Poverty is not the issue
Democrats have concluded that getting enough votes on Nov. 6 precludes taking policy positions that alienate middle-class whites. In practice this means that on the campaign trail there is an absence of explicit references to the poor -- and we didn't hear much about them at the Democratic National Convention either.
Republicans, in turn, see taking a decisive majority of white votes as their best chance of winning the presidency. The 2012 electorate is likely to be 72% white, according to a number of analyses. In this scenario, Republicans need to get at least 62 percent of the white vote to win, and Democrats need to get 38 percent or more of the white vote.
Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at Yale and the author of several highly praised books about race and urban America, including "The Cosmopolitan Canopy," organized the symposium. When I asked him about the Democrats' problems in addressing poverty, Anderson wrote back in an email:
Apparently, the Republicans have backed the Democrats, and President Obama in particular, into the proverbial racial corner. It is a supreme irony that Obama, the nation's first African-American President, finds himself unable to advocate for truly disadvantaged blacks, or even to speak out forthrightly on racial issues. To do so is to risk alienating white conservative voters, who are more than ready to scream, "we told you so," that Obama is for "the blacks." But it is not just the potential white voters, but the political pundits who quickly draw attention to such actions, slanting their stories to stir up racial resentment. Strikingly, blacks most often understand President Obama's problems politically, and continue to vote for him, understanding the game full well, that Obama is doing the "best he can" in what is clearly a "deeply racist society." It's a conundrum.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book "The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics," which was published earlier this year.
The issue of race helps to explain another development in academia as well as in the public debate: the near abandonment of the once powerful tradition of exposing the exploitation of the poor.
Matthew Desmond, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard, another speaker at the Yale symposium, described the extensive history of landlords, lenders and employers profiting from the rent and labor of slum dwellers. Desmond posed a question:
If exploitation long has helped to create the slum and its inhabitants, if it long has been a clear, direct, and systematic, cause of poverty and social suffering, why, then, has this ugly word -- exploitation -- been erased from current theories of urban poverty?
Instead, Desmond argued, contemporary urban poverty research
pivots upon the concept of a lack. Structural accounts emphasize the inner city's lack of jobs, social services, or organizations. Cultural accounts emphasize the inner city's lack of role models, custodial fathers, and middle-class values. Although usually pitted against one another, structural and cultural approaches share a common outlook: that the inner city is a void, a needy thing, and, like supplies lowered into the leper colony, that its problems can be solved by filing the void with more stuff: e.g., more jobs, more education, more social services.
This approach, Desmond contends, results in the misjudgment that proposals to lessen poverty by raising the minimum wage or improving welfare benefits would be sufficient. Not so, says Desmond, who spent months exploring evictions of the poor -- white and black -- in Milwaukee: "In a world of exploitation, such an assumption is anything but obvious."
When Desmond began his Milwaukee fieldwork, he
wondered why middle- and upper-class landlords would buy and manage property in some of Milwaukee's roughest neighborhoods. And the end of my fieldwork, I wondered why they wouldn't. As Sherrena [Tarver, one of the landlords he spoke to] would tell me the first time we met, "The 'hood is good. There's a lot of money there.... A two bedroom is a two bedroom is a two bedroom. If it's nice enough, and the people are O.K. with their living arrangements, they're gonna take it. They are at our mercy right now. They have to have a place to stay.