time periods, trends among blacks, whites, and Hispanics moved in the same direction, but blacks remained in the vanguard of family change and the object of most criticism and worry. It was this trend—the disconnection of marriage from parenthood, discussed in Chapter 5, which provided the groundwork for the Moynihan revival. But the revival became possible not only because of demographic trends but, as well, because of a shift in intellectual politics. The politics of liberation had faded into the past, a subject for the burgeoning historical literature on the 1960s and early 1970s, not any longer a powerful force in the academy or among public intellectuals. In the conservative ascendance, which is the subject of Chapter 4, poverty largely dropped off the political agenda, replaced by a concern with welfare dependence, which itself led straight back to the black family. Researchers concerned with poverty—especially poverty among inner city African Americans—could not avoid the consequences of family organization that the intellectual and political climate made it much safer for them to explore. Moynihan became the prophet without honor, deified almost as uncritically as he had been attacked.
In its attempt to discredit the culture of poverty and Moynihan Report—and in the process to remove culture and the black family from the agenda of poverty research—the politics of liberation fought a mostly defensive battle. But there was much more to its story. For in its development of the idea of the ghetto as colony, its links with feminism, and its eventual alliance with human rights, the politics of liberation waged struggles—some of which failed, others of which were partly successful—to alter the frames through which poverty was understood and the means with which it was attacked. The intellectual politics of liberation did more than drive cultural explanations of poverty and black families off the research agenda of social science for decades. It also offered alternate explanations for ghetto poverty in the United States and mass poverty in the Third World.
“Whether one is talking about the fantastic changes taking place in Africa, Asia or the black communities of America,” wrote Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in 1967, “it is necessary to realize that the current, turbulent period in history is characterized by the demands of previously oppressed people to be free of their oppression.”47 The modern black American struggle against oppression began in the 1950s and swiftly escalated into a national movement for civil rights. Its first targets were the legal bases of discrimination: segregation in public facilities, schools, and housing, and barriers to voting. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later, the civil rights movement reached its first goals. For the first time in American history, the federal government committed itself to extending the full rights of citizens to all black Americans.48
The historic achievements of the civil rights movement did not end discrimination or racism. Southern states mounted massive resistance to school integration; northern cities balked at busing students to reduce racial imbalance; whites fled to suburbs, whose exclusionary zoning ensured that all but a handful of affluent blacks would remain outside their boundaries; and, in myriad ways, the institutional racism of the world of work checked black occupational progress. Nonetheless, in every area formal barriers crumbled. Still, the civil rights movement could not rest content with its magnificent achievements. For its participants knew that racism continued to infect America’s institutions and, especially in cities, that a growing number of blacks lived in terrible poverty whose roots lay in racism and exploitation.49
In the conventional story, black economic and political radicalism flowed from disappointment with the achievements of the civil rights legislation in a neat two-stage sequence. The history, in fact, was more complicated. Recent scholarship places “militant organizers side-by-side with nonviolent moderates” and finds the origins of “Black Power radicalism in the political activities of students and activists in the postwar era.”50 Nonetheless, after 1964, events accelerated the expansion of the civil rights movement into a struggle against the poverty and exploitation of northern ghettos. The Los Angeles Watts riot of 1965, followed by ghetto revolts in cities around the country, impelled civil rights leaders as well as politicians to reassess their strategies. Militant young blacks rejected the emphasis on integration and nonviolence at the core of the civil rights campaigns. As they argued that older civil rights leaders had ignored the forces that sustained the systematic oppression of blacks, they drew support from the young, poor blacks in northern ghettos and, as a consequence, shifted the social base of the black liberation movement away from its earlier anchor in an alliance between middle-class blacks and liberal whites. The “most significant indication of the middle class nature of the civil rights movement,” wrote one militant black scholar in 1969, “was the fact that it did absolutely nothing to alleviate the grim plight of the poorest segments of the black population.” The black rioters of the 1960s, he argued, “were vigorously repudiating the civil rights Negro leaders” and calling for new leadership willing to confront the problems arising from “oppression and powerlessness” and capable of speaking to the needs of the black masses.51
Stung by the urban uprisings, aware of the limits of integration as a strategy, challenged by new contenders for power, older civil rights leaders began to refocus their attention on urban poverty. Although they retained their commitment to integration and nonviolence, they too helped transform the black struggle into a quest for economic justice and political power. Martin Luther King, Jr., in fact, as Thomas Jackson has shown, had emphasized the economic roots of black oppression throughout his career.52 This phase of the black liberation struggle had three overlapping components. Established civil rights leaders advocated economic redistribution, job creation, and housing reform. A new, militant Black Power movement asserted American blacks’ kinship with anticolonial struggles around the world, rejected integration as a goal, and hoped to restructure American social and economic institutions, and black economists debated the source of ghetto underdevelopment and poverty, the accuracy of colonial analogies, and strategies for economic development.
In 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr., summed up a decade’s achievements and outlined the tasks that remained. “In assault after assault,” he said, “we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken.… today, Civil Rights is a dominating issue in every state, crowding the pages of the press and the daily conversation of white Americans.” Nonetheless, he stressed, “the deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom had grown only a bud and not yet a flower.”53 Blacks, King pointed out, still lived “in the basement of the Great Society.” Half of them lived in substandard housing; they had half the income of whites; twice as many were unemployed; their infant mortality rate was double that of whites; and twice as many blacks were “dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.” Blacks, as a consequence, faced a set of difficult and interrelated tasks. First was to “massively assert our dignity and worth.” Another was “to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power.” A third was the development of a program to “drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income.” Black poverty had nothing to do with “want of industrious habits and moral fiber”; rather, “dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.” The task was clear: “We must create full employment or we must create incomes.” Joining his call for economic justice to his increasing criticism of the Vietnam War, King argued that if the nation can spend “35 billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and 20 billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”54
King linked the struggles of black Americans to movements against colonialism throughout the world. “The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today,” he wrote, ‘is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom.… All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history.” As in America, freedom required not only political rights but economic justice. “Like a monstrous octopus,” poverty stretched “its choking, prehensile tentacles into lands and villages all over the world.… The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty.”55 King’s call for a worldwide war against poverty echoed a key theme in the black American politics of liberation that predated the mid-1960s riots—but one met, according to historian Robin D. G. Kelley, “with a general conspiracy of silence against the most radical elements of the black freedom movement,” which spoke of revolution, socialism, and self-determination and looked to the Third World for models of black liberation in the United States. Frequently “small and sometimes isolated,” and “independent of both the white Left and the mainstream civil rights movement,” these movements advanced a “vision of global class revolution” that did not grow out of the “civil rights movement’s failure but existed alongside, sometimes in tension with, the movement’s main ideas.”56
Unlike the black radicals, King retained his commitment to nonviolence and criticized urban riots. “At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in prison while the people remain securely behind bars.” In no instance had riots gained any concrete improvement. No violent revolution would find sympathy and support from either the white or the majority of the black population, and “romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom” distracted energy from a tactical strategy for change. Here, as in his commitment to integration, King challenged the new, militant philosophy of liberation embodied in Black Power.57
