In this chapter by William Julius Wilson, he introduces to us the jobless poverty of today and the jobless poverty of the last. He introduces to us statistics that back up his study. Wilson believed that inner-city joblessness is an extreme and severe problem them is sometimes over shadowed when the main point is focused on poverty and its consequences on being in poverty and or being poor. He focuses his work on the joblessness of the inner city.
This joblessness does not include people who are not employed by companies, or other places, but it also focuses on other types of “employment” such as street hustlers, drug dealers, black market, and unpaid housework jobs, such as babysitting, stay at home mom, ect. I thought Wilson brought about extremely good statistics in his research. He stated that in 1990 in the inner-city ghetto of Chicago, only 1 in 3 adults aged sixteen and older held a job in the ghetto poverty areas of Chicago. In the tracts of the nation’s one-hundred largest cities, for every ten adults who did not hold a job in a typical week in 1990 were only six employed persons.
What I liked about this article is he parallels the effects of joblessness with the way you live you live your life and the self discipline you have for yourself on the job, and outside of the job. A person who lacks a successful job or the absence of regular employment, that individual may be involved, in my opinion, in more petty crimes, violent crimes, ect. Your family life, and life in general become less coherent. If you grow up in the inner city of Detroit, not a breadwinner of the family, where none of your family members graduated from college, and only one of your family members has a job, you are more than likely going to become less coherent of caring about getting a job, or graduating from school. You will not be determined to be on time for a job, you are probably not going to have many goals in life, and your aspects of daily life will go down the tubes.(Not to their fault at all). If you are born into a steady upper middle class family with a steady breadwinner in the family and in a upper middle class neighborhood you are more likely to succeed and care about goals. If most individuals in your neighborhood are employed and have disciplined habits that are reflected of their jobs and goals, you are likely to want to succeed just like them. You have a sense of the recognition of the hierarchy of the neighborhood. If you see the rewards (material and nonmaterial) associated with hard work(the American way), and responsibility, it will thrive you to do well in everything you do. I absolutely agree with Wilson when he talks about this in this chapter. The external factors, the factors we can’t control, has a huge effect on how we are brought up, and how we see ourselves and the other people around us. If you are brought up on the streets of the city you are going to have a hard time moving up that social ladder and getting out of that life, rather than if you are born into a white, prestige family that has the money and resources to send you to the best schools. This has a huge factor on the jobless poverty. You must take this into consideration, and I thought Wilson did it well in his findings and research.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Jobless Poverty: A New Form of Social Disclocation
The Perpetuation of the Black Underclass
The authors of this article place their main emphasis on the word “segregation.” I don’t even know where to start. The author goes on to say that residential segregation is completely and solely based off whites and I quote “it was manufactured by whites through a self-conscious actions and purposeful institutional arrangements that continue today.” I think it should say “manufactured by upper-class” instead of whites. If were a high ranking top paid doctor, I would want my house in a neighborhood with people of similar socio-economic status. What I am getting at is I believe the price of real estate can be a huge attribute to residential segregation, as well as personal prejudice whether it is coming from a white or black person. An underprivileged white or black person would have trouble moving into a neighborhood that is not within their means. I understand that the author does contend that income is not a factor for residential segregation that it still occurs among blacks and whites of all socio-economic statuses. So instead of saying residential segregation is cause because of the institution and the structure, what about bringing it down to the individuals?
For example, say if there was a middle-class neighborhood of all whites and a family of blacks wanted to move in, I would like to point out that maybe they would not want to move into that neighborhood because it was purely all white, and they might feel uncomfortable. As well this can certainly go both ways. I do understand that the author states that blacks would prefer to live in half and half communities, but I do not believe he had any statistical data to back that up.
When the author says “Deleterious neighborhood conditions are built into the structure of the black community. They occur because segregation concentrates poverty to build a set of mutually reinforcing and self-feeding spirals of decline into black neighborhoods.” What about extremely poor white or other race neighborhoods? Does this apply to them too?
The authors talks about how Black English has become progressively more distant from Standard American English, and its speakers are at a clear disadvantage in U.S. Schools and labor markets. What about redneck English? I would like to believe that redneck English would not put those speakers in advantage of those that speak Standard American English.
