Sheldon Danziger and Ann Chih Lin - Coping with Poverty: The Social Contexts of Neighborhood, Work, and Family in the African-American Community

The disproportionate rate of poverty among African-Americans often leads policymakers, researchers, and advocates for the poor to focus on their plight. In 1997, 26.5 percent of all black persons lived below the official poverty line. The comparable figure for whites was 11 percent. In fact, the 1997 rate for African-Americans was higher than the 1959 rate for whites. The poverty rate for African-Americans living in female-headed households was 42.8 percent, compared with 30.7 percent for similar whites. Even among married couples, who have relatively low poverty rates, the black rate, 8 percent, is substantially higher than the 4.8 percent white rate.

The persistence of poverty is also greater for minorities. That is, once an African-American becomes poor, she or he is likely to remain poor for more years than whites (Gottschalk, McLanahan, and Sandefur 1994). The probability that a poor child will be poor as an adult is also higher for African-Americans than for whites (Corcoran 1995; Corcoran and Chaudry 1997).

Poverty among African-Americans is geographically concentrated in a way that is not true for whites. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of poor persons living in high-poverty census tracts (tracts where at least 40 percent of all persons are poor) increased by 98 percent, even as the total number of poor persons increased by only 37 percent. In 1990, one-third of poor blacks resided in these high-poverty areas, compared with only 6 percent of poor whites (Jargowsky 1997). Thus, poor African-Americans struggle not only with insufficient incomes but also with the added disadvantages of poor neighborhoods. Concentrated poverty, unemployment, and crime combine with persistent residential segregation and labor market discrimination to generate a social context that makes socioeconomic advancement more difficult.

Focusing primarily on African-American poverty, however, can be problematic. The history of racial hostility in America lends a racial cast to behaviors associated with long-term poverty, even though whites account for a substantial percentage of all poor persons. Condemnations of out-of-wedlock births evoke images of black promiscuity, lamentation over sporadic employment draws on historical accusations of unwillingness to takeavailable jobs, and public distress over crime is fueled by a racist tradition of fear of black men. This history makes it hard to objectively analyze the higher-than-average rates of out-of-wedlock births and teen pregnancies (Moore 1995) and rates of joblessness and incarceration (Sampson and Wilson 1995; Wilson 1996) among African-Americans. The challenge is to investigate the social and structural causes of behaviors that are associated with poverty and that violate mainstream norms, without relying on racist stereotypes.

The studies in this volume rise to this challenge. They do not flinch from describing behaviors that many African-Americanspoor or non-poorwould consider undesirable. But they reject both the liberal view that the poor are forced into adopting undesirable behaviors, and the conservative view that such behaviors are evidence that the poor choose to make bad choices. Instead, the authors focus on the social context and analyze the ways that neighborhoods, family relationships, and workplaces influence beliefs and behaviors in the African-American community. They document how individual outcomes are shaped by multiple aspects of the relationships among individuals, their families, and the environments in which they live and work.

This approach helps us understand that a distinctive aspect of coping with poverty in the African-American community involves numerous undesirable options. A young African-American man who voluntarily leaves job after job is not acquiring the stable work record necessary for promotion. But he may be leaving these jobs to avoid racial harassment and discrimination, not only because such workplaces are hard to endure but also because he realizes that the opportunity for advancement in these jobs is limited. A mother who keeps her children inside where she can supervise them and isolates herself from her neighbors is protecting her children from the problems of a high-crime neighborhood in the best way she can. But her actions may keep her from developing close interpersonal ties with her neighbors and may decrease her ability to coalesce with other neighborhood parents on strategies to keep their children out of trouble. The social isolation may also prevent her from learning about an available job that might eventually provide the resources needed to move her family to a safer community. These behaviors would not represent wise choices in the American mainstream, but the chapters here show that they do make sense within the social context of urban poverty.

The chapters thus offer a more-sophisticated understanding of poverty in the lives of those who cope with it that is relevant both for poverty research and for the development of antipoverty policies. Knowledge of the social contexts of poverty can help policymakers to anticipate some of theobstacles that policies might face, and to address the main problems that the poor themselves say they face.