by Ruby K Payne
Ibid. pp. 38-39.
Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1995. p. 169.
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991. p. 60.
Chapter Two: The Role of Language and Story
"At the core of the problems of those on or nearly on welfare is the inadequacy of the schools' efforts to teach what they should first and foremost-language." Children must learn to read, write, speak, and listen.
How do we break the cycle? Start literacy enrichment in the delivery room; cognition research and infant development studies show "that early language stimulationfrom the moment of birth-influences brain development and later learning success." There should be "support networks" to help young parents from poor means in developing their child's language abilities.
Lewis, Anne C. "Breaking the Cycle of Poverty." Phi Delta Kappan. November 1996. Volume 78. Number 3. PP. 186-187.
Ibid. p. 187.
"My mother in her broken English could remedy few of the injustices, but she tried."
"In school, they placed Rano in classes with retarded children because he didn't speak much English."
The author says when he went to school he was put in the back of the classroom to play with blocks because he couldn't speak English.
He didn't want to be misunderstood, so he seldom asked questions.
"The fact was I didn't know anything about literature. I had fallen through the chasm between two languages. The Spanish had been beaten out of me in the early years of school-and I didn't learn English very well either. "This was the predicament of many Chicanos. "We could almost be called incommunicable, except we remained lucid; we got over what we felt, sensed and understood. Sometimes we rearranged words, created new meanings and structures-even a new vocabulary. Often our everyday talk blazed with poetry. "Our expressive powers were strong and vibrant. If this could be nurtured, if the language skills could be developed on top of this, we could learn to break through any communication barrier. We needed to obtain victories in language, built on an infrastructure of selfworth. "But we were often defeated from the start."
"One girl wrote in an essay that she experiences rejection and ridicule from schoolmates when she speaks what she considers `proper' English. They accuse her of `acting white' and of trying to deny her African heritage, charges that upset her greatly."
Psychologists know that basic language patterns are formed very early, with the basic language structures firmly in place by age 5. We learn language, perhaps the most complex of all of our systems of knowledge, by imitation rather than by prescription. That is, we make sentences and follow the patterns of language long before we can explicitly state the rules of grammar or syntax, if we are ever able to do so. Childhood errors are replaced, usually without instruction, with standard forms because the child hears the language used by adults. Children in environments where SAE is the language spoken will develop the patterns of that dialect themselves and will do so very early in their lives."
Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993. p. 21.
Ibid.
Ibid. P. 26.
Ibid. P. 27.
Ibid. P. 219.
Fox, Steven. "The Controversy over Ebonics." Phi Delta Kappan. November 1997. Volume 79. Number 3. P. 239.
Ibid. P. 240.
Chapter Three: Hidden Rules Among Classes
Mayer says America has "'vacillated between trying to improve the material well-being of poor children and ... the moral character of their parents'" for 200 years.
The test of "welfare reform" is fewer teen pregnancies, more marriages that are stable and children living in "better homes," not a reduction in welfare cases.
"Mayer writes: `The parental characteristics that employers value and are willing to pay for, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health, and reliability, also improve children's life chances, independent of their effect on parents' incomes. Children of parents with these attributes do well even if their parents do not have much income."'
Reference to "middle class things."
A character in a story/scenario knows the "rules of middle-class life."
Children at the Watson School did not feel that the time in the classroom was "'real time.'" Instead "they would come alive" when they were able to go to work and be "on their own." Adults on the job view their time at work the same way. In an example, one individual felt that "`the job's just cash to live; the things that matter every day to me are at home ... the family, people ... the neighborhood."'
Ibid.
Sennett Richard, and Cobb Jonathan. The Hidden Injuries of Class. London/ Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993. First published in U.S.A. in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. p. 18.
Ibid. P. 21.
Ibid. p. 93.
Samuelson, Robert J. "The Culture of Poverty." Newsweek. May 5, 1997. Volume 129. Number 18. p. 49.
Ibid.
Goal for most individuals: "[M]aterial things are aids to creating an inner self which is complex, variegated, not easily fathomed by others-because only with such psychological armor can a person hope to establish some freedom within the terms of a class society."
Theories of why poor children fail more often than rich children: (1) "Parents who are present-oriented, fatalistic, and unambitious raise children who are the same. Both generations tend to be jobless and poor." (2) Material deprivation and parental stress of poverty cause failure because children can't compete if their basic needs are not met.
The definitions of class by each group: People at the bottom define class by your amount of money; people in middle class value education and your line of work almost as much as money; at the top, people emphasize "taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior"-regardless of money, education, or occupation.
Middle class is characterized by "'Correctness' and doing the right thing."