In the summer of 1966 three leading civil rights organizations—SCLC, CORE, and SNCC—jointly sponsored a civil rights march in Mississippi. On June 17 state troopers in Greenwood ordered marchers not to pitch their tents on the grounds of a black high school. When one of SNCC’s leaders, Stokely Carmichael, defied their order, the police arrested him. Released from jail only minutes before a major rally, Carmichael told an angry, militant crowd: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” His cry, writes Jack Bloom in his study of the civil rights movement, reflected “the experience and disillusionment of the civil rights workers in the South, but it was fueled by the ghetto uprisings [which started in Harlem in 1964].”58 In fact, Black Power had deeper routes that extended back to postwar radicalism, including, for example, West Coast student activism embodied in the Afro-American Association founded at Berkeley in 1961. “While the Watts rebellions signaled a turning point, inaugurating a new militant and anti-integrationist strain of black politics,” points out historian Donna Murch, “many of the social networks and ideas that formed the core of California’s Black Power movement had their roots on the campuses of public colleges and universities.”59 Black Power, asserts historian Robert O. Self, “was a creative outgrowth of earlier efforts [to advance a political strategy beyond desegregation], not a radical and failed break from them.”60
By calling for black power, militants rejected both the analysis and strategies of the civil rights coalition. One result was a new explanation for the poverty of black America: The colonialism of white America had trapped blacks in an ever-worsening poverty from which militant solidarity offered the only escape. In his influential 1962 essay, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” Harold Cruse explained that in the United States blacks experienced “domestic colonialism.” The relationship of American blacks “to the dominant culture of the United States” paralleled “that of colonies and semi-dependents to their particular foreign overseers: the Negro is the American problem of underdevelopment. The failure of American Marxists to understand the bond between the Negro and the colonial peoples of the world has led to their failure to develop theories that would be of value to Negroes in the United States.”61
Cruse and other writers used the colonial analogy before it was taken up by advocates of black power, who transformed it into the basis of a national movement.62 Black Americans, wrote Carmichael and Hamilton, formed “a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them.” Although blacks were legal citizens, they stood as “colonial subjects in relation to the white society.” Colonialism, they argued, operated in three areas: political, economic, and social. Like other colonial masters, whites made the key political decisions that affected blacks’ lives and governed them through indirect rule by coopting selected blacks to administer their decisions. As in other colonial situations, the colony existed “for the sole purpose of enriching, in one form or another, the ‘colonizer.’” Outside “exploiters” entered the ghetto; bled “it dry,” and left it “economically dependent on the larger society.” As a result, the economic depression of black communities worsened. Here, then, was the source of black poverty, which was not only a problem of persons—individuals without enough resources to lead a decent life—but, equally, a problem of place—districts from which the resources essential to sustain viable communities had been drained.63 This spatialization of black urban poverty endured as the signal intellectual contribution of internal colonialism—one echoed, albeit with a different politics, two decades later in the idea of concentrated poverty (discussed in Chapter 5).
In the rhetoric of black power, the colonial analogy became a brilliant and powerful strategy for galvanizing blacks into a militant national movement. As an explanation of poverty, it broke radically with liberal discourse, whether expressed as the culture of poverty, the residue of discrimination, or the lack of human capital. But was it correct? Was black America truly a colony? Could its persistent and deepening poverty be explained by the dependency theory with which radical scholars of the Third World had begun to challenge mainstream theories of economic development? These questions animated a vibrant debate among black social scientists and the few white colleagues who shared their concerns.
The colonial analogy rejected the core premise of conventional development economics: the benefits of economic growth. Radical scholars argued that wealth created by economic growth did not automatically trickle down from rich to poor. In Third World countries, poverty had spread even as economies modernized and grew. Without changes in political control, the benefits of growth always failed to reach those most in need. In fact, growth had widened the gap between rich and poor. Nor did conventional economic theories explain the economic failure of black ghettos. American economic growth had not decreased poverty among blacks. Indeed, black unemployment remained high during a period of economic expansion. Similarly, explanations of black poverty that stressed only the role of discrimination or the low educational achievement of blacks overlooked some uncomfortable facts. The passage of civil rights legislation had not ended ghetto poverty, and blacks achieved far less than whites with comparable educations.64
As they applied the colonial model to America, black scholars drew especially on dependency theory as developed by Andre Gunder Frank and other Third World economists. In a series of Latin American case studies, Frank illustrated his theory that conventional analyses of development and underdevelopment ignored the “economic and other relations between the metropolis and its economic colonies throughout the history of the world-wide expansion and development of the mercantilist and capitalist system.” The expansion of the capitalist system had “effectively and entirely penetrated even the apparently most isolated sectors of the underdeveloped world.” One result was relations of dependence that prevented development and fostered growth inequality and poverty. Ron Bailey argued that Tanzanian economist Justinian Rweyemamu’s definition of dependence could be applied to the status of Africans in the United States. Dependence meant that economic development and expansion in metropolitan economies retarded growth among peripheral economies. Dominant nations used their power to monopolize markets and transfer surplus wealth from dependent nations to themselves, just as powerful white economic interests extracted and appropriated surplus wealth from black ghettos.65
Particularly through the work of Baran and Sweezy on monopoly capital, Marxism also influenced colonial models of ghetto economic development, although black scholars criticized conventional Marxist analyses for their lack of attention to race. The history of capitalist development, contended Baran and Sweezy, confirmed again and again that “capitalism everywhere generates wealth at one pole and poverty at the other.” This was a “law of capitalist development … equally applicable to the most advanced metropolis and the most backward colony.” Within capitalist economies, they stressed, poverty always remained rooted in unemployment and underemployment, or the industrial army, which in America concentrated in “the decaying centers of the big cities.”66
Applied to America, the colonial model was straightforward: Ghettos export their unskilled labor and import consumer goods. Most capital within them remains in the hands of outsiders who control local businesses and export their profits. Unable to import capital, ghettos neither produce the material needed for their subsistence nor accumulate the capital essential to development. Blacks who work outside the ghetto bring back wages too low to offset the drain of their energy and resources. The result is exploitation and dependency, or what some called “domestic colonialism.” Wilfred David summarized the model clearly:
Unskilled labor is the basic productive resource of the ghetto, which is “exported” to the outside economy. Consumer goods and services are largely “imported” from outside, and with a few exceptions, the ghetto is unable to produce its needed materials. Further, it is difficult to import capital into the ghetto for use by its residents, and where such capital is employed it is largely “foreign-owned.” Thus, wealth is extracted by “outsiders” as profits from the sale of consumer goods and returns to invested capital. The outward flow of cash is partially offset by the wages of “exported” labor, but the result is that no net financial accumulation takes place within the ghetto. This creates a situation of dependency. Much as a colony is dependent on its “mother country,” so too is the ghetto dependent on the larger society for most of its material needs.67
