The War on Poverty was legislation that brought about the beginning of the modern era of respectability politics and the face of African-Americans as the symbol of poverty in the U.S. In 1965 the report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” was released. In this report and through various interpretations of this report black women were demonized for not being good mothers owing to their “loose morals,” and the black family was generalized and pathologized.
The community needed help and the community was going to get it.
Lyndon B. Johnson was going to make “taxpayers out of tax eaters,” because the problem in the black community wasn’t the over 200 years of slavery or nearly 100 years of Jim Crow or the racially restrictive covenant laws or the lynchings. The problem in the black community was that it didn’t know how to pull up its own boot straps.
All the challenges of the black community, according to the Great Society, needed to be taken care of from inside the black community.
It brought about Head Start (which forced poor women to watch other poor women’s children for slightly above minimum wage,) food stamps (so you could know who to shame) and housing projects (a jail for poor women and their children.)
Means based safety nets is one of the cruelest and ineffective ways a society can implement social programs.
When the War on Poverty was implemented our country could have implemented a War on Sexism or a War on Racism. Attacking those two fronts could have made systematic changes to the way the U.S. was run, but maybe the idea was that the system was fine, it was simply that black people were not.
The War on Poverty brought about as Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “piecemeal changes.”
Martin Luther King Jr. was not a fan of the War on Poverty.
You won’t end poverty if you don’t address the deficits of the institution that causes poverty. And poverty is caused. It’s not something you can try hard and make go away on your own. Poverty is caused by oppression and/or system deficits. Poverty is a symptom. You don’t just alleviate the symptom that is poverty, you fix what causes poverty.
The War on Poverty at its best was a band aid for the cancer of economic inequality and at its worse was manipulative plan to change poverty from something that the government was obliged to fix into something that you brought upon yourself by not working hard and being a “bad” Christian.
“You have free child care and a place to sleep, why aren’t you middle class yet?”
In more economically oppressed U.S. black communities the deficits in the institution’s system in regards to women are compounded by institutional racism and institutional sexism which restricts social and physical movement and economic access.
While many people take the view that women who have children without being married tend to be poorer, which means those women should get married. I take a different view.
Women who aren’t married who have children should be paid a fair wage and have institutional supports, so that being a woman doesn’t doom you and your child to a life of poverty.
Pregnancy is not a disease. It is a natural function that over 80% of adult women in the US —at some point, go through. Our society should make plans for this natural biological function.
The problem with the “single mom” issue isn’t the single part. It’s the mom is a woman part. Marriage isn’t a business transaction, at least it is not supposed to be.
We in the U.S. pride our country as the country where you have a choice. Women should have a choice whether they want to get married.
Marriage rates in many developed countries are going down, yet poverty rates for children aren’t going up. The reason being is that the rest of the world has figured out that oppressing women, oppresses children. Children that grow up oppressed and poor, regardless of gender, have a challenging time being productive members of society.
You want to save poor black boys in the inner city, save their mother’s first.
Support women and you support children. Equal pay, universal child-care— regardless of income— family leave and a society that doesn’t view sex outside of marriage as icky, is all part of that.
If marriage was the answer to cure child poverty then Sweden which has some of the lowest marriage rates in the developed world should have the highest child poverty rates and the US which has some of the highest marriage rates in the developed world should have some of the lowest child poverty, but the reality is— the opposite is true.
Sweden has a child poverty rate of 7.0%. The U.S. has a children poverty rate of 22%.
In 2009 according to the CDC unmarried children births were 66% in Sweden and in the US unmarried children births were 41%.
The War on Poverty had nothing to do with poverty. It had to do with puritanical morality and a sexist out of date purview.
Black women in the U.S. have always had higher than average unmarried childbirths. Black children in the U.S. have always been disproportionately poor.
Never married women poverty rate in the U.S. is 21%. Married women poverty rate in the U.S. is 6%. You compare women without children the poverty rate for unmarried women in the U.S. is 18% and the poverty rate for married women without children is 4%.
That smells like sexism to me.
Now the idea is if we could just get women married then poverty would magically vanish.
There is no need to address the pink collar ghetto, which forces women to have more education than a man for less pay. This pay gap is even more pronounced in the working class purple collar ghetto where a man with high school diploma can make more than a woman with an AA degree.
I do not believe the answer to childhood poverty is more people getting married and god. I don't believe children poverty is about values, at least not puritanical ones that paint scarlet letters on women for having sex.
I believe the answer to children poverty is stopping systematic institutional oppression in all forms. I believe the answer in ending childhood poverty is more feminist, family, labor and urban planning policies and passage of the ERA. I believe the answer is a class and racially balanced feminist curriculum in K-12 and in universities, so that all of society is on the same page in regards to the fact that women are as valuable as men.
“The newly enacted Civil Rights Bill brings the American Negro to the threshold of becoming a first class participate in society. But until he can be released from economic privation he cannot be fully deemed liberated, ” Martin Luther King Jr. regarding the War on Poverty.
Poverty is caused by policies that aren’t just sexist, but down right misogynist and antagonistic towards women and their children.
Until working class women of all races are released from economic privation, the U.S. will continue to have the second highest child poverty rates in the developed world.
by Teka Lark