A sign of middle class: desire to belong and to do so by a "mechanical act," such as purchasing something.
Middle class: believes in the "likelihood of selfimprovement."
Upper middle class: The emphasis of cookbooks, and books about food and food presentation addressed to them, was about "'elegance."' At their dinner parties, the guests are an audience.
"At the very top, the food is usually not very good, tending, like the conversation, to a terrible blandness, a sad lack of originality and cutting edge."
Middle class is the main clientele for mail-order catalogs; "the things they buy from them assure them of their value and support their aspirations."
Buying things, especially from mail-order catalogs, is a way "the middle and [proletarian] classes assert their value."
Mayer, Susan E. What Money Can't Buy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
p. i6.
Fussel, Paul. Class. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1983. P. 3.
Ibid. p. in.
Ibid. p. 113.
Ibid. p. 132.
Ibid. p. 131.
Ibid. P. 258.
Ibid. P. 34.
Ibid. P. 35.
Ibid. P. 37.
"If it's grammar that draws the line between middles and below, it's largely pronunciation and vocabulary that draw it between middle and upper."
The farther down socially one moves, the more likely that the TV set will be on.
A sign of the upper classes is silence; proles are identified by noise and vociferation.
A Chicago policeman, probably a high prole, said, "'If my mother and father argued, my mother went around shutting down the windows because they didn't want the neighbors to hear 'em. But they [i.e., the lower sort of proles] deliberately open the doors and open the windows, screaming and hollering...' "
Proles like to be called "'Mr. [First Name] Prole."'
Low-income families differ from higher-income families in more ways than just economics (i.e., they're not as likely to have the two biological parents living in the household, to have adults with col
lege degrees or high-status jobs present); "they are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, receive income from welfare, contain adults with mental or physical problems, and so on."
"In communities with limited resources like Humboldt Park and East L.A., sophisticated survival structures evolved, including gangs, out of the hone and sinew tossed up by this environment."
The author says that in the first Christmas his family had (the presents were from a church group), "I broke the plastic submarine, toy gun and metal car I received. I don't know why. I suppose in my mind it didn't seem right to have things in working order, unspent."
When the family moved from South Central L.A. to Reseda after their dad obtained a substitute teaching job, he writes, "Even my brother enjoyed success in this new environment. He became the best fighter in the school..."
Ibid. p. 178.
Ibid. p. 196.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 197.
Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Duncan, Greg J., and Maritato, Nancy. Poor Families, Poor Outcomes: The Well-being of Children and Youth. Duncan, Greg J., and BrooksGunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 14.
Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993. p.8.
Ibid. pp. 22-23.
Ibid. pp. 30-31.
Ibid. p. loo.
Rodriguez says his dad "went nuts in Reseda," buying things such as new furniture, a new TV, a new car. He went into debt to do so, but "his attitude was `who cares.' We were Americans now." But then his dad lost his job, and these things were repossessed.
"It seemed Mama was just there to pick up the pieces when my father's house of cards fell."
During the time in Reseda, his mother was "uncomfortable." ... "The other mothers around here were good-looking, fit and well-built. My pudgy mom looked dark, Indian and foreign, no matter what money could buy."
"It seems to me that the culture of poverty has some universal characteristics which transcend regional, rural-urban, and even national differences. In my earlier book, Five Families (Basic Books, 1959), 1 suggested that there were remarkable similarities in family structure, interpersonal relations, time orientations, value systems, spending patterns, and the sense of community in lower-class settlements in London, Glasgow, Paris, Harlem, and Mexico City. Although this is not the place for an extensive comparative analysis of the culture of poverty, I should like to elaborate upon some of these and other traits in order to present a provisional conceptual model of this culture based mainly upon my Mexican materials."
"The economic traits which are most characteristic of the culture of poverty include the constant struggle for survival, unemployment and underemployment, low wages, a miscellany of unskilled occupations, child labor, the absence of savings, a chronic shortage of cash, the absence of food reserves in the home, the pattern of frequent buying of small quantities of food many times a day as the need arises, the pawning of personal goods, borrowing from local money lenders at usurious rates of interest, spontaneous informal credit devices (tandas) organized by neighbors, and the use of second-hand clothing and furniture."
Ibid. P. 31.
Lewis, Oscar. The Culture of Poverty. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1971. P. 137.
Ibid. pp. 137-138.
Ibid.
Ibid.
". . . [T] he city jail is one of the basic institutions of the other America."
In a conversation the author describes "work hard, get ahead" as a "middle class promise."
The author says she "didn't spend a lot of time worrying about nutrition, just volume enough to quell hunger pains."
"The poor are usually as confined by their poverty as if they lived in a maximum security prison. There is not much exposure to other ways of life, unless their neighborhood starts to undergo gentrification."