Poverty among American blacks, writers pointed out, had special features. The economic forces generating black poverty, claimed Frank Davis, differ from those that create white poverty. Demand for black labor, he argued, did not increase when discrimination lessened; in both boom and depression, unemployment rates remained high among unskilled ghetto laborers. Indeed, technological change had rendered black unskilled workers “redundant.” Demand for their labor in high-paying industry would decrease, thereby perpetuating low wages and poverty in the black ghetto. Urbanization as well as automation had worsened their situation. In subsistence economies, agricultural economist Frank Parsons pointed out, agriculture provided one “refuge for the poor—for all the people who can’t find anything else to do.” But in the United States—especially for blacks driven from the land by the mechanization of southern agriculture—refuge in a subsistence economy ceased to be “a feasible (or acceptable) alternative.” The intersection of race with a dual labor market also sustained black poverty. Black workers, according to David, face a dual labor market, with primary sector jobs reserved for whites, and blacks relegated to secondary or “low-paying low status jobs.” This arrangement protects workers in the primary sector from layoffs due to business cycles. And because secondary-sector jobs offer almost no opportunity for advancement, the dual labor market reinforces the subordinate position of the ghetto worker.68
Colonial powers always confront the problem of control; they must discover how to prevent protest and rebellion. Writers advocating the colonial analogy contended that America deployed two strategies: One was to distribute back to the ghetto a small part of the surplus extracted from its residents. The major examples were welfare and Great Society programs. (This analysis omitted much larger returns of the surplus in the form of public education, infrastructure, police and fire protection, and social insurance.) One critic labeled Model Cities programs “liberal pacifiers.” The other strategy was tokenism, or the selective promotion of a few blacks to positions of influence within ghetto communities. As with colonies elsewhere, internal imperialists chose when possible to govern through indirect rule. With ghettos, according to William Tabb, “acculturated natives” acted as “middlemen between other natives and the colonist businessmen who … reside ‘abroad.’” Not only did they serve the colonial power, they also exemplified the rewards of “working hard within the system.” Indeed, tokenism’s true purpose, according to Baran and Sweezy, was securing the loyalty of the black bourgeoisie: “If this loyalty can be made secure, the potential revolutionizing of the Negro protest movement can be forestalled and the world be given palpable evidence—through the placement of loyal Negroes in prominent positions—that the United States does not pursue a South African policy of apartheid but on the contrary fights for its Negro citizens.”69
Although critics of the colonial analogy often argued that true colonies formed geographically distinct states, most black scholars rejected strict spatial separation as irrelevant. “The concentration made of a given population on a single land area,” claimed Ralph H. Metcalf, Jr., only made colonization “more convenient as a result of centralization.” But an oppressive country could colonize its oppressed population by exploiting them “economically, politically, and militarily, with almost the same machinery it would use with a centralized population.” Although not a national political unit, wrote David, the black ghetto exists “as a geographical, economic, and social unit within its own unique psycho-pathology … The black ghetto is an economic entity covered by a glacier of poverty.”70
Not a colony in a conventional sense, black America formed a new type of settlement, which writers labeled an internal colony. “Internal colonialist perspectives,” explained Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “saw racism as an ongoing historical process which contained both class- and nationally based elements.”71 African Americans, writers on internal colonialism explained, had lived as colonized people before the development of urban ghettos. Indeed, from its inception, their colonization ran as a bitter stream through American history. To J. H. O’Dell, the American Revolution remained incomplete because it left slavery intact. Capitalist institutions and racist psychology had developed within a colonial framework that continued to constrain American blacks. For David, blacks’ contemporary status also derived from their history in America. Study of the black ghetto, therefore, became “in essence a study of de facto slavery, i.e., the black ghetto economy is a de facto slave economy.”72 (The argument that internal colonialism represented one legacy of slavery at first glance appears to have reflected the legacy of slavery argument that black scholars and liberal whites angrily rejected when Moynihan and others applied it to black culture and family life. The difference was that Moynihan and other writers making the same point applied the argument to persons; the black advocates of internal colonialism applied it to place, which is quite different, although still an analogy in need of unpacking.)
Like other colonial populations, Ron Bailey argued, blacks usually had concentrated in places most in need of their labor: the antebellum rural South; late nineteenth-century industrializing southern cities; and twentieth-century northern manufacturing cities badly in need of semi- and unskilled labor. Now, however, automation and deindustrialization had left American blacks concentrated in urban ghettos with no vital economic function. As had occurred in numerous African states, American blacks now formed a colony no longer needed by its colonizers. They had become what some writers called a “neocolony.” (“Neocolonialism” is a term coined by Kwame Nkrumah, who used it to refer to the way in which imperialist powers switch tactics—that is, substitute foreign aid and other indirect measures for repression as a means to “perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom.’”73)
Exploitation emerged as the central and most controversial concept in theories of black colonialism. Based on the Marxist definition of surplus value, exploitation referred to the use of blacks to produce wealth of which they received only a small, inadequate share. “The rate of exploitation,” explained Bailey, “is the ratio of surplus value to wages.” All capitalists tried to increase their share of workers’ daily production. “When the share going to the worker is decreased, the rate of exploitation increases.” Although capitalism resulted in the exploitation of all workers, some suffered more than others. The question was the basis of differential exploitation, or, as Donald Harris phrased it, “whether there is a systemic pattern of under-payment of black labor relative to whites for the same task, same level of skill, and same level of productivity.” Black proponents of internal colonization answered with a resounding yes. Indeed, Bailey claimed that only the concept of “super-exploitation” could describe the labor market situation of American blacks throughout their history. Blacks had been barred from many jobs, relegated to the “least skilled, lowest occupational categories,” and paid less than whites with similar education and training for comparable work. Almost everywhere, they remained the last hired and first fired. The result of the “mechanisms, once by law and now more by custom, was black super-exploitation and impoverishment.”74
Not all black economists agreed. Thomas Sowell, for one, traced black disadvantage to discrimination rather than exploitation. Because of discrimination, argued Sowell, a black man “born with native ability to be a chemist and earn $20,000 a year” easily could find himself a “ditch-digger making $3,000 a year.” He would be “worse off than if he were in fact exploited,” and policies directed toward raising his wages as a ditch-digger only would worsen his situation. For the net result likely would be that machines would replace ditch-diggers, thereby reducing his already meager income. Nor were black people robbed of very much by white America: “The real problem is that deliberate discrimination, unconscious racism and general neglect have left black people too poor to be robbed of anything that would make a difference on a national scale.” For Sowell the source of oppression was not the conjunction of capitalism and racism. “Whenever one group oppresses another, it almost invariably does so by denying them opportunities for self-realization, not by allowing them to develop their potential and then taking away what they have produced.” The answer to black poverty, therefore, lay in the hard task of blacks developing their own human capital.75
Nor did all radical black scholars accept the colonial analogy. Joseph Seward, who taught for seven years in Ghana, argued that the analogy usefully aroused American blacks to “our kinship to our African and Caribbean brothers-in-oppression.” (Note the use of “brothers,” which expresses the unreflexive sexism in the early black radical movement, discussed in the next section.) Nonetheless, the analogy was wrong on several counts because it failed to point out that African and Caribbean neocolonies could break with monopoly capitalism if they chose, while American blacks could not. Seward worried that the internal colonial analogy would end up another source of black oppression because of its increasing acceptance in “liberal ruling class thinking.” One trick of the ruling class, he argued, was the use of the colonial analogy to promote black capitalism, that is, the capitalist development of ghettos by blacks themselves. Black capitalism, he predicted, would only transfer resentment from Jewish landlords to the black middle class. “Black capitalism, if it ever gets off the ground, can be expected to make black workers and slumdwellers even more anti-black bourgeoisie.” American monopoly capitalism had made black people poor, and “black capitalism isn’t going to change that.”76
