ONLINE JANUARY
13, 2011
Poor Reason
Culture still doesn’t explain poverty“‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback.” So read the headline of Patricia Cohen’s front-page article in the October 17, 2010 edition of The New York Times.
The article was prompted by a recent issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science under the title, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty.” In their introductory essay, the editors, Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, strike a triumphant note:
Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors.
Cohen begins with a similar refrain:
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a ‘culture of poverty’ to the public in his 1965 report on ‘The Negro Family.’
Cohen uncritically accepts two myths woven by William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, and repeated by his acolytes: first, Moynihan was clobbered for bringing to light compromising facts about black families, and second, that this torrent of criticism constrained a generation of social scientists from investigating the relation between culture and poverty, for fear that it would be pilloried for “blaming the victim.” Thus, a third, patently self-serving myth: thanks to some intrepid scholars who reject political correctness, it is now permissible to consider the role that culture plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities.
These myths add up to something—a perverse obfuscation of American racial history. They suggest that for four decades academia has abetted a censorial form of anti-racism that prevented serious research into the persistence of poverty among black Americans. If only, the mythmakers insist, we stopped worrying about offending people, we could acknowledge that there is something amiss in black culture—not, as the politically correct would have it, the politics of class—and that this explains racial inequality.
Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”
• • •
It is indisputable that the publication of Moynihan’s report on “The Negro Family” evoked a torrent of criticism and that Moynihan was thrown on the defensive. I remember seeing him on Meet the Press in late 1965, pleading for understanding:
I was trying to show that unemployment statistics, which are so dull, and you read so many of them, and you don’t know what they may mean, and they’re hard to believe—that unemployment ended up nonetheless with orphaned children, with abandoned mothers, with men living furtive lives without even an address, that unemployment had flesh and blood and it could bleed. That’s all I was trying to do.
Perhaps. However, it is grossly inaccurate to say, as Wilson does in the Annals, that Moynihan came under fire for bringing to light facts that “could be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing to people of color.” Or that Moynihan was prescient, in that the segment of black children born outside marriage has doubled from one-quarter in 1965 to one-half today.
The problem from the beginning was not Moynihan’s publication of what were actually well-established facts, but rather his distorted interpretation of these facts. Moynihan made the fatal error of inverting cause and effect. Although he acknowledged that past racism and unemployment undermined black families, he held that the pathology in “the Negro American family” had not only assumed a life of its own, but was also the primary determinant of the litany of problems that beset lower-class blacks. To quote Moynihan: “Once or twice removed, [the weakness of family structure] will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or anti-social behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.” Moynihan followed with an even more inflated claim: “At this point the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” And then the zinger: “The cycle can be broken only if these distortions are set right.”
This last statement had dire implications for public policy, especially when placed in historical context. In The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (1967), Lee Rainwater and George Yancey wrote:
The year 1965 may be known in history as the time when the civil rights movement discovered, in the sense of becoming explicitly aware, that abolishing legal racism would not produce Negro equality.
By 1965 the words “compensation,” “reparations,” and “preference” had already crept into political discourse, testing the limits of liberal support for the black protest movement. In Why We Can’t Wait, published in 1964, Martin Luther King observed: “Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror.” Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, went further, declaring that this “radical” turn by some movement leaders had precipitated “a crisis in liberalism.” As early as 1965 Moynihan was on record as opposed to anything that smacked of “preference,” asserting, much as Wilson did 22 years later in The Truly Disadvantaged, that policy had to be universal rather than targeted specifically for blacks.
The question is not whether culture matters, but whether it is an independent and self-sustaining factor in the production and reproduction of poverty.
With his report on “The Negro Family,” Moynihan shifted the conceptual framework that underlay policymaking. Instead of attacking racist barriers, he suggested that legislation focus on the putative defects of “the” black family. In his concluding section, “The Case for National Action,” Moynihan called for “a national effort” to strengthen the Negro family, though, as the sociologist Herbert Gans pointed out in a 1965 article in Commonweal, Moynihan offered no specific policy recommendations for accomplishing that end. Not only did he leave a vacuum that could be filled with a politics that blamed blacks for their own troubles, but he also tacked on an ominous addendum:
After [the repair of the black family], how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation’s business.
In short, the Moynihan report elicited fierce condemnation because it threatened to derail the black liberation movement in its pursuit of equality. In one palpable example of that derailment, a 1966 White House conference called “To Fulfill These Rights,” which might have been an opportunity to chart the next phase of the protest movement, instead was overshadowed by preoccupation with the Moynihan report and the ensuing controversy.
• • •
Far from having a chilling effect on researching and thinking about culture in relationship to poverty, the debate over the Moynihan report spawned a canon of critical scholarship. For the first time, scholars came to terms with the economic underpinnings of the nuclear family, which tends to unravel whenever male breadwinners are unemployed for long periods of time, as was true of white families during the Depression.
No longer was the nuclear family, with its patriarchal foundations, the unquestioned societal norm. The blatantly tendentious language that pervaded the Moynihan report—“broken homes” and “illegitimate births”—was purged from the professional lexicon. More important, feminist scholars forced us to reassess single parenting. In her 1973 study All Our Kin, Carol Stack showed how poor single mothers develop a domestic network consisting of that indispensable grandmother, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and a patchwork of neighbors and friends who provide mutual assistance with childrearing and the other exigencies of life. By comparison, the prototypical nuclear family, sequestered in a suburban house, surrounded by hedges and cut off from neighbors, removed from the pulsating vitality of poor urban neighborhoods, looks rather bleak. As a black friend once commented, “I didn’t know that blacks had weak families until I got to college.”
Yet even Moynihan’s harshest critics did not deny the manifest troubles in black families. Nor did they deny that the culture of poor people is often markedly at variance with the cultural norms and practices in more privileged sectors of society. How could it be otherwise? The key point of contention was whether, under conditions of prolonged poverty, those cultural adaptations “assume a life of their own” and are passed down from parents to children through normal processes of cultural transmission. In other words, the imbroglio over the Moynihan report was never about whether culture matters, but about whether culture is or ever could be an independent and self-sustaining factor in the production and reproduction of poverty.
