The Politics of Poverty, Race, and Religion

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 7:40 pm by Guest Contributor

The Politics of Poverty, Race, and Religion 2015-04-29T19:40:09-05:00 Guest Contributor

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This month marks 51 years since Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” speech. On January 8, 1964, during his State of the Union address, he urged the joint session of Congress to join him in a battle that the “richest Nation on earth can afford to win.” Over the past year, current elected officials have been reflecting on the legacy of Johnson’s war on poverty as a way of assessing contemporary anti-poverty policies and programs. Some Republicans have taken the opportunity to expound on the failures of the current liberal-progressive agenda in light of a poor economy and the nearly 50 million people still living in below the poverty line. With Representative Paul Ryan as their spokesperson, they have collectively resurrected an assessment Ronald Reagan made in 1987 that the government “waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.” Ryan has followed the standard conservative party logic: big government spending on “counterproductive” federal programs induces the poverty trap—a mechanism that impedes upward mobility from poverty to the middle class. For Ryan, who is the current chairman of the House Budget Committee and was the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential candidate, the current federal policies dissuade the free-market values of work and independence that are essential to the American way of happiness and success.

Last July, Ryan released his latest proposal, “Expanding Opportunity in America,” a program designed to reduce poverty and increase social mobility. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that unveiled the proposal, Ryan said, “We need to cut down the bureaucratic red tape. A lot of families are trying to get ahead, but Washington is just simply getting in the way.” He also embarked on a poverty tour around the country, visiting local leaders and learning how they combat poverty in their communities. Last August, he released a book title The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea, which advocates for growing the economy and civil society—not government programs. Ryan and other Republicans have once again strategically transported the discussion of poverty to the domain of individual cultural behaviors. Inspired by local religious and charity organizations’ successes at eliminating gangs from school grounds and assisting men with drug addictions, the party has adopted the cultural deficit hypothesis—blaming poverty on broken families and dependency rather than on social inequities. Against the American “nuclear family,” the “broken family” is a coded term for the single, female-headed household crowded with illegitimate children, which Ryan identifies as the primary cause of intergenerational poverty.

Often overlooked in the cultural deficit hypothesis is the role that religion has played in stereotyping the urban, black lower class. In the late 1930s and 40s, liberal-minded social scientists began to study black laborers at the height of the New Deal era. They were invested in chronicling the psychological ramifications of segregation in urban race relations. In doing so, social scientists, such as E. Franklin Frazier, John Dollard, and Allison Davis, helped to legitimate the cultural assumptions about impoverished, black laborers—from their parenting skills and sexual relationships to leisure activities and group affiliations. In her book Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, Barbara Savage writes that these social scientists “often advanced old arguments without questioning them or listening to the ideas of their human subjects.” Savage adds that within lower-class, black religious circles, these scholars “occupied overlapping roles as trespassers, as intermediaries, as experts, and, ultimately, as creators of narratives they told about respectability and deviance in black communities.”

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