Like Seward, though with different politics, Sowell rejected black capitalism as an answer to ghetto poverty. “Capital,” he pointed out, “is the most fluid of resources.” It flows wherever profits are highest, and it had avoided the ghetto because businesses there had “on the whole done poorly,” as had “the community banks which … financed them.” Black capitalism, with its emphasis on artificially supported markets, added up to a new form of mercantilism, which as a strategy of economic development had been discredited historically. In Europe and America, generations had elapsed before “repeated disasters” finally led to the abandonment of mercantile policies, and black people could not afford to repeat the same process.77
Unlike Sowell, advocates of the colonial analogy did not rely on markets freed from discrimination for black economic advancement. Instead, they rejected liberal individualism. By focusing on individuals and individual initiatives, Frank Davis argued, the ideology of free enterprise neglected the group oppression of black people, which called for collective action. “The problem in America,” wrote Guy C. Z. Mhone, “is simply that opportunities for blacks are only open to them on an individual level.” Any efforts to enhance “the group upward mobility of black people only results in a redefinition of status such that blacks will remain at the bottom.”78
Any serious attempt at liberation required “a plan to create political cadres” dedicated to organizing black people in the great metropolitan areas and developing strong, independent political organizations directed toward capturing control of all institutions that touched their lives and livelihoods. Even liberal white remedies for black poverty, claimed Charles Sackrey, failed to advocate changing the distribution of power. They failed, that is, to grasp that poverty is a problem of power as well as resources. Whites would still own and control “the productive equipment of the economy, even in areas … predominantly black; whites would also continue to make most of the laws, would still run the schools, the cities, and the counties.”79 Sackrey wrote before depopulation and white flight had turned over institutional control to African Americans in many American cities. It is a great irony of late twentieth-century history that they inherited the ostensible reins of power when depleted resources left city governments struggling just to keep their cities alive, unable even to contemplate the institutional reforms that would turn around the economic situation of black Americans.80
Disagreements among advocates of internal colonialism highlighted the theory’s ambiguities and the different politics to which it led. These included, Omi and Winant point out, a spectrum that ran
all the way from moderate reform initiatives to revolution and ‘national liberation.’ Demands for increases in the number of ‘natives’ occupying key posts in businesses or state institutions (police, schools, social agencies), plans to achieve ‘community control’ of the ghetto and barrio economies, and schemes for a two stage revolutionary process analogous to the Angolan or Vietnamese experiences, were all put forward based on the internal colonialism analysis.81
Internal colonialism enjoyed only a short life as the theory underlying radical black militance. As early as 1970, Murch points out, Huey Newton, a leading Black Panther theorist, “coined the term ‘intercommunalism’” to replace the “Party’s earlier stance on internal colonization, which defined Afro-America as a subjugated colony within the mother country.” Intercommunalism “shifted the focus to ‘communities’ rather than nation-states.” Newton had come to believe that “capitalist expansion and an increasingly integrated world system rendered the nation-state obsolete as a means of confronting power.” Instead, he argued, activists should follow a “communitarian ideal in which resources would be mobilized to serve ‘communities’ rather than nations.” With this shift, Newton was able to link the “Party’s radical anticolonial and internationalist stance with its newfound commitment to reform” expressed through its “local survival programs”—breakfasts for poor children, involvement in local electoral politics, and other practical activities.82
By the late 1970s, debates about the ghetto as colony, like the Black Power movement with which they were so intimately connected, had faded. In the case of Black Power, one reason was the relentless assault of the FBI and other public authorities who broke up the movement through infiltration, propaganda, and jailing and killing its leaders. Even as they turned to practical reformist activity, the Black Panthers could not escape the powerful campaign of law enforcement to destroy them and discredit their activities.83 Internal colonialism, on the other hand, fell out of favor not so much from repression as from a combination of its radical sponsorship, location outside the mainstream of American social science, and internal weaknesses. Neither the literature of internal colonialism nor Black Power left a strong institutional legacy or influence on economic and political thought. For Kelley, “describing black people as colonial subjects was a way of characterizing the materialist culture of racism; it was more a metaphor than an analytical concept.”84
But it was much more than that. Internal colonialism’s brief prominence was a significant moment in American discourse about poverty because it was the first major theory of the spatialization of urban poverty—more firmly anchored than its successor, concentrated poverty, discussed in Chapter 5, in political economy—and, also, because it offered one of the only alternatives to the liberalism of the time. (The spatialization of poverty was, of course, a long standing theme in development economics and, in the U.S., in discussions of rural, Southern, and Appalachian poverty.) To the economists and political scientists who developed the idea, internal colonialism was a deeply serious attempt to develop a theory that transcended liberalism, which, even when it avoided the culture of poverty, concentrated, as Chapter 3 shows, on microeconomic issues: how to get people off welfare, how to train the unemployed, how to prevent children from failing in school. Mainstream social scientists avoided the macroeconomic questions posed in the literature of internal colonialism: Why does America generate so much poverty? How does poverty relate to the dynamics of capitalism? Is American poverty linked to the world economy? Do the same mechanisms perpetuate poverty among American blacks and among people of color in the Third World? For advocates of internal colonialism, unlike mainstream social scientists, poverty was a problem of political economy as well as a problem of power and of space. In its combination of political economy, power, and space, internal colonialism remains unique in the intellectual history of American poverty.
Whether or not theorists of internal colonialism offered correct answers, the questions they raised remain of profound importance.85 Their neglect has impoverished American discourse on poverty and stunted the development of a strong, Left political economy. What accounts for the lack of attention they have received? Why did internal colonialism never enter the mainstream of American debates about poverty? The easy answer is the quality of the literature. By and large, it lacked the polish found in major academic journals and did not use the advanced econometric techniques that began to dominate poverty research in the 1960s. In method as well as theory, its advocates remained outside the prevailing approach to research. Still, they formulated crucial questions; their work bristled with insights unavailable elsewhere; and their combination of political economy, power, and space is immensely heuristic. They might have laid the foundation for a generation of rigorous empirical, theoretical, and historical research. Their work pointed to an intellectual open road, not a dead end. But they suffered fatally from their association with Black Power and Marxism. Because Black Power seemed to sanction violence, outside of academic circles it faded quickly as a respectable, debatable political alternative. Nor, despite the emergence of an extraordinarily gifted group of radical economists such as those involved with the founding in 1968 of the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE), did most economists modulate their hostility to Marxist theory or expand the questions that underlay their research.86 (Since 1969 URPE has published the lively Review of Radical Political Economics, which according to Citation Reports ranked only 256 of 321 economic journals, a signal of the continued marginalization of radical economics within the discipline.87)
The colonial analogy raised issues of geography, class, and power usually avoided by American social science, including the new branch of research on poverty, and its advocates lacked the cultural authority to force these issues onto its agenda.88 At the same time, public policy also contributed to its weakening. When civil rights laws and affirmative action opened jobs and neighborhoods, individual social mobility, as so often before in American history, undercut the institutional, occupational, and residential base on which the theory of internal colonialism rested. Without support for its reformulation in the wake of changed contexts, internal colonialism became a missed opportunity to break through the barriers that have channeled American discussions of poverty and wealth in their narrow course.89 (Today, the relative lack of attention to the concept of human capabilities as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum in American poverty discourse—discussed in the Epilogue—represents another missed opportunity to widen the channels.) Another opportunity to push discussions of poverty along unmapped roads, however, experienced more mixed success and a more enduring legacy. This was black feminism, which fashioned its own distinctive politics of liberation based on the triple oppression of race, class, and gender. White feminism, slow off the mark to embrace poverty as one of its issues, also in time inserted poverty into its agenda for the liberation of women.