Many scholars have challenged the notion of culture as an independent, causal factor in generating poverty, and none more effectively than Elliot Liebow in his 1967 study, Tally’s Corner. Liebow’s subjects were men who had neither regular jobs nor stable families and took refuge on the streetcorner where they devised “a shadow system of values” to shield themselves from a profound sense of personal failure.
Liebow did not deny culture—indeed, he documented it in scrupulous detail. However, he insisted that the streetcorner man was not a carrier of an independent cultural tradition. To be sure, there were obvious similarities between parents and children, but Liebow held that these were not the product of cultural transmission, but rather reflected the fact that “the son goes out and independently experiences the same failures, in the same areas, and for much the same reasons as his father.” Thus, it is not their culture that needs to be changed, but rather a political economy that fails to provide jobs that pay a living wage to millions of the nation’s poor, along with a system of occupational apartheid that has excluded a whole people from entire job sectors throughout American history.
Liebow is not alone. Although left scholars insist that poverty is rooted in political economy, it is preposterous to accuse them generally of eliding culture. Indeed, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who first used the term, was an avowed socialist, and the culture of poverty entered popular discourse through the ideas of another socialist—Michael Harrington, in his 1962 book, The Other America. Both men preferred structural explanations of poverty. They argued that the despair and coping mechanisms associated with the culture of poverty were anchored in conditions of poverty, and that the only remedy for the culture of poverty was the elimination of poverty itself.
If Moynihan’s critics were unusually vociferous, this was because they understood what was at stake. Moynihan and his supporters contended that the poor were victims of their own vices, thus shifting attention away from powerful political and economic institutions that could make a difference in their lives. If those institutions were absolved of responsibility, the poor would be left on their own.
• • •
The claim that the furor over the Moynihan report stymied research on lower-class culture for four decades is patently false. What was the massive underclass discourse of the 1980s if not old wine in new bottles—Moynihan’s culture arguments repackaged for a new generation of scholars and pundits?
As with the culture of poverty, the conception of the underclass had liberal origins. In his 1962 book Challenge to Affluence, Gunnar Myrdal borrowed a Swedish term for the lower class, underklassen, to refer to people who languished in poverty even during periods of economic growth and prosperity. This term entered popular discourse with the 1982 publication of Ken Auletta’s The Underclass, based on a series in The New Yorker.
Then, between 1986 and 1988, there was an outpouring of articles in U.S. News and World Report, The Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, and Time, all providing graphic and frightening portrayals of pathology and disorder in the nation’s ghettos. The image was of poverty feeding on itself, with the implication that cultural pathology was not just a byproduct of poverty but was itself a cause of pathological behavior. This was the explicit claim of a 1987 Fortune article by Myron Magnet:
What primarily defines [the underclass] is not so much their poverty or race as their behavior—their chronic lawlessness, drug use, out-of-wedlock births, nonwork, welfare dependency and school failure. ‘Underclass’ describes a state of mind and a way of life. It is at least as much cultural as an economic condition.
Social science lagged behind journalism, but by the late ’80s, with the backing of charitable foundations, a cottage industry of technocratic studies appeared charting the size and social constitution of the underclass. In his 1991 article “The Underclass Myth,” Adolph Reed noted the reinstatement of the culture-of-poverty theory during the Reagan-Bush era. The pendulum had swung so far to culture that Reed was pleading for a restoration of structure:
We should insist on returning the focus of the discussion of the production and reproduction of poverty to examination of its sources in the operations of the American political and economic system. Specifically, the discussion should focus on such phenomena as the logic of deindustrialization, models of urban redevelopment driven by real-estate speculation, the general intensification of polarization of wealth, income, and opportunity in American society, the ways in which race and gender figure into those dynamics, and, not least, the role of public policy in reproducing and legitimating them.
Reed ended on a note of personal exasperation: “I want the record to show that I do not want to hear another word about drugs or crime without hearing in the same breath about decent jobs, adequate housing, and egalitarian education.”
Culturalists confuse cause and effect, arguing that lack of social mobility among black youth is a product of their culture rather than the other way around.
Yet here we are, two decades later, with a special issue of a prestigious journal, the Annals, launched with fanfare and a congressional briefing, bombastically claiming that “culture is back on the policy agenda,” as though it had not been there all along. Even as the editors take up this “long-abandoned topic,” however, they are careful to distance themselves from culture-of-poverty theorists who were accused of “blaming the victim,” and they scoff at the idea that the poor “might cease to be poor if they changed their culture.” Indeed, readers are assured that “none of the three editors of this volume happens to fall on the right of the political spectrum.” Alas, the culture of poverty has not made a comeback after all. The new culturalists have learned from the mistakes of the past, and only want to study culture in the context of poverty—that is, in the selective and limited ways that culture matters in the lives of the poor.
True to form, the rest of the Annals issue is a compendium of studies informed by this “more sophisticated” conception of culture. One study examines “How Black and Latino Service Workers Make Decisions about Making Referrals.” Another explores how poor men define a “good job.” Still another ventures into the perilous waters of the black family, examining the “repertoire of infidelity” among low-income men.
The problem is less with the questions asked than with the ones left unexamined. The editors and authors are careful to bracket their inquiries with appropriate obeisance to the ultimate grounding of culture in social structure. But their research objectives, methodology, data collection, and analysis are all riveted on the role of culture. Is obeisance enough? If the cultural practices under examination are merely links in a chain of causation, and are ultimately rooted in poverty and joblessness, why are these not the object of inquiry? Why aren’t we talking about the calamity of another generation of black youth who, excluded from job markets, are left to languish on the margins, until they cross the line of legality and are swept up by the criminal justice system and consigned to unconscionable years in prison where, at last, they find work, for less than a dollar an hour, if paid at all? Upon release they are “marked men,” frequently unable to find employment or to assume such quotidian roles as those of husband or father.
Enter the sociologist, to record the agony of the dispossessed. Does it really matter how they define a “good job” when they have virtually no prospect of finding one? Does it matter how they approach procreation, how they juggle “doubt, duty, and destiny” when they are denied the jobs that are the sine qua non of parenthood? Aren’t we asking the wrong questions? Do the answers bring us any closer to understanding why this nation has millions of racial outcasts who are consigned to a social death?
