Poverty in America
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This is a study of poverty, official poverty policy, and the politics of Black Liberation its checkered past and uncertain future. Why did black ghettoes explode in the 1960s, immediately in the wake of the Civil Rights revolution? And why have the failed to explode, at least in the dramatic sense of mass rioting, in the 1980s, when the condition of the black poor in our inner cities seems worse than ever? Is the politics of black liberation dead? Or is it ready to re emerge in a new form? These are questions which we will attempt to touch on in the following pages. If you hear the phrases "poverty in America," or "the poor," "the underclass," or even "the inner city," and they trigger any mental image, chances are that the image you will form is one of of poor Americans who happen to be black. Our stereotyped image of "the poor" is one of teenaged welfare mothers who have babies so they can collect welfare, and of their brothers who hang out on street corners, deal and smoke "crack," and shoot one another or unfortunate bystanders (Katz, 1989: 195). Yet, in fact, most poor Americans are not black, they are white. As of the middle 1980s, official statistics indicated that there were 52.4 million Americans living in poverty, of which 41.8 million, or almost exactly eighty percent of the total, were white. These white poor, though four fifths of the total, are socially invisible. We undoubtedly see them every day, but we have no no distinct,
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ndent underdevelopment as any Central American or African country.
The abolition of Jim Crow laws, enacted by white governments, could only be achieved with white allies and support. But just as emancipation after the Civil War had ended institutional slavery without truly making black people free, so the civil rights revolution ended institutional inequality without making black people truly equal. The struggle now had to be fought on the economic front, within the ghetto communities, argued the black liberationists. Whites had no part to play, save to get out of the way.
But the black liberation movement was sabotaged on several fronts. The first was its connection with white radicalism, which flowered at the same time in response to the war in Vietnam. Some black radicals, notably the Black Panthers, found that "it was easier to appeal to the sympathies of white liberals and radicals than to organize the Black community" (Katz, 1974: 25). Their violence oriented rhetoric was appealing to white, middle class, romantic revolutionaries. But it did nothing to foster black independent mobilization in the ghettoes, and led only to the Panthers' swift eradication at the hands of the police.
The Panth
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Black Panthers, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, Third World, Underlying American, Moynihan Katz, York City, War Poverty, Civil War, George Gilder, black liberation, katz 1989, middle class, jim crow, black people, late 1960s, independent mobilization, thomas 1974, war poverty, black liberation movement, black liberationists, native middle class, politics black liberation, strong native middle, katz 1989 24ff,
Approximate Word count = 2741
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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