Culture of poverty
If you can't tell I'm catching up on some of my reading... here's another piece from the NYT. This one annoys the shit out of me.
The columnist who wrote Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sounds like a real conservative to me. He gives us great statistics that say that landowning families have succeeded more than tenants, and that owning property makes people take on qualities praised by conservatives: a desire to work harder, to save money. He even says, as the title alludes, that if after the Civil War the United States had made it policy to give each former slave "forty acres and a mule," maybe more black families would be doing as well as Oprah Winfrey's.
Where he pisses me off is when he goes directly from saying that property creates this change, to backing up more of the sorry old proposals to "teach" poor black people to have "responsible" sex, procreate only within marriage, read to their kids, and do other things that have got nothing to do with owning property. He's already said that the property makes the change in culture, but then he supports a plan that has already been proven not to work, of trying to create cultural change in people without changing their circumstances. He's trying to tell us some great wisdom about changing people's lives, but he ignores his own advice about the direction that causality runs.
The columnist who wrote Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sounds like a real conservative to me. He gives us great statistics that say that landowning families have succeeded more than tenants, and that owning property makes people take on qualities praised by conservatives: a desire to work harder, to save money. He even says, as the title alludes, that if after the Civil War the United States had made it policy to give each former slave "forty acres and a mule," maybe more black families would be doing as well as Oprah Winfrey's.
Where he pisses me off is when he goes directly from saying that property creates this change, to backing up more of the sorry old proposals to "teach" poor black people to have "responsible" sex, procreate only within marriage, read to their kids, and do other things that have got nothing to do with owning property. He's already said that the property makes the change in culture, but then he supports a plan that has already been proven not to work, of trying to create cultural change in people without changing their circumstances. He's trying to tell us some great wisdom about changing people's lives, but he ignores his own advice about the direction that causality runs.