How Important is the Culture of Poverty as a Determinant of Criminality?
by John Lawrence
Police reform is now being undertaken to some extent because of the Black Lives Matter movement. Whether it is sufficient to solve any problems is questionable. Most of the policing activities take place in poor neighborhoods both black and white because most street crime takes places in poor neighborhoods. In some families and neighborhoods there is not only a culture of poverty, there is a culture of crime. The two of them seem to go together. If your uncle or brother or father has spent time in jail or in prison, it seems to young people growing up that this is a normal part of life. Close to six million kids in America have experienced losing a parent to prison or jail at some point in their lives. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. 45.8 percent of young black children (under age 6) live in poverty, compared to 14.5 percent of white children. This says it all.
There is a culture of imprisonment in predominantly black families and neighborhoods. My contention is that the solution is the elimination of poverty in the black community, and that would go a long way to eliminating the need for police enforcement in the first place. The culture of poverty and imprisonment is cultivated by both black and white artists, playwrights and musicians. For example, take the play Porgy and Bess written by a white man, DuBose Heyward about a poor crippled black man. It was developed into an opera by George and Ira Gershwin, also white. Porgy and Bess started out as a novel, was converted into a play, then an opera and finally a movie. It contains many cultural stereotypes of black people. Wikipedia reported:
Another production of Porgy and Bess, this time at the University of Minnesota in 1939, ran into similar troubles. According to Barbara Cyrus, one of the few black students then at the university, members of the local African-American community saw the play as "detrimental to the race" and as a vehicle that promoted racist stereotypes. The play was cancelled due to pressure from the African-American community, which saw their success as proof of the increasing political power of blacks in Minneapolis–Saint Paul.
The belief that Porgy and Bess was racist gained strength during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movement of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As these movements advanced, Porgy and Bess was seen as more and more out of date. When the play was revived in the 1960s, social critic and African-American educator Harold Cruse called it, "The most incongruous, contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World."
One of the characters in Porgy and Bess is Sportin' Life, a pimp and dope peddler. This emphasizes the connection between black people and a traditional role model - pimp and dope peddler. Now Sportin' Life is one of the most successful members of the neighborhood. Why is this? Because most of the people were extremely poor. The lesson is, if you want to be successful, if you want to have money, be a pimp or sell dope. Or gamble like Porgy does in jail. So all the associations of black people with dope, prostitution, police and jail are reinforced by this work of art which has been praised as a brilliant story filled with brilliant music. Even Miles Davis, a black jazz artist, recorded a much praised album with orchestration by Gil Evans: the Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess.
In order to have street cred, even black men make up stories to make them seem bigger criminals than they really are. Then they peddle their art to make money. Take Akon. According to the Baltimore Sun:
The world of thug culture has its own perverse equivalent, in which middle-class men with minor legal transgressions exaggerate their bad behavior, claiming to be hard-core degenerates in order to impress youngsters looking for outlaw role models. In this destructive environment, the more violent and predatory you are, the more heroic you seem.
That helps to explain why a hip-hop star known as Akon wove a tall tale of malevolence and criminal activity, claiming to have spent three years in prison for running a "notorious car theft operation," a story he's been telling for years. In fact, he has apparently never served hard prison time. A Web site called The Smoking Gun recently exposed Akon as a thug wannabe, a "James Frey with ... an American Music Award.".
So the culture of criminality is perpetuated so that some black men can make money off of it, and young kids can grow up wanting to emulate them. This culture has to change in order that black and white kids grow up with more positive role models, but the root cause of this criminal culture is poverty so, if you want to change the culture, first change the culture of poverty. Give incentives for black men to stay with their families. Give them good jobs. It's not only black people who have lived in a crime culture due to poverty. Take the Mafia. White Italians looked up to the mafia dons because they were financially successful at a time when many Italians were in poverty. Black or white, poverty breeds a criminal culture. Problems with the police are going to persist as long as there is a huge amount of poverty and homelessness in the US. Progressive and enlightened government policy could start to change that for poor people, both black and white. Positive incentives to do the right thing go a long way to dispel poverty.