Obeisance is not enough. The Annals issue caps off with an article by William Julius Wilson on “Why Both Social Structure and Culture Matter in a Holistic Analysis of Inner-City Poverty.” Wilson wants to show “not only the independent contributions of social structure and culture, but also how they interact to shape different group outcomes that embody racial inequality.” At first blush this appears to be a sensible, even unassailable stance. But what is Wilson getting at with his prosaic language about the interaction of structure and culture? The answer is found several pages later: “One of the effects of living in a racially segregated, poor neighborhood is the exposure to cultural traits that may not be conducive to facilitating social mobility.” This is tantamount to blaming blacks for the racism of employers and other gatekeepers.
Like Moynihan before him, Wilson has committed the sin of inverting cause and effect. He thinks that black youth are not socially mobile because of their cultural proclivities—“sexual conquests, hanging out on the street after school, party drugs, and hip-hop music.” But a far more convincing explanation is that these youth are encircled by structural barriers and consequently resort to these cultural defenses, as Douglas Glasgow argued in his neglected 1981 book, The Black Underclass. Liebow had it right when he stripped away surface appearances and put culture in its proper social and existential context:
If, in the course of concealing his failure, or of concealing his fear of even trying, [the street-corner man] pretends—through the device of public fictions—that he does not want these things in the first place and claims he has all along been responding to a different set of rules and prizes, we do not do him or ourselves any good by accepting this claim at face value.
It makes little sense to compare—as Wilson does—the culture of a pariah class with that of mainstream youth, putting aside the fact that white suburban youth also strut around in saggy pants, listen to hip-hop music, and are far more prone to drug use than are their ghetto counterparts. Wilson’s theoretical postulates about “deconcentrating poverty” have also led him to support the demolition of public housing across the nation. Is this how cultural change takes place, with dynamite, the destruction of poor communities, and the dispersal of its residents? Or do we have to transform the ghetto itself, not by reconstructing the identities of its people, but through a wholesale commitment to eliminating poverty and joblessness?
While he routinely violates his own axiom about the integral relationship between culture and social structure, Wilson injects what might be called the “culturalist caveat.” In a section on “the relative importance of structure and culture,” he concedes, “Structural factors are likely to play a far greater role than cultural factors in bringing about rapid neighborhood change.” But what structural changes does he have in mind? Despite the fact that Wilson’s signature issue for many years was jobs, jobs, jobs, since his cultural turn there has been nigh any mention of jobs. Affirmative action is apparently off the table, and there is no policy redress for the nation’s four million “disconnected youth” who are out of school and out of work.
Instead, Wilson places all his bets on education—specifically, the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a schooling and social services organization predicated on the idea that the challenge is to “take the ghetto out of the child,” much as earlier missionaries and educators sought to “take the Indian out of the child.” Wilson trumpets HCZ’s “spectacular” results, citing a study by Harvard economists Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer that purports to show that HCZ students are closing the achievement gap with students in public schools. However, these findings are based on a single class on a single test in a single year. Also, the measure of progress was scoring at “grade level” in math and reading, and as critics have pointed out, grade-level work is a weak predictor of future academic success. Furthermore, thanks to score inflation—not only prepping students for the test but also lowering the score required for achieving grade level—marks were up throughout New York on the 2007 exam, the one that Dobbie and Fryer analyzed.
Never mind; the die is cast. With Wilson’s backing, the Obama administration has made HCZ the model for twenty “Promise Neighborhoods” across the nation. At best, however, HCZ is a showcase project that, even multiplied twenty times, is no remedy for the deep and widening income gap between blacks and others. At worst, the Obama administration is using it to camouflage its utter failure to address issues of racism and poverty.
• • •
The new culturalists can bemoan the supposed erasure of culture from poverty research in the wake of the Moynihan Report, but far more troubling is that these four decades have witnessed the erasure of racism and poverty from political discourse, both inside and outside the academy. The Annals issue makes virtually no mention of institutionalized racism. To be sure, there is much discussion of poverty, but not as a historical or structural phenomenon. Instead we are presented with reductionist manifestations of poverty that obscure its larger configuration.
Thus there is no thought of restoring the safety net. Or resurrecting affirmative action. Or once again constructing public housing as the housing of last resort. Or decriminalizing drugs and rescinding mandatory sentencing. Or enforcing anti-discrimination laws with the same vigor that police exercise in targeting black and Latino youth for marijuana possession. Or creating jobs programs for disconnected youth and for the chronically unemployed. Against this background, the ballyhooed “restoration” of culture to poverty discourse can only be one thing: an evasion of the persistent racial and economic inequalities that are a blot on American democracy.
The methodological reductionism that is the hallmark of the new culturalists is a betrayal of the sociological imagination: what C. Wright Mills described as exploring the intersection between history and biography. Instead, the new culturalists give us biography shorn of history, and culture ripped from its moorings in social structure. Against their intentions, they end up providing erudite justification for retrograde public policy, less through acts of commission than through their silences and opacities.
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About the Author
Stephen Steinberg, Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is author of Race Relations: A Critique.
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Speaking of jobs, next week we will be posting our forum on full employment as a policy goal.
Incidentally, I wonder if black Americans suffer from a lack of inter-generational transfer of wealth (something that would strengthen family ties), which is undoubtedly a legacy of slavery and institutional racism.
Nor in his attempt to racialize the culture of poverty by ignoring cross-cultural comparison, i.e. you will find the same cultural patterns in the UK's white housing estates.
Such is the culture of intellectual poverty of professional anti-racist whites, who like vampires, feed off real and imagined Black suffering
When you ask him to explain his diagnosis, he says:
"It's your CULTURE. All your lab results indicate that your CULTURE is why you have Stage IV liver cancer."
Would you, or any sane person, accept this diagnosis?
In all the above opinions about "black poverty," where is the SCIENCE? The STATISTICAL ANALYSIS of any reliable data whatsoever?
What could a term as vague and amorphous as "culture" possibly mean?
How do you measure "culture"?
This problem, by the way, isn't confined to the difficulties confronting African Americans.
