Poverty

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Poverty

The term poverty has many different and complex meanings. Similar terms exist in various languages, but they often connote different and particular conditions of landlessness, destitution, deprivation, and inequality. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the usage of the term can be traced to the Middle Ages, though its emergence as a concept is more appropriately located in the writings of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), specifically in an evolutionary theory that interpreted poverty and famine as natural outcomes of population growth.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND POVERTY

In contemporary times, the concept of poverty as a social problem, and particularly as a problem to be addressed by the modern state, has its origins in the late nineteenth century. In England, the long process of “enclosures,” which started in the thirteenth century and displaced and dispossessed English peasants through the privatization of agrarian and common lands, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution by freeing up labor and concentrating capital. But the system of industrial capitalism was to generate intense forms of poverty. England’s rural poor made their way to cities such as London and Manchester, where they clustered in slums and worked under conditions akin to sweatshops. These conditions made poverty more visible than it had been previously, and social reformers and urban planners set about to create some of the first mappings and categorizations of poverty, sorting the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving” categories. There was charity for the former group and stiff penalties, in the form of poorhouses and vagrancy laws, for the latter. The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) later theorized that such institutions of “discipline and punish” are the foundations of modern power.

In England, in France, and elsewhere in Europe, there was also concern that the urban poor would organize in rebellion and revolution, as they did in Paris in 1798, and again in 1848, and as had the rural poor in various peasant revolts. The Second Empire of France thus sought to break up urban enclaves of poverty, vesting Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann with the powers of urban modernization, including the capacity to demolish the slums of Paris and displace the poor to scattered peripheries of the city. Such techniques of poverty management, both in England and France, were precursors to, and paradigms of, twentieth-century sociospatial control.

RACISM AND POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES

American cities were also convulsed with the visible poverty of industrial capitalism. These cities had large immigrant populations, initially from Europe and then from other parts of the world. The concern with poverty was thus inevitably a concern about racial and ethnic differences. The social reform efforts of the late nineteenth century, such as the settlement houses, intended to assimilate the immigrant into an American way of life. However, these liberal tendencies did not apply to two social groups that were seen as the racial Other. On the West Coast, Chinese laborers were building the infrastructure that was to make the settlement of the American frontier possible. However, by the early twentieth century, the Chinese were seen as a threat. Racist cartoons depicted the “Chinaman” as an evil and alien figure. Legal mechanisms, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricted the ability of Chinese workers to bring their families to America. Urban planning codes made it impossible for the Chinese to rent or own property in any part of the city other than Chinatown, which became a space of quarantine and control.

On the other side of America, large numbers of black families were making their way from the Deep South to the factories of the Northeast and Midwest. This Great Migration made visible the failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Despite the formal end of slavery, the American South was a racialized space marked by segregation, violence, and lynchings. But in the cities of the North, black Americans were to find other forms of state-tolerated, even state-sponsored, segregation. These included racially restrictive covenants that protected white neighborhoods in the name of property values; redlining policies that devalued property in black neighborhoods; and segregated public housing that, when integrated, saw massive white flight and a concentration of poor black families. This was in fact an “American apartheid” (Massey and Denton 1998).

In the American context, this racialized experience of poverty has been explained in various ways. In the 1920s, the Chicago School of urban sociology put forth a conceptual model of American cities as ecological zones of social and spatial mobility (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925). This liberal interpretation envisioned the city as a spatial equilibrium where all social groups could be fully accommodated. The political scientist Edward Banfield was to later claim that the explanation for ghettoization and segregation of black Americans lay in the fact that black Americans had simply arrived late to the city, and were thus unable to access jobs and neighborhoods in the same way as European immigrants. Poverty, in other words, had nothing to do with structural racism, but was instead a historical idiosyncrasy. More important, Ban-field argued that black Americans did not want to leave their racial enclaves: “there was nothing to stop them from doing so,” he famously argued, concluding the chapter “Race: thinking may make it so” (Banfield 1974). Other scholarship, of course, such as the pathbreaking work of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (1945), had already demonstrated why the argument “there was nothing to stop them from doing so” could not have been further from reality. Drake and Cayton delineated a “Black Metropolis,” a stubborn and persistent spatial concentration of racialized poverty in the heart of Chicago. But Banfield’s work proved influential, reinforcing themes of a “culture of poverty.” Liberal policymakers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965) argued that black poverty could be partly explained by a tangle of pathologies, including a distinctive matriarchal family structure. Culture-of-poverty arguments have even made their way into the work of the eminent African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson. In his famous research on the American underclass, Wilson noted that the economic restructuring of the 1970s sharply worsened the conditions of black Americans. Work disappeared from the ghetto and, in a “spatial mismatch,” new jobs existed far away, often in the suburbs. He notes that with the civil rights movement, as restrictive covenants and redlining were struck down, black middle-class families did manage to leave the ghetto, but they left behind an underclass mired in a culture of poverty. These liberal frameworks of poverty have faced scathing criticism in the work of Loïc Wacquant. In an essay titled “Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto” (1997), Wacquant insists that to state that poverty creates the ghetto is to reverse causation. Instead, the ghetto is a space created through the institutional mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control, and such forms of institutionalized racism create poverty.

THE EFFECTS OF COLONIALISM

It is, of course, not enough to understand poverty, and its racial dimensions, solely in the Euro-American context. Poverty, in modern times, is inextricably located within structures of colonialism and imperialism. Such forms of colonialism include colonies of settlement that destroyed and wiped out indigenous populations, as in the settlement of the American frontier. They also include colonies of rule, where European powers established rule over colonized populations and lands, as the British did in India or the French did in North Africa. Using the world-systems perspective of theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930), poverty can therefore be understood as a structural feature of the global extraction of resources. This unequal exchange is expressed as a core-periphery relationship, where colonizing (core) countries exploit colonized (periphery) countries. The core-periphery relationship is replicated at various scales—within the periphery, the primate city (one that is more than two times as large as others in a nation) exploits the countryside, and within cities the formal sector exploits the informal sector. Such a condition is often described as “dependency” or the “dependent city,” a space where poverty is determined not only through internal mechanisms but also through the extractive and exploitative nature of global linkages (Cardoso and Faletto 1978).