Both white women and women of color always have borne a disproportionate share of poverty. In early and mid-nineteenth century America, most white women lived on farms, where their labor was essential to the family’s economy. Some supplemented farm income with the household manufacture of clothing and other articles, but the value of household manufacture declined steeply in the first decades of the nineteenth century.90 Almost none worked for wages after they had married. Before marriage, most employed women were domestic servants; others worked in mills; a smaller number taught school; many labored as seamstresses; others were prostitutes. All these occupations paid little. After marriage, women supplemented family income in various ways: by helping their artisan or shopkeeper husbands, taking in boarders, or sewing and washing at home.91 They depended on their husbands for their primary income. When working-class husbands died, they usually left almost no savings and no life insurance. Their widows, often with children still at home, could earn only the most meager income at customary women’s work. Even farmers’ widows often found themselves destitute or dependent on their children. No public programs existed on which women could draw as a right. Instead, they depended on family, charity, and sometimes meager outdoor relief or, even, the poorhouse. As a consequence, women, including single women trying to support themselves, often suffered terrible, absolute poverty.92 Many contemporaries understood the source of women’s poverty, even if they could do little to alleviate it. Most poor women, even harsh critics of relief admitted, had not fallen into poverty through indolence or intemperance. Upright widows with children and old women remained the quintessential worthy poor. But where could they turn for help? They looked first to their families. Children much more readily housed and cared for their mothers than their fathers. Men never evoked as much sympathy as women. They should have saved enough for their old age; they were cantankerous and difficult to live with; and they could not help with the housework and childcare. Women with young children or without families to care for them turned to private and public authorities. Most large towns and cities in the early nineteenth century had female benevolent societies that made small gifts to widows, who more often than widowers received outdoor relief from public sources. But in both cases the amounts were small and their continuation uncertain. Neither benevolent societies nor overseers of the poor offered help as a right; it always remained charity. (Unemployed and older men, who could not tap the same well of sympathy as women, more often depended on indoor relief, that is, the poorhouse.)93
Women’s prospects did not improve much until the twentieth century. Life insurance became more widespread, and late in the nineteenth century, widows of northern Civil War veterans received pensions. Industrialization opened more semi- and unskilled jobs to women. Still, only a small fraction of married women worked for wages outside the home. In the early twentieth century, state governments began to introduce mothers’ pensions. Although these small grants for worthy widows with children extended the responsibility of state governments, they never reached more than a tiny fraction of eligible women. Nor did the constitutional right to vote, won in 1920, directly alleviate the hardships experienced by women.94 The situation of black women was especially dire. In 1950 9 percent of black women worked in agriculture and 42 percent in domestic service; 67 percent lived in poverty—as did 81 percent of black children and 62 percent of black men—and local welfare officials and social workers conspired to deny them benefits.95
Energetic women reformers from the federal government’s Children’s Bureau managed quietly to nationalize the mothers’ pension concept in the Aid to Dependent Children provision of the 1935 legislation creating the Social Security system. Its sponsors thought that ADC would be a small program supporting widows with children, but in the 1950s its demography started to change. By the 1960s AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, as it was renamed in 1962) supported growing numbers of women whose husbands had deserted or divorced them, or who had never married. Increasing numbers of them were women of color. Hostility to the program—fueled also by an escalating Cold War-inspired antagonism toward the idea of a welfare state—mounted: southern states tacked on punitive regulations, and a welfare backlash swept northern cities. In the early 1960s, the program still supported only a modest number of women, largely because most of those eligible did not apply or because officials arbitrarily denied them relief. A combination of forces, as we have seen—the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, and the welfare rights movement—increased the number of women on the AFDC rolls, whose size exploded. Even though the cost remained a small and shrinking fraction of the total budget for social welfare, it bore the onus of public hostility, which inflated popular conceptions of its relative cost and generosity (AFDC never lifted women over the official poverty line) and fueled myths about the poor women who turned to it for survival. AFDC clients fused gender, sexuality, and welfare dependence into a powerful image that touched deep, often irrational fears embedded in American culture. As they refused to be grateful and demanded public assistance as a right, they provoked a transformation in the historic relation between women and welfare. Poor unmarried women with children now became the undeserving poor.96
Unlike AFDC, other programs, serving mainly the “deserving” poor, helped alleviate women’s poverty. These include Social Security extended to survivors (that is, widows) in 1939 and both increased and indexed to inflation in later years; Supplemental Social Security in 1974; Medicare and Medicaid in 1965; federal housing programs; nutritional grants to women and children with infants; the expanded food stamp program, and, in the 1990s, the Earned Income Tax Credit and child care tax credits.97 By the 1980s, women could draw on an unprecedented array of income supports. Even though they still earned lower wages for comparable work, experienced employment discrimination, and found themselves the object of sexual harassment, legislation and the courts had begun to extend them protections. As their labor force participation soared, women entered an unprecedented variety of occupations with the result that their position improved along most of the major routes charted by the early feminists.98
As a result of work and government support, by the 1980s poverty among women had decreased, but no more quickly than poverty among men. The ratio of women’s to men’s poverty, in fact, remained stubbornly resistant to change. Poverty among women fell from 38.9 percent in 1930 to 20.8 percent in 1959 and hit its low point, 11.9 percent, in 1979 before turning upward to 12.6 percent in 1989. But poverty among men fell more quickly, with the result that the ratio of women’s to men’s poverty was 125 in 1959, 149 in 1979, and 137 in 1999. Even though poverty among women decreased, the proportion of women among the poor grew, leading to what writers in the 1980s labeled the feminization of poverty.99 This increase was driven by the rise in the number of women heading households. Between 1960 and 1984, the number of poor female family heads had increased 83 percent, from 1.9 million to 3.5 million. The changes were reflected among both white and black women, but black women fared worst. In 1960 women headed 20 percent of poor white families and in 1984, 38 percent. By comparison, women headed 42 percent of poor black families in 1960 and 73 percent in 1984. These numbers were cause for serious concern because of the rise, after 1970, in the number of households headed by women. Among all families, female-headed households rose from 11 to 16 percent in 1984. For whites, the increase was from 10 percent to 12 percent and for blacks from 28 percent to 43 percent. By 1986, for the first time women headed more than half of all poor families. (Chapter 5 discusses the increase in female-headed families in later years.) In 1970 cash programs removed 19 percent of female headed families from poverty; by 1984, they lifted only 10 percent above the official poverty line—one result of the war on welfare embodied in the decline in the real value of AFDC payments after 1973. (Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued that the real increase in female-headed households was much, though an indeterminate amount, lower because changes in census categories artificially inflated the increase.)100
Women’s poverty raised alarms in part because of its association with the growing poverty of children. Between 1979 and 1982, the proportion of children under six living in poverty increased from 18 percent to 24 percent and of six- to seventeen-year-olds from 16 to 21 percent. In New York City about 38 percent of all children lived below the nationally established poverty line uncorrected for the city’s cost of living. National children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman pointed out: “Children were slightly worse off in 1979 than in 1969. But from 1979 to 1983 the bottom fell out.” In 1980, 1981, and 1982 more than 1 million children per year joined the poverty rolls, and the rate of child poverty soared to its highest level since the early 1960s.101
The sharp increase in the proportion of women among the poor and of childhood poverty helped draw attention to women’s poverty as an issue, despite the overall decline in the proportion of women who were poor. The feminization of poverty became a prominent social issue because of the interaction of women’s real poverty with the energy of modern feminism and public policy. Three conditions proved especially important: the identification of the early feminist movement with affluent women; the male bias in discussions of poverty; and the Reagan administration’s attack on social programs. To become a mass movement, feminism needed to incorporate working-class women and women of color—which, of course, directed its attention to poverty. As it turned to poverty, feminism confronted a discourse strikingly male-centered. Despite the historic poverty of women, most writing about poor people used male pronouns. By implication, the poverty of men appeared more real, urgent, and distressing. After 1980 the Reagan administration’s policies worsened the situation of poor women. Cuts in income maintenance programs, food stamps, health care, and even the administration’s early tax policy all fell heavily on women. (Male poverty also increased during the same years.) The conjunction of demographic trends, ideology, and politics transformed women’s poverty into a major public issue.102