If you have the time, take a gander at the quality, and quantity, of research into diseases that kill poor little brown people, every year, by the hundreds of thousands.
Its just a reassertion of 'we have already decided the answers and don't dare question us'.
If these so called scientist were intellectually credible or moral, they would search for the truth, not that which satisfies their racialized conditioning. How can they be taken seriously when they have not even reflected on the evolution of their own beliefs? Sad.
In the end, they are truly the ones who are impoverished.
Enough about me. Let's try replacing the word 'culture' with the word 'behavior.' Now we can forget cause and effect and look at outcomes. If we concede that abandoning the responsibilities of fatherhood is negative behavior, then we look to solutions that encourage a different outcome. For fifty years or so, welfare encouraged desertion by rewarding single-parents.
What I learned in fifty years of working in the poverty vineyard is that poor people are consumers of values and incentives like everyone else. "Simply" define the outcomes you want your programs dollars to buy and measure if the targeted customers are buying it, remembering that venality and self-interest are not the exclusive purviews of the affluent.
When thousand of men become institutionalized,who then raise children we get a new culture. The drug war the gang culture has become our nations culture.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure it out, but of course the elitist ranks do not want this figured out now do they.
Unfortunately, it is attitudes like Stienberg's that reinforce this failure. The idea that there are big macro-level forces at work which will cause you to fail...so why try? Those trying to transcend their origins are then labeled as 'Acting White' - a gigantic cultural ball and chain for many minorities.
I suggest this because there seems, to me at least, a great deal that's cloudy, even dreamy, in this discussion.
Also self-contradictory.
I can't quite grasp how people who would reflexively prefer state and local government to the federal, would also reason that the social realities faced by African Americans in, say, Boston, are identical to those faced by African Americans in San Diego.
However, if you accept his argument, then his proposed solution is basically to give jobs to people who are not qualified, or to fabricate economically nonviable jobs that match the qualifications of the poor - options that exacerbate both dependency and racial/class resentments.
Seriously? If you know a lot of white people who have been recipients of inter-generational wealth, then we travel in entirely different circles (quite likely, I admit). I can only think of one personal acquaintance who received an inheritance, and it was just enough to buy a used boat to use for trawling on a lake. I guess time spent fishing together can strengthen family ties, so that's one point in your favor...
My mother didn't finish high school, my dad ran away from home and became a logger on the west coast. He broke his back in the woods and, with three little children, struggled through college to get a degree in computer science. Without "institutional" assistance or generational wealth to fall back on, my parents pulled the family through those hard times and we didn't fall apart. Why? Because my parents CHOSE to stay together and work on the same team.
My point is this: conditions do not need to be perfect in order for a family to be strong -- or for mothers and fathers to be present to teach their children to make good choices, perhaps even better choices than they themselves made. Choices have a much bigger impact on outcome than any other factor, and choices are affected by the culture one grows up in.
These immigrants had a culture of discipline, delayed gratification, family, education and work ethic. Explain that one Mr. Steinberg
These immigrants had a culture of discipline, delayed gratification, family, education and work ethic. Explain that one Mr. Steinberg
Liver cancer caused by "culture" would seem silly to me, yes.
However, if the doctor told me I have high blood pressure because I smoke, that would make sense.
More sense than, say, I have high blood pressure because of institutional racism.
That said, it seems unlikely that anything will change for poor inner city youth as long as we insist on fighting this miserable war on drugs.
Your point about the War on Drugs is very important since it something that we can do something about and that will have immediate positive effects for the Black communities.
Sanford Schram, in Words of Welfare, tabulates the number of articles on topics related to the Moynihan Report and listed in the Social Science's Index between 1960 and 1990 and indicates that "rather than scholarship being silenced on the issue it continued along at a rather low rate, just as it had before the Moynihan Report appeared, only to peak at much higher levels in the mid-1970s, and then again in the last half of the 1980s." He concludes "it has been upward and was increasingly so by the 1980s." As Steinberg notes as well, Wilson in the Truly Disadvantaged made the same claim that scholars had been intimidated from confronting the culture issue nearly 25 years ago. So how could that be? I asked in another context, after liberals and ersatz leftists praised candidate Obama in 2008 for his courage in attacking black poor people's behavior, who exactly has been saying anything else for the last 30 years?
And there's more to Moynihan's prescience and crocodile tears about being misunderstood. His sexism no less than bordered on misogyny as he railed against "the disorganized matrifocal life" in which black men came of age, and he proposed the military as a locus of behavior modification, "a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority, where discipline, if harsh, is nonetheless orderly and predictable, and where rewards, if limited, are granted on the basis of performance." Factor in that this recommendation came as Moynihan and Defense Secretary McNamara proposed Project 100,000 to ease unemployment by feeding young black men into the war effort just after the first big troop build-up in Vietnam and it suggests something even more sinister.
And for all his crocodile tears, here's Moynihan 30 years after the nefarious Report, at his 1994 Senate Finance Committee hearing invoked biological "speciation" to characterize the processes at work inscribing the difference of supposedly isolated, inner-city poor people.
But defense or indictment of Moynihan isn't the issue. He's only a rhetorical device, a prop that enables academics who tail behind the safely hegemonic common sense of the moment to present their intellectually irresponsible conventionalism as courageous challenge to an orthodoxy that no one embraces. It's also a huge concession to the bipartisan right-wing consensus on social policy that has prevailed for a generation.
Steve and I differ on the extent to which "racism" is either accurate or helpful as a label for this continuing attack on poor people and therefore the extent to which "antiracism" is an adequate response. However, we are in absolute agreement that such an attack is what underlies this recurrent proclamation of the same tired lie. It is, moreover, a gutless lie, the lie of the comfortable and well-fed actual and wannabe retainers of the powerful who simultaneously want to see themselves as courageous truth-tellers victimized by softheaded egalitarians.
Let's suppose he is absolutely correct about structural and institutional racism - and I agree more than disagree with him on that. But calling out structural racism doesn't prove CAUSATION. Let me show why.
You're driving down a road and a mile down the road a tree is blocking the path. But if you run off the road before you get to it, the tree blocking the road is not the cause.
That is sadly too often the case with many Black youth today, for complex reasons that can't be unpacked in an email, but involve more than institutional racism.
A recent ethnographic study, "Lone Pursuit," explores how distrustful individualism in the inner city interferes with the networking assistance of family and friends in finding jobs because family and friends are reluctant, from first hand experience, to make job referrals for relatives who may not show up for work or otherwise act in ways that jeopardize the reputation of the referral source. If true, this is an example of the intervening role of culture BEFORE structural racism. Hell, I have friends who fit in this category and I won't tell them about any openings on my job. Because I don't want their unreliability and explosions over "dissing" to reflect on me.
Such subtleties and distinctions - and there are many that need to be explored -are cut out of Steinberg's self-righteous, hamfisted and narcissitic "anti-racism" If the left refuses to engage with culture, then, yes, it will be left to the likes of Myron Magnet to appropriate - another example of the theoretical poverty the U.S left is so stunningly known for.
And Prof Reed, I am mildly disappointed in your ad-hominem response; you who pierced racial political mystification so well in your unparalleled and seminal TELOS articles!
We have spent a half century attempting to solve these problems. There is no more time. The country is bankrupt, and non-white races hate blacks even more than whites. If the mindset of this author is not banished from public discourse immediately, there is the very real possibility of needless human suffering.
I didn\'t know whether this claim is true or not, so I went to the online Census data. Table P02 has median per-capita income broken out by race and sex. According to this data median black male income was 53.5% of white income in the 5 year period 1951-55. It rose to 60.3% in 1976-80, 69.6% in 1996-2000 and 72% in 2005-09. The equivalent figures for females were 49.2%, 90.8%, 94.1% and 94.4%.
In other words, according to this Census data, the black-white gap has virtually disappeared for females and, while still significant, has narrowed substantially for males.
I guess I understand why Steinberg does not cite any data!!
Any of you guys ever seen a rap music video ?
Unfortunately the new culture hustlers are likely to ignore him as they hurry uncritically to get their lucrative foundation grants in order to study the way poor people of color, walk, talk, and expel gas.
Once again we see the importance of the hugely powerful relationship between voice and power.
I grew up in a neighborhood divided by race in the 1950's. At that time, racism was near and clear but black families were far more intact and stable.
I know of no theory, other than the impact of drugs and new cultural attitudes in the 60's and 70's that can explain the devolution of inner-city culture.
One has to be deep in denial to believe a culture that survived Jim Crow and lynchings - intact, would fall to jobs (and white people) moving six miles down the road to the suburbs.
Why is this viewed as an either/or situation?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
"Does it matter how they approach procreation, how they juggle 'doubt, duty, and destiny' when they are denied the jobs that are the sine qua non of parenthood?"
I think it DOES matter. It represents a level of maturity, respect for others, and thinking about the future. Those are principles that should be taught, and are often taught through culture. "It's all hopeless anyway" can explain why some fall victim to drugs and crime, but it's inexcusable to pull another person (the girl) or two (her baby) into the net. That is the essence of lack of responsibility.
There are clear differences in IQ between different ethnic and racial groups. Sub Saharan Africans, and their African American descendants, have a lower average IQ than whites and east asians by a whole standard deviation. And before whites and asians get too fat headed about this, note that Ashkenazi Jews are significantly more intelligent than them.
Consider this: When a child is adopted, his or her intelligence is far far more likely to resemble that of his biological parents than his adoptive parents -- even if that child is raised in the most privileged environment. This is indisputable. And it is why the author's claim that simply providing jobs and money to the poor would solve the problem is asinine: The poor's behavior would not change at all, and the policy would fail.
Not only do she and her colleagues show a) that subtle and not-so-subtle forms of institutionalized racism most certainly do exist, but also b) that racism can, indeed, cause hypertension -- among myriad other health problems.
Also, anthropologists have a powerful tool for making sense of all that's left out of the Annals discussion: structural violence. See, for instance, the voluminous work of physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer.
Yet sadly Farmer has defended real practictioners of structural violence like the neo-liberal Mbeki, who has even been accused with-in the ANC itself of genocide for withholding HIV medications from the SA poor and whose denialism had little to do with resisting imperialism and everything to do with making SA attractive for foreign investment from the very same imperialists, who wouldn't invest in a country with huge public spending costs on health care.
This doesn't of course detract from the immense value of Farmer's medical work.
Both Mexicans and Blacks would live a different way if left to their own designs. Why expect baseball players to do well on the football field?
Everyone knows that if a black kid does well in school, they can get into a great college and from there, the sky is the limit. Yet so many neglect school in favor of street life. Why? Culture.
How is 'institutionalized racism' leading high-school age kids to drop out at enormous rates or, if they stick around, to barely learn anything? No, it's culture my friend. You can bury your white-guilty head in the sand but the answers are there for anyone to see.
Moreover, they instilled in their kids an understanding that coming to America represented an incredible opportunity to lift the family out of generations of subsistence living.
The Korean family next door came to the US from rural poverty. Their three children all wound up getting college degrees (one from Princeton, and today all thrive as a doctor, engineer and business owner)
The African Americans in our neighborhood hated the Koreans....I think it was jealousy. But it was an early lesson for me as to why certain people succeed and certain people fail in America.
But time and time again when I was teaching (about 8 years ago), the reaction amongst many teachers (and probably amongst most administrators) was to recoil at the thought of not sending 100% of their students on to university-level education. I've been in many discussions where people with furrowed brow said that everyone ought to have the lovely liberal arts education that they had. With the amount of debt this often entails (and for lots of ghetto kids the scariness that comes with stepping so far outside their comfort zone) I for my life cannot understand why we can't encourage parallel options of vocational training. Some kids will go to university no matter what the barriers. The rest should be in a position by the age of 18 to get themselves a decent job.
Ultimately this is all about selfishness. There is more than enough wealth in the United States to get everyone there on the road to a better life, but that would require a tax code that prioritizes the basic needs of the poor over the selfishness of the rich, none of whom could have made so much money without the assistance of the state anyway, in the form of policies designed to benefit business and lock wealth into families generations after it has been accumulated.