In describing her friend Nora's situation, the author writes: "Born into what I think of as the `lost-out' generation, just pre-baby boom, Nora says there wasn't much questioning going on: you obeyed your parents and your teachers; middle-class values and expectations weren't suspect, everyone you knew bought into them. You provided your children with at least as much as you had, and that meant, for a divorced woman, getting a job. Nora's mother still works, at eighty-eight, bound and determined not to be a burden to her children. It's what a responsible person does, Nora believed."
The author, when writing about going to Nora's for a dinner party, says: "I can ask them about the invisible rules that become visible only when you break them. If they say, `Come about seven,' I can demand clarification: what does that really mean? I don't settle for, `Whenever you get here,' I hold out for what's socially acceptable."
Lisa, an interviewee, says: "'I never felt like I was middle class. I didn't live in a renovated house, we didn't have cable or colour television, junk food, ketchup in bottles, new cars, yearly family vacations.' My mother says: `Of course you were raised in a middleclass family. You went to camp, you took gymnastics and ballet, you read books for entertainment, both your parents were educated and working."'
Harrington, Michael. The Invisible Land. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1971. P. 153.
Capponi, Pat. Dispatches from the Poverty Line. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, 1997. P. 41.
Ibid. P. 53.
Ibid. pp. 82-85.
Ibid. p. 161.
Ibid. p. 166.
Ibid. pp. 173-174.
Lisa continues: "'But to me, it seemed that secondhand clothes and home cooking (we never went to restaurants) were less of a lifestyle choice than an economic necessity. This is not to say I felt I was poor. I got everything I needed, just not what I wanted. I was envious of my friends. While we only had two channels on a black-and-white TV, a huge treat was going to lunch at my girlfriend's. We'd eat hot dogs and watch `The Flintstones.' It seemed at the time they had all the luxuries: Pop Tarts for breakfast, white bread, while at home I was crunching stale granola and wheat germ and watching my mother make ketchup out of tomatoes and molasses.'"
"But the new poverty is constructed so as to destroy aspiration; it is a system designed to be impervious to hope."
"This is how the Midtown researchers described the `low social economic status individual': they are `rigid, suspicious and have a fatalistic outlook on life. They do not plan ahead, a characteristic associated with their fatalism. They are prone to depression, have feelings of futility, lack of belongingness, friendliness, and a lack of trust in others."'
Of the poor, the author says that, "they do not postpone satisfactions that they do not save. When pleasure is available, they tend to take it immediately."
"Like the Asian peasant, the impoverished American tends to see life as a fate, an endless cycle from which there is no deliverance."
Class I: "the rich, usually aristocrats of family as well as of money." Class V: "the bottom class, was made up of the poor."
The elite are said to "accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike."
Ibid.
Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1962. P. io.
Ibid. p. 133.
Ibid. P. 134.
Ibid. p. 161.
Ibid. P. 123.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956. p. u.
"No matter what else they may be, the people of these higher circles are involved in a set of overlapping `crowds' and intricately connected `cliques."'
"... [T] here is the increased seasonal change of residence among both rural and small-town upper classes. The women and children of the rural upper class go to `the lake' for the summer period, and the men for long weekends, even as New York families do the same in the winters in Florida."
The up
per social class "belong to clubs and organizations to which others like themselves are admitted, and they take quite seriously their appearances in these associations."
"They have attended the same or similar private and exclusive schools, preferably one of the Episcopal boarding schools of New England. Their men have been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or if local pride could not he overcome, to a locally esteemed college to which their families have contributed."
"The one deep experience that distinguishes the social rich from the merely rich and those below is their schooling, and with it, all the associations, the sense and sensibility, to which this education routine leads throughout their lives."
"As a selection and training place of the upper classes, both old and new, the private school is a unifying influence, a force for the nationalization of the upper classes."
"The major economic fact about the very rich is the fact of the accumulation of advantages: those who have great wealth are in a dozen strategic positions to make it yield further wealth."
Ibid.
Ibid. P. 40.
Ibid. p. 57.
Ibid. P. 58.
Ibid. p. 63.
Ibid. p. 64.
Ibid. P. 115.
In describing the rich: "... [T]heir toys are bigger; they have more of them; they have more of them all at once."
Reverend Gregory Groover says many of the children in the South Bronx don't go to Manhattan. He says, "'...Some have never traveled as far as 125th Street, which is close to us, in Harlem."' He tells about a boy they call Danny. " `... He was 16 before he ever went across the bridge into New Jersey when I took him with me on a trip I had to make. He told me, "I thought New Jersey was this state out there near California." ... "'