Culture, character and poverty

I've had several conversations about culture, race and poverty over the past few days with people who are directly involved in working with impoverished minority children (as distinct from middle-class ones). I'm working on a piece for the newspaper about this, so I'm not going to report here everything I was told, pending the publication of my story. But here are a few notes.

As regular readers know, I have several friends who are public school teachers in Dallas and around the country. Heard from one the other day who's giving up on teaching in his urban public school district, where his students are entirely black and Latino. The culture of rap music -- valorizing rebellion, violence, sex and material acquistion as the highest values in life -- has colonized his kids' minds, and anytime he challenges it, they tell him that he's a "rich white man" who can't understand them. A public school teacher as a "rich white man" -- that would be funny if it weren't so sad. He said he's tired of trying to change the culture, and wants out. I heard the same thing from a colleague whose relative volunteered to teach in New Orleans public schools, but is leaving at the end of this school year, broken by the culture clash.

Another teacher friend mentioned in passing the other day that he had dealt with a situation in his school involving sex and middle schoolers that sounded like a situation out of a porn video. The kids involved were all poor and black. My friend, who is white, sounded really weary.

"For these kids," he said, meaning children of the black underclass, "having sex at 12, 13 years old is normal. They really don't understand what the big deal is. There's nothing in their culture to tell them that it's wrong. You can't get people who don't see what we [teachers] face to understand what a big deal this is. Middle-class people have their own ideas, but these black kids are living in a different world. You see lots of black girls in our school getting pregnant really early, and you know, it's over for them. It would be a miracle if they ended up in college. Odds are they're going to end up just like their moms." By which he meant: poor, uneducated, abandoned by the babydaddy, and without prospects for material advancement.

I interviewed a (white) man from a prominent north Dallas family who a few years ago left behind the business world and moved into poverty-stricken west Dallas to live and do mission work among the poor (primarily Latino in his area, but also heavily black). He told me that before he started to live among the urban minority poor, he had shared the belief that the problems of the poor are primarily a matter of culture, and that all they needed to do was pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Now, he still believes that culture is the primary obstacle to lifting themselves out of poverty, but he says middle-class people, white and otherwise, badly underestimate how difficult this expectation is for many of the poor to meet.

"If I told middle-class people from north Dallas what it's like down here, they'd think I was talking about science fiction," he said [I'm paraphrasing from memory; I haven't transcribed the tape yet]. Middle-class people, he explained, have so many unexamined assumptions about human nature, and the orderly way the world works. These are assumptions not shared by the poor people he lives and works among.

He said that so many academics and other well-meaning people who study and who try to help the poor put far too much emphasis on material conditions as the main obstacle to their progress. They downplay culture, possibly because they don't want to be judgmental. But culture is at the heart of it. Yet he also said that many conservatives undervalue how hard it is to hold on to good values when you are in dire need. He said he started his work believing that government was, if anything, the problem in these people's lives. He no longer does. He says that government does, in some ways, make the problems of the poor worse by enabling self-destructive behavior, there is no question that there is a necessary role for government to play in ameliorating their suffering.

In the end, though, all the government can do is help on the material end. Cultural renewal has got to come through the churches. He believes that "drive-by" charity is not enough -- that is, while it's good of suburban churches to give money to helping the inner-city poor, real change for the poor will only happen when Christians of means move into poor parts of town and share lives with the poor, and love them.

I mentioned to him that teacher friends had complained to me that the values of rap music had conquered the minds of their poor and working-class minority students, and it locked the kids in to a mindset that all but guaranteed their failure. The inner-city missionary told me that he agrees, and calls that mindset "ghetto nihilism." The idea that sex, drugs, booze and bling constitutes the good life; that violence is the way to deal with any challenge; that the oppression forced on them by whites, real or imagined, is the only thing holding them back from achieving their desires; and that authority is always to be despised and resisted. If a child comes to believe that this is how the world works, it is very hard to reach him and lift him out of that.

The missionary -- because that's what he is -- expressed frustration with middle-class people on this point. He said it's very hard to tell the black and the brown kids he works with to turn their back on ghetto nihilism when they look at the broader white, middle-class culture, and see the same materialistic, hedonistic values esteemed, and rebellion against sexual and materialistic restraint valorized.

This is a sore point with me. What middle-class liberals see as "liberation" from an oppressive code of sexual behavior amounts to a kind of enslavement of the poor. Middle-class people have greater means, materially and otherwise, to deal with the consequences of their promiscuity, and over time the abandonment of bourgeois values of self-restraint in favor of anarchic underclass values will impoverish the descendants of those who left those values behind. Don't get me wrong, it's still destructive of their soul and character, but for various reasons, the material consequences are mitigated. Not so for the poor, not usually.

And, as one of my teacher friends put it, "Don't think it's a black thing only. Poor white people don't live so differently." Indeed, the missionary told me that there's an immigrant Asian family that lives on his west Dallas block. The parents have all the values esteeming hard work, education, self-sacrifice and such that we associate with Asian culture. Most of the kids do too. But there's a high school age son who has adopted ghetto nihilism, because that's the culture that rules his public school. He dresses like a gangbanger, carries himself like a gangbanger, and interprets the world like a gangbanger. It's killing his parents, but the culture the kid lives in has a stronger hold on his heart and mind than his mom and dad do. Similarly, the missionary also said he sees immigrant Mexican families moving into the neighborhood possessing a strong work ethic, and pretty strong family values. But their children easily fall prey to ghetto nihilism.

The church, says the missionary, is in most cases the only sign of hope, of order and of life-giving values for the urban poor. Politics alone will never be able to give poor people what they need to escape their condition. The missionary is 39, and he sees the great challenge to the church in our time to be evangelizing our own urban poor, and helping them lift themselves up out of their condition. Giving them lectures about bootstrapping it won't do, he said. Christians -- white, black and brown -- who have been blessed to live in prosperity have got to do for the poor as Christ did for all of us: live with them, share their lives, suffer with them, and above all, show them what they have far too little of in their lives: real love.

For what it's worth, there you are. I imagine one of our regular readers, a woman who does the same kind of missionary work among the urban poor, will have something to say about this.