But I do agree that selfishness is the problem, the selfishness of the poor, poor pitiful poor themselves, of whatever color. The selfishness of parents who put their own concerns (sex, drugs, alcohol, clothes, cars, guns) ahead of their children.
I grew up in a poor, multi-generational welfare family. I've seem first hand how the immediate gratification of desires robs children of their future. How the self-destructive behaviors are bequeathed to the next generation as a perverse, negative inheritance.
And there is nothing heroic about those who've somehow managed to escape the iron trap of poverty, they took school seriously, avoided drugs and alcohol, avoided sexual irresponsibility, respected themselves and persevered.
Steinberg is not even wrong: Culture and poverty are inextricably intertwined because they emerge from the same underlying substrate: The biological make-up of the participants themselves. And biology does matter: Intelligence, which is based on particular structural/functional characteristics of the brain and is highly heritable, plays a huge role in determining whether someone is a success or a failure in this society. IQ, which measures intelligence, reliably predicts socio-economic outcomes on average. To ignore this is to consign oneself and their discipline to irrelevance.
If they wish to contribute to scientific and social progress in this country, social scientists like Steinberg have to have the courage to look at what is right in front of them:
The reason there is inequality is because human beings are unequal.
And people who sneer at the importance of solid families as being "simplistic" really need to get their heads out of the sociology journals. An ounce of family is worth a ton of social services. There's no root cause more deeply rooted than one's family--or lack thereof, after liberals have destroyed it.
Steinberg just repeats the thesis over and over in different words and constantly insinuates that the people he disagrees with are wrong-headed.
Steinberg is evidently convinced that the causation only works in one direction: economic disparities cause all cultural problems. Culture never takes on a life of its own and causes more problems. I don't understand why the causation couldn't work in both directions. Would this be somehow too complex to be an appealing thesis, so Steinberg rejects it out of hand?
Anyone who's interested in seeing what the other side *actually* thinks (instead of the straw-man caricature presented in this article) should pick up a copy of John McWhorter's Losing the Race, or his follow-up Winning the Race.
Would appreciate any thoughts.
One mistake that gets made a lot, by both "sides" of this discussion is the idea that culture is a kind of absolute framework that rewards "good" behavior and punishes "bad." It seems obvious that the dominant classes will create a culture that benefits other members of that class and themselves, and devalue other behaviors and class characteristics. For example I have read studies that point to behavior patterns exhibited by predominantely middle and upperclass children, such as talking back to parents, being rude to strangers, whining, that most people would find negative behaviors, to in reality prepare those kids for life and work (success) as part of the dominant class. The ability to questions authority, defend your ideas in a competitive environment, etc. Morality seems to not really enter the equation. Successful bankers, for example, use tons of drugs, listen to crappy music, cheat on their spouses, lie, steal, are prone to violence, and are more than willing to stab each in the back just as much as their poor counterparts.
Because they do not have anything to say that makes sense
therefore
They write these long convoluted articles.
Social sciences academics should compulsorily be sent to work in corporations where they will be made to understand the principle of KISS (Keep it simple stupid) and learn that anything that takes more than a couple of pages to say is simple obfuscation.
An obvious armchair sociological observation would be the effect that a country of origin's history has on the minority group. In the case of immigrants, this history is usually one of victimizing colonialism, and even then all 3rd world countries aren't created equal. I'm of the opinion that a large factor in the success of Asian-Americans is their direct link to our colonization of Asia beginning with the Spanish American War and continuing through the restructuring of Japan post WWII.
Franz Fanon talks about this. Colonial victims have a tendency to travel to the centers of the empire if they can and assimilate more readily.
Now, the Black experience in America is a little more complicated. They are centuries removed from their country of origin and have been oppressed here in the US by far subtler means than colonial wars, the criminalization of a whole generation of Black males being only the most recent example.
It's apples and oranges, "minority" being the only common denominator, with even that word a conscious choice of simplifying complex populations to a relationship with a white majority.
Short answer: peoples are different but to appreciate these differences you must appreciate their history, as they have acted and have been acted upon.
Maybe it's culture, maybe it's the historical legacy of slavery and its social repurcussions, maybe it's low expectations, maybe it's "structural racism", maybe it's bad luck or that god just hates black people. Very likely, it is a complicated combination of multiple of these factors (except probably the god thing) and others.
I know what it is not though---it is not that black people are less intelligent. Stop pulling self-serving, non-existant, and deeply flawed (and certainly not "indisputable") evidence out of your *ss.
Also, the sooner everyone can get these ideas about inherent intelligence out of the back of their minds, the sooner we can actually have some productive discussion and planning on these issues of black underachievement and development.
I'm surprised to see the "IQ" argument come up so much in these comments. Really? Are you really trying to say that poor people are poor because they're stupid? Sure, some people are smarter than others, but all should start out with the same access to opportunities, regardless of their intelligence. Some people might say that stupider people are a problem because they don't contribute as much to societal goals and objectives, but we probably all know people who are really smart but are completely inefficient and dysfunctional when it comes to contributing to society or bettering themselves and their communities. You don't have to be a genius to be a productive member of society.
Again, there has been a lot of focus on the symptoms in these comments, and not a lot of focus on the cause of the problem, which is where Steinberg comes in. Lack of family values, drug use, reckless sex, violence - all symptoms. Sure, all of this sucks and it does break down communities and families, but these are still symptoms of a deeper problem that, left untreated, will only make things worse. Individuals might be able to occasionally transcend these problems, and we look at such individuals and say, "Hey, if that one guy did it, shouldn't all the other millions of people be able to do it, too? Obviously, they just don't want to. They could if they wanted to." THAT is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Someone above said, "...the immediate gratification of desires robs children of their future. How the self-destructive behaviors are bequeathed to the next generation as a perverse, negative inheritance.." etc. This is precisely the problematic thinking this article wants to combat. Those "self-destructive behaviors" are most definitely symptoms, results, and consequences of entire generations of people living without opportunity. "Lack of responsibility", you say? Symptom. When opportunity doesn't knock, we fill ourselves up with other things - much of it completely self-destructive but often the only perceived way to cope with a life that will not ever work out the way you'd like. That's how humans are. Now, I'm not saying that we can't demand some sense of responsibility and maturity, and I am saying that families SHOULD endorse these things, but poverty does not occur simply because families do not endorse these things. Someone else earlier gave the fallen tree/roadblock analogy, and I think it's a good one, except for the caveat that people wouldn't have to swerve off the road if the tree could just get removed in the first place. I know that person's point was that tree or no tree, people often get off the road before they've even reached the tree, and this is true. But, they'd drive a lot further on the road if they thought - and did not expect, as they do now - that a tree will be blocking the way eventually, in one way or another, and will never be removed. Why would you drive up to a tree that has been blocking the road for at least the last 50 years that has no sign of ever being removed? You wouldn't - you'd get off the road way before that and go do something else with yourself. The commentator with the tree analogy was right, though, too, in that there are a lot of other reasons why people get off the road. But, simply put, if you remove the fallen tree, at least you know that the reason they always get off the road too soon is NOT because there is a damn tree lying there, blocking the way.