Historians contributed to the focus on women’s poverty not only by documenting its existence and tracing its sources and trajectory but also by showing how from its inception the architecture of the welfare state disadvantaged women. The division between social insurance and public assistance at the core of the American welfare state, they have shown, reserved the best benefits disproportionately for men. The American welfare state emerged in the 1930s divided between public assistance and social insurance. Social insurance benefits were entitlements; they reflected the assumption that workers and employers paid into funds on which they drew in times of unemployment or when they retired or became disabled. (The insurance model, in fact, has been more myth than fact.) Public assistance is means tested. That is, it serves only people who meet strict income and asset requirements. Although early advocates of social insurance included benefits for the elderly, the unemployed, and the poor within their proposals, the split deliberately engineered into policy created two different types of programs. Public assistance programs became synonymous with welfare; they carried the old stigma of relief. Their recipients were the modern paupers. Social insurance benefits, moreover, always were more generous, and the gap between them and public assistance continued to widen. Social Security, for instance, came to lift most of the elderly out of poverty; AFDC boosted no one above the official poverty line. From the beginning, gender biases underscored the distinctions between these categories. Federal public assistance, ADC, was a women’s program. By consigning most needy women with children to ADC, public policy ensured that they would remain poor. Social Security for decades excluded agricultural and domestic workers, two types of occupations that employed a large proportion of women (and blacks). In the beginning, Social Security did not extend benefits to survivors, that is, to widows; it reflected prior earning, which favored men; and its benefit structure disadvantaged women. At the same time, unemployment insurance contained a structural bias against women because it rested on a male model: its founders assumed it would serve male household heads and designed it in ways that overlooked the needs of women.103
Black feminists along with women welfare recipients became the first to convert women’s poverty into a public issue. In 1971 a group of black and Puerto Rican female political activists in New York City founded the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA). Like other radical women of color, they believed it necessary to build their own organization to advance the politics of liberation. Largely ignored by white feminists who missed the distinctive oppression of black (and poor) women, and exploited by radical black men in SNCC and the Black Panthers, women of color required their own platform for advancing their interests—not only in the United States but around the world. The TWWA (whose lineage extended back to the 1968 Black Women’s Liberation Caucus in SNCC and its 1969 successor, the Black Women’s Liberation Organization) represented one short-lived effort to link women of color around the globe in a politics of liberation.104
In its newsletter Triple Jeopardy (the title refers to the triple jeopardy of race, class, and sex that confronted women of color), published bimonthly from September 1971 through the summer of 1975, the TWWA explained that “Our purpose is to make a meaningful contribution to the Third World community by working for the elimination of the oppression and exploitation from which we suffer. We further intend to take an active part in creating a socialist society where we can live as decent human beings, free from the pressures of racism, economic exploitation, and sexual oppression.” Its ambitious goals, which, as in most feminist politics, linked the conventionally public and private, included radical changes in family, employment, education, services, sex roles, self-defense, and “women in our own right”—the right of third-world women to determine their own lives and the demand that all organizations (including “so called radical, militant, and/or so-called revolutionary groups”) deal with women as individuals valued for themselves, not through their association with particular men; and that they be “full participants on all levels of the struggle for national liberation.” Their concrete demands called for “Guaranteed full, equal, and non-exploitive employment”; “Guaranteed adequate income for all”; and a reform of social services—“inadequate, unavailable, or too expensive, administered in a racist, sexist manner”—that exacerbated the indignities and frustrations faced daily by poor women. “All services necessary to human survival—health care, housing, food, clothing, transportation, and education,” they contended, “should be free and controlled and administered by the people who use them.” With family, in response to the widespread condemnation of “illegitimacy” and the controversy over the Moynihan report, they stressed that there “is no such thing as an illegitimate child” and called for “the continued growth of communal households and the idea of the extended family” along with “alternative forms to the patriarchal family” as well as expanded day care facilities. They also asserted their right “to decide if and when to have children” and demanded free and safe family planning, “including abortions if necessary.” Control of their own reproduction meant more than access to family planning and abortions. It extended as well to the assault on black bodies. “There should be no forced sterilization or mandatory birth control programs, which are presently used as genocide against third world women and against other poor people.”105
In September 1973 Triple Jeopardy focused on the role of involuntary sterilization, a legacy of the eugenics movement, which remained prevalent in the United States right through the 1970s. In “Sterilization of BLACK Women Is Common in the U.S.,” the magazine cited shocking case histories from Alabama, Mississippi, Illinois, New York City, and Georgia. “On the state level,” wrote the magazine, “it is the old story. Laws advocating sterilization of the poor or the ‘mentally defective’ have been on the books in a number of states (22 according to the ACLU) since the 1800s.” But at “the local level, it is terrifying.” The magazine cited the case of a “doctor who informed a number of women that they had cancer, performed hysterectomies, and used the money earned to finance a sparkling new clinic.”106
In her powerful Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts documents Triple Jeopardy’s claims, setting sterilization in the context of the attempt throughout American history to assert control over black women’s reproductive behavior. During the 1930s through 1950s, involuntary sterilization of black women took place in institutions under the auspices of eugenic-inspired state laws. “The North Carolina Eugenics Commission,” reports Roberts, sterilized nearly 8,000 “mentally deficient persons in the 1930s and 1940s, some 5,000 of whom were black.” But most sterilization came to be practiced under different sponsorship:
The violence was committed by doctors paid by the government to provide health care for these women. During the 1970s, sterilization became the most rapidly growing form of birth control in the United States, rising from 200,000 cases in 1970 to over 700,000 in 1980. It was a common belief among Blacks in the South that Black women were routinely sterilized without their informed consent and for no valid reasons. Teaching hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor Black women as practice for their medical residents. This sort of abuse was so widespread in the South that these operations came to be known as ‘Mississippi appendectomies.’ In 1975, a hysterectomy cost $800 compared to $250 for a tubal litigation, giving surgeons, who were reimbursed by Medicaid, a financial incentive to perform the more extensive operation—despite its twenty times greater risk of killing the patient.107
As a practice, sterilization exposed how public policy linked together black women’s alleged sexual promiscuity, unfit mothering, and welfare dependence in a toxic, frightening threat to the fiscal, social, and moral health of the nation. By their actions, even more than their words, medical practitioners of sterilization and their many supporters in public life and among ordinary citizens revealed the place of black women in the pantheon of the undeserving poor. In her history of black feminist thought, Patricia Hill Collins writes, “African-American women were deemed unworthy recipients of aid that maintained their status as permanent beggars.”108
Black women fashioned a politics of liberation that grew out of the pattern of oppression that constrained their lives in ways that marked them as distinct from both white women and black men. One supporter quipped, “there can’t be liberation for half the race.”109 Black women feminists seized on the concept of “womanism” first introduced by novelist Alice Walker. Womanism, as historian Linda Gordon explains, emphasized that black women “shared an autonomous gender system, one distinct not only from white mainstream norms but also from those of white feminists.” Womanism signified “an assertion of women’s rights” that “did not attempt to isolate gender from race or class issues.”110 “With the collapse of the black nationalist movement,” reports historian Ruth Rosen, “African-American women felt freer to take a look at the sexism within their own community. In 1973 activists founded the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which, within a year, had spawned local chapters and had held a national conference.”111 In her introduction to her anthology of African American feminist thought, Beverly Guy-Sheftall succinctly summarized the movement’s common premises.
1) Black women experience a special kind of oppression and suffering in this country which is racist, sexist, and classist because of their dual racial and gender identity and their limited access to economic resources;
2) This ‘triple jeopardy’ has meant that the problems, concerns, and needs of black women are different in many ways from those of both white women and black men; 3) Black women must struggle for black liberation and gender equality simultaneously; 4) There is no inherent contradiction in the struggle to eradicate sexism and racism as well as the other ‘isms’ which plague the human community, such as classism and heterosexism; 5) Black women’s commitment to the liberation of blacks and women is profoundly rooted in their lived experience.112
As with the broader African American liberation struggle, the actions of black women drew on a long history of activism and assertiveness, which for the most part had been ignored or suppressed in accounts of African American history and the history of social and political movements.113 The history unearthed by the new black feminism revealed that the “matriarchy” theory of black history inverted the history of black women, turning their strength into a weakness;114 it also showed how poverty had been integral to the experience of black women since the days of slavery, the product of overlapping pressures: the inability of black men to earn living wages, and their early death, which left black women widowed and without support;115 educational opportunities restricted through the deliberate underfunding of black schools;116 the confinement of black women to jobs in agriculture and domestic service—the most poorly paid employment;117 the reluctance of public authorities and private charities to extend aid to black women;118 the denigration of black women as unfit mothers;119 and exclusion from the exercise of political influence through the ballot box. Because black women’s distinctive pattern of oppression translated into widespread poverty, struggles against poverty composed a key component of their politics of liberation. Activist Pauli Murray, reviewing the statistics of black women’s economic disadvantage, emphasized that “while all families headed by women are more vulnerable to poverty than husband-wife families, the black woman family head is doubly victimized.”120
Black women built their theories and politics of liberation from the ground up. Their ideas about the connections among gender, race, and inequality grew out of lived experience, which also shaped their anti-poverty agenda. This generative role of lived experience in shaping consciousness, theory, and practice remained a key feature of black women’s feminism. What Patricia Hill Collins labels “motherwork,” for instance, “reflects how political consciousness can emerge within everyday lived experience. In this case, Black women’s participation in a constellation of mothering activities, collectively called motherwork, often fostered a distinctive political sensibility.”121 “As women who had almost always worked,” explained historian Ruth Rosen, black women “viscerally understood the bitter experience of economic exploitation, the nightmare of finding child care, the humiliation of caring for white women’s children when their own children cried out for them.”122 “Although day care was an issue that predominantly white feminist organizations covered,” reported Kimberly Springer in her history of black feminist organizations, Triple Jeopardy linked the need for day care not only to women’s work lives, but also to the “intersection of city, state, and federal policies surrounding welfare as they impacted the well-being of communities of color.”123 Black feminist ideology, emphasizes historian Jacqueline Jones, “sprang not from abstract theoretical formulations, but from self-scrutiny and self-understanding.” Toni Morrison mused that the African American woman “had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have reinvented herself.”124
As they constructed indigenous theories and strategies, poor women and men asserted the idea that welfare was a right linked directly to the exercise of first-class citizenship. In The Battle for Welfare Rights, historian Felicia Kornbluh reports that welfare rights activists
created political theories from the materials available to them. They drew on, and transformed, Anglo-American legal and political traditions and the rights discourse of postwar United States. At the center of their approach to politics was a vision of citizenship. Welfare recipients and their allies believed that the rights for mothers that had been written into public policy in the New Deal period should apply to all low-income parents and not just to the respectable white women who had been their primary beneficiaries in the years between the New Deal and the 1960s. They saw the United States as an affluent society in which citizenship entailed access to the consumer goods that allowed children to hold their heads up in school and made women look and feel presentable. Citizenship meant full participation in the economic, legal and governmental institutions that shaped people’s lives.125
In the late 1960s and early 1970s black women asserted their claims to welfare rights and first-class citizenship through the welfare rights movement. The National Welfare Rights Organization, NWRO, founded in 1966, was the most visible welfare-rights player on the national scene. But local welfare-rights organizations preceded it and sprang up around the country. In Philadelphia, the Kensington Welfare Right Union, founded in 1991 and led by the “firebrand” Cheri Honkala, became the most prominent poor women’s anti-poverty organization.
[Honkala and the KSWU] pries open abandoned HUD buildings to provide housing for homeless families. When she and five other mothers found there was no safe place for their children to play, they took over a closed welfare office and turned it into a community center. After being held in jail for six days, Honkala and the others were found not guilty by a jury that was so impressed by the defendants that jury members asked if they could join the welfare rights group.126
In Las Vegas, Nevada, the extraordinary Operation Life, according to its historian, Annelise Orleck, showed that when “the lived experience of poverty is seen as a valid credential, entitling poor mothers and fathers to build their own antipoverty programs, the results can be astounding, both materially and psychologically.”127 Orleck tells the story of black single mothers who left farms in Louisiana and Mississippi for Las Vegas, Nevada, during and shortly after World War II. They ended up influencing state politics, garnering national support, and, for two decades, running a major community-based social service organization. They worked in low-income service jobs and lived in terrible poverty, experiencing the consequences of the city’s racial segregation and the state’s reluctance to accept federal welfare, job training, or health care funds. Galvanized by the cutback in welfare payments, they formed a branch of the National Welfare Rights Organization. National celebrities, clergy, and other supporters joined them on March 6, 1971, as they occupied the opulent Caesars Palace in protest. On March 19, federal judge Roger Foley ruled Nevada’s welfare cuts illegal. Energized by success, the women studied law, entered politics, and built Operation Life, a grassroots organization that mobilized federal, state, local, and foundation funds to deliver social services, health care, job training, housing, and economic development to the city’s impoverished Westside. “It had taken the women years to feel entitled to a fair shake from the government,” writes Orleck. “Now they were arguing something more daring: that poor mothers deserved a voice in policymaking. They knew more about managing a tight budget than any cost-cutting legislator. They knew firsthand what poor children lack and what mothers needed to pull their families out of poverty.”128 For about twenty years, Operation Life ran its services with exemplary skill and efficiency and at low cost made possible by volunteers and minimally paid workers. Despite the success and national praise it earned, the organization struggled against unremitting opposition, which, finally, in the anti-welfare climate of the 1990s, succeeded in shutting it down for reasons of ideology and politics—not effectiveness, efficiency, or diminished need. “What is remarkable,” emphasized Orleck, “is not that the women of Operation Life failed to achieve their vision, but that they went as far as they did. Their successes are astonishing not only because they started with so little, but because those who opposed them were so fierce and so relentless.”129
Welfare rights organizing outlived the militant phase of the black women’s politics of liberation, which, like the men’s movement, wound down in the 1970s, unable to sustain its passion in the face of state-sponsored repression, internal conflict, and the rightward movement of American politics. “Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) records indicate,” Singer discovered, “that the TWWA was under investigation from December 1970 to March 1974. This investigation included at least six sources supplying the FBI with the TWWA’s publication … infiltration of the organization’s meetings, reports on the activities of key TWWA members, and photographs of TWWA members for inclusion in the agency’s Extremist Photograph Album.”130 Black feminists faced external challenges from their struggles to show other black women that feminism was not only for white women; their confrontations with white feminists over demands to share power and “affirm diversity”; and their fights with the “misogynist tendencies of black nationalism.” Added to these “were significant, inter-and intra-organizational conflicts”; “insufficient resources;” and “activist burnout.”131 At the same time, some organizations “decided to stop meeting because they felt it was time to devise new strategies of organizing. These organization sensed a rise in conservatism, and … determined that 1960s strategies would not be effective in the predicted backlash against women of color, the working poor, and people of color communities.”132
Despite their short formal life span, black feminist organizations left a concrete legacy in empowering black women to carry on the struggle in other forums. “It may be more useful to assess Black women’s activism less by the ideological content of individual Black women’s belief systems,” advises Collins, than “by Black women’s collective actions within everyday life that challenge domination in” the “multifaceted domains” that routinely impinge on their experience. An African American mother “unable to articulate her political ideology,” claims Collins, “but who on a daily basis contests school policies harmful to her children may be more an ‘activist’ than the most highly educated Black feminist who … produces no tangible political changes in anyone’s life but her own.”133 As Springer points out, black feminists “often found their activism institutionalized in social services, governmental bodies, higher education institutions, and other organizations they could attempt to influence with antiracist and antisexist ideology.”134 Nonetheless, the early black feminists also left their legacy in a flourishing field of black feminist scholarship—a national meeting at M.I.T. in 1994 brought together 2,010 black feminist scholars—and in many organizations dedicated to improving the lives of black women and children.135
In fact, black feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s composed the starting point for the literature of “intersectionality,” a term first used by Kimberly Crenshaw in her 1991 Stanford Law Review article, “Identity, Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.”136 Intersectionality developed early black feminism’s insights about “triple jeopardy”—the simultaneous oppressions of race, class, and gender in the lives of women of color—into a theoretical program that combined analysis of “the relationships and interaction between multiple axes of identity and multiple dimensions of social organization at the same time”—with a practical program of social and political criticism and action. For Patricia Hill Collins, intersectionality represented a mode of analysis “claiming that systems of race, economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization, which shape African American experiences and, in turn, are shaped by African Americans.”137 In the introduction to their anthology of writing on intersectionality, Bonnie Thornton Dill and Ruth Enid Zambrana explain the ambitious agenda on which the idea rests—four “theoretical interventions” that echo the themes we have seen in early black feminist writing.