Overall this article was good, even though I do not agree with some of it. Which could very well be because I am white, or it could because I am middle class (or would like to think so). I truly believe that residential segregation has a lot to do with both money and personal prejudice. Not the institution or the structure of things. That’s just my two cents.
The Perpetuation of the Black Underclass
When someone thinks Black underclass we all think; ghetto, drugs, welfare, etc. But we never think about how those things became associated with the blacks. The word that Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton believe is the main explanation for this is “segregation”. Massey and Denton seem to focus on the fact that the United States has moved into two societies, one being black and one being white – separate and unequal. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s blacks lived in separate neighborhood, or for that matter a separate side of town because of all the racism that was going on at that time. Once civil rights moved in, it was not supposed to be segregated any more; everyone was supposed to be set on equal term. But in today’s society we still see some of the same segregated actions; it’s just not as out in the open as it used to be 70 years ago.
In the book it states that the reason segregation is still going on is because, the civil rights laws that were passed in the 1960’s haven’t had enough time to work yet. I agree with this statement because if someone was treating you like crap for 300 some odd years you’re not going to just have changed feeling in a 50 year period, it’s still people alive that remember and went through all the horrible things that happened in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Massey and Denton States that “this extreme racial isolation did not just happen; it was manufactured by whites through a serious of self-conscious actions and purposeful institutional arrangements that continue today”. They also go on to state that the black segregation is unique compared to the other races, because basically it shows no promise to get better.
So because blacks are residentially segregated it undercuts the social and economic superior of blacks in the United States. Segregation is also a big factor in poverty. One can’t improve their life chances, when their primary means are not too great to begin with. Due to the fact that blacks and whites live in different districts that leads to the fact that blacks have different schools, hospitals, and other intuitions. These district lines were made to separate the whites from the blacks. I look around my home town there are three high schools in the city one is predominately black, one is mixed, and one is predominately white. The one that is mixed I looked back at the history of the school and it was considered a white school but as the years went on it became a fairly mixed school. I see that now there are more blacks moving into that area, but on the contrary the whites are moving out. A school that I attended and once was a mixed school is now predominantly black, and the whites are shipping their kids off to better educational institutions. I want to leave you with a passage from the book that I think really sums up how white society is deeply caught up in making of the upholding of black the black underclass. “White institutions created it (the ghetto), white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
American News Media and Public Misperceptions of Race and Poverty – Martin Gilens
Our opinions and behavior are a reaction to the way we view the world. Lippman believes that what we view through different forms of media leaves “pictures in our heads” that influence our actions and feelings. Many people depend on the media for information on our society and world, however he thinks that these “pictures” do not always represent absolute truth. Everyone knows that reports about the world and its relentless issues come from the mass media.
Gilens aims for readers to understand the core of American public opinion, to understand Americans’ viewpoint of the social and political world we live in, and also the role the media plays in developing those views/ideas.
One of the surveys show that public views of poverty is exaggerated by Americans in regards to the belief that African Americans compose to be the poor over any other race. The Gilens states “…news media distortions coincide with public misperceptions about race and poverty, and that both are biased in ways that reflect negatively on the poor in general, and on poor African Americans in particular”(P. 258). In Gilens’ argument he believes that the relation between misunderstanding by people and the media’s inaccurate representations of poverty goes hand in hand. The Medias distortion of what they present to our society are directly connected to our misperceptions that continue to build existing stereotypes and personal views.
Americans, who believe that there is an array of opportunities, also believe that poverty itself is for those who have personally failed. Americans have distorted ties between poverty and race, and these continuous stereotypes lead to the idea that African Americans are lazy and poor (P. 259).
I question Gilens studies because he admits in the reading that the depiction of poverty by American media has never been systematically studied; how can I as a reader be convinced that this research is accurate or done without bias?