And, the "basic needs of the poor" are NOT being met. Not all of them, anyway. Many do NOT have food, shelter, clothes. That's what we usually call homelessness.
Furthermore, I didn't get the sense that Steinberg was arguing that poverty is the one and only cause of culture, and so I'm irritated with the commentators here who say that Steinberg confuses causation with correlation. He doesn't. He's saying, simply, that culture is not the cause of poverty, not that poverty is the one and only cause of negative cultural traits. His article attacks the problem of the current rhetoric, and why it can't stand. For the record, he definitely leans toward saying that the problems with the current "culture of poverty" really is caused by a deficiency in economic support, and I, for one, agree. But he sure doesn't confuse correlation with causation. Seems to me he's pretty sure of what the cause is. Also, he definitely doesn't say that economic lack of opportunity is the cause of ALL cultural problems, as someone above misinterpreted.
Morality, time and time again, finds its way in to this argument, but it just has no place. Speaking of conflating, people here DO conflate morality with "culture", which is also unproductive. Every culture has its own moral compass, and it does no good to worry about good versus bad morals, as I believe someone else mentioned here. What we need to focus on is giving each and every person a fighting a chance, until we know for sure and for certain that the destruction in their lives is truly their own fault. As of now, we simply cannot say that.
He has never lived in an inner city ghetto.
He will never suffer the actual consequences of his delusions.
He is free and safe to hurl his carefully camouflaged invective at those who dare to question the liberal orthodoxy.
But the liberal solution has failed. The kids still go to prison instead of college.
He, like all zealots - will not see the simple truth of that failure - but instead tries to blame still present hidden evils that must yet be rooted out with further struggle up the same failed path.
The people he attacks are only trying to shed light on the true situation - to find actual causes and actual solutions that might actually work - but he attacks them anyway - safe in the knowledge that he will never have to live with the consequences.
It is a disgusting spectacle.
a) They have as a group lower IQ.
b) They have more single mothers.
c) Their "time preference" is not as long term strategic as other racial groups.
d) More impulsive.
All of this is firmly established. See e.g. Philosophy and Biology, 2009.
Moreover: e) USA blacks do better than any other blacks in the world. So, certainly there is cause for asking: why are USA blacks doing so well compared to other blacks? The answer is that they live in a society were blacks are not the majority. f) The dichotomy of "Culture vs. economics" is shallow, both are supervenient on deeper biological properties.
Of course, it doesn't matter how well established these simple truths are, someone like Steinberg thinks that he disregard science, and come to right answers by some armchair, quasi-Marxist "its all the material conditions" analysis that fits with his nice egalitarian liberal outlook. The greatest problem with his nice view is that it runs up against the facts.
We all need opportunities to envision the possibilities for what we might become, someday. When we lose that, we become complacent with where we are and what we have, regardless of where we come from and what kinds of experiences we have had.
Certainly, economic and political policies and structures play an empirical role in showing us what our options are. If public funding is not devoted to ensuring that we all have access to decent education, housing, and jobs, then the reality we interpret the reality we have inherited as unfair, and our opportunities for agency as inherently limited. And yes, policies that do not ensure economic, organizational, and human investment in areas where kids grow up seeing poverty everywhere they look, are bound to reproduce cultural norms and patterns that reinforce hopelessness.
Culture, as the set of inherited patterns of behavior, values, and norms, is not only influenced by policy- it also influences it. This bi-directional relationship must be attended to in any analysis. Steinberg is fairly one-sided in this analysis, but he is up against a more dominant "culturalist" paradigm, and someone needs to help create a balance. But what cannot be forgotten is that all of these factors have an impact on a young kid, growing up in any neighborhood.
I am reminded of the words of the late architect and urban theorist, Louis I. Kahn. "A city should be a place where a little boy [or girl] walking through its streets can sense what [s/]he someday would like to be." There are a lot of factors that go into the cultivation of this "sense." As long as we continue to make conjecture without actually working on the ground to make change, we will reproduce the impossibilities that young people--and indeed, we too-- feel altogether too often.
Let us reunite our research and our practice- our thought and our action-- for all of our good.
Anyone else who knows exactly where this data is coming from is also welcome to reply.
I won’t pretend that it was not exasperating at times to read comments that showed that we were talking past each other. I realize that I am not only challenging popular assumptions, but that I also may be seen as denying the reality before our eyes. After all, it is a matter of simple observation that many poor people—yes, in their behavior as well as their belief systems—violate the cultural norms that prevail in the society at large. It is undeniably the case that school dropouts, domestic violence, crime, gangs, prostitution, and a host of other “social ills” are found disproportionately among the poor, as was true for Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews when they were poor, and as is true of today’s struggling immigrants. My whole point was not to deny culture, but to trace its anchorage in social structures and conditions of poverty. Nor do I deny that poor people often act in ways that are self-destructive as well as anti-social. But as Andrea cautioned in her sage comment, we must be careful not to confuse symptoms with causes. And if the root causes reside in poverty, then social policy must focus on reforming those structures that engender and reproduce poverty. Matt put it well:
"I agree that poverty arises from more than just structural issues; personal (you say individual) and cultural issues are at play as well. But consider that Steinberg is addressing the political and policy realms, arguing that cultural considerations are not viable as matters of public policy. The pertinent point of discussions is effective public policy, not 'conceptions about human life'. You can't legislate culture, and to do so with effect might just be unconstitutional."
Matt’s critics will counter that while you can’t legislate culture, you can change culture, that even poor people have agency and bear some degree of social responsibility for their “bad choices.” True enough. But there are a plethora of relevant others who define their mission in terms of rehabilitating and uplifting the poor: parents, teachers, social workers, ministers, courts, and others who teach and enforce cultural norms. But my question is: What does sociology bring to the table? The distinctively sociological question is: What can be done, not to rehabilitate the poor, but to eliminate poverty? Or to provide the poor with channels of escape so that they can earn a wage that will allow them to live according to the prevailing norms of our society. As Dean wrote with dazzling clarity:
"How do you bootstrap tens of millions? Welfare.
When faced with reality of persistently inadequate economic conditions, Americans talk about how they or their friends pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to create a decent life. Well good for you. But maybe there's something wrong with a society in which emerging from poverty into a livable existence requires a heroic act [emphasis is mine]. Anti-poverty programs aim to shift the baseline upward so that a shred of hope is guaranteed. No one gets rich or even comfortable off welfare. It's just about providing the minimum economic support necessary to break out of poverty. That should be a matter of right, not heroism."
Our society has the resources to eliminate poverty; it only lacks the political will. And while I do not doubt that my intellectual adversaries share this ideal, I fear that their “cultural turn” places the individual, not societal institutions, at the center of analysis and hence of policy.
As for the exchange on this website, so much the better that we did not speak with unanimity, since it is hardly a “debate” if you hear from only one side. But there is also merit in acknowledging difference even among those who share the same politics and world view. Such is the case with Adolph Reed. Full disclosure: we are both friends and on one occasion, co-authors. But Adolph ended his incisive comment on a note of candor and blunt eloquence:
"Steve and I differ on the extent to which 'racism' is either accurate or helpful as a label for this continuing attack on poor people and therefore the extent to which 'antiracism' is an adequate response. However, we are in absolute agreement that such an attack is what underlies this recurrent proclamation of the same tired lie. It is, moreover, a gutless lie, the lie of the comfortable and well-fed actual and wannabe retainers of the powerful who simultaneously want to see themselves as courageous truth-tellers victimized by softheaded egalitarians."
@ Andrea
Not necessarily, although if you're looking at group statistics higher mean iq will tend to predict greater academic achievement and vocational success. You see this particularly with Ashkenazi jewish and East Asian groups who have high mean scores on psychometric tests.
Variation between people in a given population is significantly due to genetic variation, although this can be swamped by a bad environment. Environmental factors such as exposure to toxins like alcohol in the womb or poor nutrition can stifle development.
Also, executive function (planning for the future and strategic thinking) and 'emotional intelligence' (ie. Delay Gratification) are important. A person may have a relatively high iq, but be lacking in these areas.
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2007/11/iq-executive-function-and-emotional.html
Does Mr Steinberg have an answer to Thomas?
Yes he probably does. But what does it matter. It won't change his concrete-reinforced left wing mindset.
Biol Philos (2010) 25:143–162 DOI 10.1007/s10539-009-9193-7
Race: a social destruction of a biological concept Neven Sesardic
Also: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235–294
Earlier I made the incontrovertible point that the 30% or so less that male Blacks make, and the 10% or so less that black women make in the US is due to: a) lower IQ, b) less self-discipline, c) time preference biased to reward now, rather than in the future and a few other such psychological characteristics. Social factors: d) war on drugs:criminals usually have lower IQ and less impulse control, so one would predict that blacks would be in jail. e) The Asians, Latinos, and Whites who discriminate actively may also contribute some, but this may have to do with the behavior of blacks rather than some mean racist ideology per se.
The "culture of poverty" explanation is an environmentalist (i.e leftist, 0-genetic) attempt to account for the now well established fact that socially important, functional, race differences in the general cognitive factor (g) have a developmental (i.e biological) basis and exist across the SES spectrum. It is an established fact that "people of color" (African-Americans and Black Hispanics) in the same social class as White or Yellow people, on average, have lower levels of general intelligence, a factor which is intercorrelated with numerous neurological endophenotypes. Since high SES "people of color" are deficit relative to high SES white people, this deficit can not be explained by biologically affecting environmental "pollutants." Since it's biological, it can not be explained discrimination; discrimination is not going to lead to differential cortical volume as measured by automated MRI. Sorry.
The "culture of poverty" explanation is an attempt to account for this. Accordingly, "people of color" are not "exercising" (as environmentalist James Flynn puts it) their brains and, thereby, increasing their neural volume, processing capacity, etc. Perhaps.
In absence of the "culture of poverty" explanation, how would you account for the above mentioned differences? Or is it that you, unlike those you critique, are unaware of the existence of these average psychometric and endophenotypic differences?
Second: how wonderful it would be if the range of opinion here could be fully aired in some sort of National Town Meeting on poverty. And does anything like this sort of discussion occur during election year? How about a candidates' debate that focuses exclusively on the poor or, following Steinberg's remarks, more properly, on poverty? (I especially favor treating poverty as a public health issue, as one contributor above suggested.)
The mechanism of IQ is also being discoved with the help of new high-resolution MRI scans.
This UCLA abstract describes how "genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin"
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/more-proof-that-intelligence-is-85134.aspx
But the real point I want to make is that Mr. Steinberg was educated before these new scientific instruments, and is therefore stuck in a time-bubble were its either culture, or "structure", when in fact both are supervenient on deeper psychological statistical facts. It is exactly like Kuhn said in The Structure..., the old paradigm becomes silly and outdated from the point of newer paradigms. From a reality based point of view, you might as well call Mr. Steingberg's writing a genre of fiction or poetry. Psalms serving a psychological need.
People who actually want to engage with the arguments should note them: attributing the degree of success/failure of a group to cultural factors is begging the question when we have good reason to believe that the cultural factors are a consequence of/reaction to socio-economic conditions. If you suppose culture was somehow a significant cause of the socio-economic situation, you suggest that culture exists independent of social and economic conditions. This is an especially silly claim to level against impoverished groups with relatively little control over their own context.