(1) Placing the lived experience and struggles of people of color and other marginalized groups as a starting point for the development of theory; (2) Exploring the complexities not only of individual identities but also group identity, recognizing that variations within groups are often ignored and essentialized; (3) Unveiling the ways interconnected domains of power organize and structure inequality and oppression; and (4) Promoting social justice and social change by linking research and practice to create a holistic approach to the eradication of disparities and to changing social and higher education institutions.138
For Collins, the “heady days” of intersectional scholarship were the 1970s and 1980s when it focused on questions of economic power and “trying to do something about social inequalities.” After its promising beginning, however, intersectional analysis had lost its tough, cutting edge, too often turning “inward, to the level of personal identity narratives, in part because intersectionality can be grasped far more easily when constructing one’s own autobiography.” This inward turn also reflected “the shift within American society away from social structural analysis of social problems” and institutions, which had been abetted by the ascendancy of “poststructuralist theory” in the “American academy” with its “erasure of social structure.” With their book, Dill and Zambrana refocused intersectionality on inequality and showcased its essential role in the development of theory and the analysis of policy. The goal—and it was crucial, “more needed than ever”—asserted Collins was to restore “the robust, initial vision of social justice that catalyzed intersectionality’s origins.”139
The exploitation resulting from the links between race, class, gender, and inequality limned by theorists of intersectionality found concrete expression in the care-giving occupations that had largely replaced domestic service among women of color. Care-givers for the sick, elderly, and disabled, overwhelmingly female and persons of color, experienced a combination of low pay, absence of benefits, dangerous and difficult working conditions, and job insecurity that kept them below or, at best, not far above the poverty line—a modern version of the historically oppressive features of women’s work. The substitution of home-based health care for domestic work, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein show in Caring For America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, originated in the 1930s with the WPA, which funded “visiting housekeeper” positions filled mainly by African American women who helped families in poverty. The trend accelerated during the War on Poverty with the attempt to provide jobs for poor women—and move them off welfare—by turning them into care workers and, with the New Careers program, into paraprofessionals. The process of exchanging domestic labor for home aide positions was by and large completed in the 1960s, when federal funding of social services opened up huge numbers of new positions. At first, most home health aides were African American. However, the liberalization of immigration law after 1965 coincided with new employment opportunities made available to African American women by the civil rights movement, resulting in the hiring of newcomers from Latin America and other regions as home health aides and staff in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other entry-level care-giving positions. By and large excluded from the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, home health workers suffered from low pay and terrible working conditions even as their numbers skyrocketed when changes in federal reimbursement to hospitals during the 1980s resulted in shorter hospital stays and the transfer of recovery and rehabilitation to patients’ homes. The story of home caregivers, nonetheless, Boris and Klein show, went in an opposite direction from the rest of the labor movement as home caregivers formed unions that enjoyed real success. “Home care workers entered the twenty-first century with a dynamic union movement—one of the few success stories of recent decades. Like public sector workers in the 1960s and 1970s, care workers for the welfare state repoliticized American labor relations.”140 Here in the militancy of home caregivers was a significant legacy of low-wage women’s politics of liberation for the late twentieth and early twenty-first-centuries.
By the close of the twentieth century, the facts on the ground to which the black women’s and the early white women’s liberation movement responded had undergone profound shifts. The progress of black women was astonishing. As discussed elsewhere in this book, they had moved into a distinctive occupational niche in the public and quasi-public sector. Since the 1960s, their poverty rate had plummeted, and with education held constant they earned as much as white women.141 The defining feature of their history, like the history of black men whom they outpaced in education, income, and occupation, was differentiation. While substantial numbers enjoyed true economic advance, others remained poor, trapped in the ghettos of America’s cities. In 2009 roughly one of every four black and Hispanic women lived in poverty.142
In fact, the condition of all women remained precarious. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of women living in poverty increased by 4.9 million, and fewer of them found help in the public safety net. In 1996 TANF provided cash benefits to 68 of every 100 families with children in poverty; in 2010, the number had plummeted to 27 of 100.143 In theory, welfare reform was replaced by work and an array of new supports such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and these supports did raise a significant proportion of women not far below the poverty line over it. But huge numbers of women, when they worked at all, found themselves in jobs paying poverty wages and lacking benefits. In 2010 women made up a majority of low-wage workers. In food preparation and serving-related jobs, 73.7 percent of workers earned a wage at or below the poverty level; for personal care and service jobs the proportion was 56.9 percent.144 Both of these occupations were populated disproportionately by women.145 The politics of liberation, long faded, had been replaced by the struggle for survival, which, in truth, is the constant theme in the history of poor women—both white women and women of color.
In reality, the politics of liberation was not so much dead as transformed, melded into the international human rights movement. From its inception, black feminism linked its quest for liberation to the struggles of women in the Third World. Accounts of women’s liberation struggles in Third World countries, for instance, filled many of Triple Jeopardy’s pages. Working for human rights on an international scale formed a key plank in the black feminist agenda. Collins writes that “women of African descent have a distinctive, shared legacy that in turn is part of a global women’s movement.”146 At the grassroots, writes historian Rhonda Y. Williams, “black women activists … viewed their daily struggles for material well-being, representation, autonomy, and respect as part of a quest for not only citizenship rights and self-determination but also as a matter of human rights.”147 “Defining poverty as an international human rights issue,” reports Orleck, members of the KSWRU “and other economic human rights organizations have traveled to the Mexican border to meet poor women who live and work in polluted and dangerous American-owned factory towns.” Women helped revive poverty as part of the human rights movement, as Chapter 5 explains, and bend it back from the Global South to the United States. In its trajectory, the human rights movement has renewed the ties between the politics of liberation and the politics of poverty, though to what result remains to be seen.