Under the section of Findings (Page 532) there is a lot of statistics that support the issue of readers who read magazines like U.S. News and World Report are likely to have an influence that African Americans make up a large number of the poor. I could see that the majority of the reading was based with some truth, but I also think that the author ignores the fact that not all Americans are gullible and naive when it comes to seeking out information from the media. I do not buy into everything that I read or watch. I am somewhat of a skeptic. I believe that most people do not lack commonsense, and could agree with me. Didn’t your Mom or Dad warn you on how to view the media? Although, TV is a main source for Americans…I believe that sometimes information we receive does install to an unconscious level, but I think the Gilens is a turd to assume that Americans as a whole can not make conscious decisions for themselves about the media and its misrepresentation of poverty and race.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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Tillys article the roots of durable inequality starts our discussing food and poverty and the way at affected the work force in 1800’s. The people who were lower class were often well on average shorter than the wealthy did grow taller as they came into adult hood or involved with different careers. A lot of the reason for this is because of the nutrition a lot of families were growing their own food because production was exported and they could do it faster themselves. Three to ten percent of the work force did not have enough food to have enough energy and power to be able to work an entire day. Up to 20 percent of the people at this time in all areas were beggars that is an outrageous amount. With the amount of poverty at that time the people who were not beggars barley had enough to feed their family let alone help out others.
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The height of an average adult in western countries has risen six inches over the last century. They say hat height comes form genes and also nutrition as a child. But he also indicates something about male and females living together and what I got from it he was saying that the female eats less food their for they stay smaller than the male. He says this is genetically so that females are just prone to eat less this is why this fact stays the same thought all cultures and societies. He talks about how starting at childhood we teach our children their gender roles even giving boys more food than we would give a girl. Well are the boy hungrier than the girl? Or is this just the way we train or children to be.
He tells us how in western countries they some times take food away from citizens to give to the military. Well with out citizens they would not have military. The idea being that they want the men to be strong and well nourished so they can fight the best for their countries. The will always need to recruit new members to the military so if the people are not getting as much food the people they recruit are not going to be strong when they go in and it will take a while to get them healthy and strong to be able to go out and perform the difficult tasks that the military actually has to and they can not be malnutritioned doing it.
Spinning Knowlegde Into Gold
I thought it was interesting that the chapter talks about labor and capital, the two basic productive resources, and is defined culturally and are matters of perception. The Untied States thankfully now outlaws child labor so adults can no longer see children as workers. I don't agree that what labor is and who is capable of it should be a social judgement. I think there should be one definition of it that all the world has to uphold.
The chapter makes a good point when they say that knowledge, capital, and labor are the three basic factors of production. Each is essential to produce all goods and services in all societies and eras. This reminded me of a company today because every person working at the company has to take part to make the product. The five different resource distribution I found very interesting because I would have never thought of knowledge, capital, and labor being put in different distributions. I would have never thought that all the distributions could be found in history and that each would give rise to its own class structure.
Thanks to logocracy, investing in capital is not needed because people only need to possess knowledge in order to control and profit from economic enterprises and to occupy high seats of government. I think the spirits of witch doctors and the God of the Middle Ages are now ghosts and because of logocracy the ghosts haunt capitalism and socialism.
Spinning Knowledge into Gold: Knowledge as Property
Derber, Schwartz, and Magrass use their article to present knowledge and its role in obtaining, controlling, and retaining class power. Using historical examples knowledge is characterized in forms ranging from magic performed by witch doctors, blessings by clergy, and industrial knowledge retained by management. Derber and his colleagues elaborate on the importance of these knowledge holders efforts in legitimizing their status as experts and their means of establishing and rationing the control over their knowledge as property.
The authors of the article describe the importance of establishing a worldview to support the importance of your expertise in society. So, just as the witch doctors of the Azande are described in the article as having set up a magical worldview their people cannot escape so we live in the age of high science and the existence of such threats that support the importance of that knowledge. Fifty years ago people were not worried about such things as super volcanoes and cataclysmic meteor strikes but now we have scientific experts who have discovered evidence to support the possibility of their occurrence and dream up techniques to counter these disasters.
Derber, Schwartz, and Magrass describe "enclosing the commons" or creating the exclusivity of knowledge. In our modern country we use the education systems to establish the rarity of knowledge. Any man, woman, or child can pick up a book and study physics but it is only through the achievement of various levels of degrees that this knowledge is made marketable. The authors use examples of this control of knowledge such as priests blessing fields. The peasants in the Middle Ages could have blessed their own fields in hope of a bountiful harvest but it was only the clergy who were legitimized and ordained through the church.
Finally, the article covers the topic of Logocracies and their past examples and future potential. This has particular relevance in an age of increasing technical development at all levels of society. Boardrooms, classrooms, and newsrooms are all perfect places to go looking for these high qualified experts related to the contemporary worldview and the problems it presents.