While colonialism formally ended in much of the world in the mid-twentieth century, dependency theorists argue that the core-periphery structure persists through new institutions of international development, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). While these institutions claim to enable economic growth, stabilize international financial markets, and alleviate poverty, their critics see them as instruments of “neocolonialism” (Escobar 1995). The World Bank stands accused of the widespread displacement and dispossession of vulnerable social groups in the name of development and modernization. The International Monetary Fund is seen to be responsible for severe austerity policies that have sharply restricted the ability of nation-states to maintain social safety nets or subsidize basic consumption. Various global poverty campaigns, such as Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History (2005), have called for an overhaul of these institutions and pushed for debt relief for formerly colonized countries.

Colonialism, or neocolonialism, is much more than the extraction of material resources, of course. It is also a racial ideology that claims a “mission of civilization” as a “white man’s burden” (Fanon 1952). In the late nineteenth century, as London and Paris were being reformed and modernized, colonial cities such as Algiers and Calcutta were being managed and rationalized by colonial administrators. Colonial cities were often divided into “white town” and “black town,” with natives cordoned and quarantined in the black town in a manner reminiscent of the slums and ghettos of Europe and America. This “dual city” also emerged under conditions of semi-colonialism in cities such as Cairo and Mexico City, which were formally independent but remained within the sphere of control and authority of European powers. Here, native elites sought to enclose and contain the urban poor, and in some instances, as in Mexico City, they did so to enforce complex hierarchies of whiteness and color. Colonialism also returned “home” to shape ideologies of race. As analyzed in the seminal work of Edward Said (1977), Europe produced the “Orient” through military conquest and economic rule as well as through discourse—through the power to create an image and declare it to be reality. Such forms of “Orientalism” were applied to the colonized Other, but they were also applied to the urban poor in Euro-American cities. Jacob Riis, in his passionate documentation of urban poverty in New York in the 1890s, presented the poor as the “other half,” and designated poor street children as “street Arabs.” Wacquant, therefore, labels more recent instances of American ghetto poverty as the “new urban Orientalism.” Indeed, American public debates about the “Latino metropolis”(i.e., about large numbers of Latino immigrants in U.S. cities), has taken a racist turn. Much like Banfield’s earlier arguments, Samuel Huntington argued in 2004 that

American culture is under threat from Latinos and their alleged enclave mentality. Similar racial tensions have erupted in France, where the failure of postcolonial integration and assimilation has become evident in the joblessness and frustration of North African immigrants.

THIRD WORLD POVERTY

While the Euro-American debates about poverty remain marked by racial anxieties, the “Third World” poverty debates have partly moved on. The late 1970s witnessed an important paradigm shift in the study of poverty in the Global South. Social scientists such as Janice Perlman undermined the “myth of marginality” (1976) and drew attention to the ways in which the urban poor create their own informal economies, urban settlements, and forms of social organization. In the important theoretical work of Manuel Castells (1983), these ideas were formalized as a theory of urban social movements. In the early twenty-first century, there is a vast body of research that indicates the tactics, quiet encroachments, and negotiations through which the urban poor carve out spaces of livelihood in the cities of the Global South (Roy 2003). Such work restores agency to the urban poor and presents an important challenge to “culture of poverty” arguments, while also remaining acutely aware of the structural exploitations and vulnerabilities of poverty. Third World poverty has also been presented in rather romanticized ways. In The Mystery of Capital (2000), for example, Hernando de Soto celebrates the poor as heroic entrepreneurs. Such ideas are gaining popularity because of their resonance with neoliberalism, which is the practice and ideology of privatization. Taking hold in the 1980s, neoliberalism has crucial implications for poverty and inequality. Neoliberal practices, such as the dismantling of the welfare state, often deepen poverty. Neoliberal ideology legitimizes such action by making a case against dependency on state welfare and by making a case for the work ethic and family ethic, tropes that are inevitably racialized. As an urban process, neoliberalism also involves an engagement with the inner city. In the 1950s and 1960s, the slums and ghettos of American cities were demolished to make way for state-led urban development. This was reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Haussmann-led modernization, but such forms of urban renewal also came to be known as “Negro removal.” In the 1980s and 1990s, a second round of urban renewal unfolded. This was a more privatized process of gentrification that scripted the inner city as a new urban frontier of elite consumption and leisure. As covenants and redlining once protected prosperous neighborhoods, so walls and gates and paramilitary forces have come to protect the high-end enclaves of cities around the world. Neoliberal enclave urbanism is made possible through new and renewed forms of displacement and dispossession. These evictions can be understood as part of the long genealogy of colonialism and capitalism, and particularly of their mechanisms of primitive accumulation (Harvey 2005). Race, as a practice and ideology, is an integral part of such accumulation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Citizenship and Segregation in Saõ Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso.

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Drake, St. Clair, and Horace Cayton. 1945. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

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Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

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Malthus, Thomas. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson.

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Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor.

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Perlman, Janice, 1976. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Riis, Jacob. 1890. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Roy, Ananya. 2003. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge.

Wacquant, Loïc. 1997. “Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21 (2): 341–353.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974–1988. The Modern World-System, 3 vols. New York: Academic Press.

Wilson, William Julius. 1980. The Declining Significance of Race:Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_____. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago:UniversityofChicagoPress.

_____. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.

Ananya Roy

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism