Culture of Poverty

In a seminal work about poor Mexican families titled Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis fashioned the concept of “culture of poverty,” an explanation for why poverty is reproduced and transmitted from one generation to the next. Lewis contended that a distinctive set of cultural patterns and values among the poor, which are antithetical to mainstream values, impairs poor people's attempts at full participation in mainstream economic, political, and social sectors. He developed a list of 50 traits that he believed to constitute a culture of poverty, including feelings of marginality, hopelessness, dependency, not belonging, and little sense of history. Lewis conceived of a culture of poverty as one that inculcated poor people with no class consciousness. Lewis argued that those beset by a culture of poverty are steeped in their own local problems with no knowledge of how poverty and inequality operate in other parts of the world. When the poor mobilized around class interests in unions and within political movements, according to Lewis, they are no longer ensconced in a culture of poverty.

Lewis surmised from his research that a culture of poverty results from poor individuals' feelings of despair over their marginal positions in a class-stratified, highly individualistic, and capitalistic society. That is, the poor are believed to have adapted to the dismal economic and social conditions that they face daily. Therefore, according, to Lewis, poverty is more difficult to eliminate because the patterns of behavior exhibited by the poor are transmitted generationally and create a continuous immersion in poverty for some families.

Although sociologist William Julius Wilson rejects Lewis's culture of poverty thesis, he has offered social and structural explanations of how certain behavioral and social patterns develop among the poor. Wilson argues that social isolation from families and individuals who subscribe to more mainstream values foments the culture of poverty that Lewis discussed. Social isolation encompasses the degree to which inner-city residents lack sustained interaction and contact with upwardly mobile individuals and families. Wilson has argued that this isolation results from the out-migration of many middle- and working-class families from the central areas of major metropolitan cities. Consequently, many low-income [Page 579]individuals are not exposed to working and educationally oriented role models. Subsequently, various patterns such as increased high school dropout rates, increased illiteracy, extremely limited college-going, and drastic unemployment have developed. These behaviors limit the social mobility of many of a society's low-income residents.

From an educational perspective, one framework that is considered culture-of-poverty-like is one posited by anthropologist John Ogbu. Ogbu developed one of the most dominant theoretical frameworks in the race, culture, and achievement literature explaining why “involuntary” or native minority students perform less well in school than do “voluntary” or immigrant minority students. Ogbu posited that the descendants of persons who were involuntarily brought to the United States via slavery, conquest, or colonization react negatively to continual experiences with subjugation, racism, and discrimination. As a form of collective resistance, these descendants reject behaviors that are considered to be the province of the dominant White middle class. Consequently, they develop a cultural identity that departs from that of middle-class Whites, which these students view as threatening to their minority identity and group solidarity.

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