Click here
to order a term paper on Sociology - Culture
The fact that is that almost no one in the early 1960s
thought of poverty as something involving urban blacks.
(West Virginia was the model in those days.) We are
then given a tour through the major ways by which intellectuals
tried to understand the poor: the culture of poverty.
Harrington aimed for making his readers understand that
regardless of the apparent national consensus that the
“affluent society” had arrived, there had
been a continual culture of poverty which existed in
urban slums as well as rural isolation.
Click here to order essays on
Sociology - Culture
Harrington's "discovery" had two parts: First,
he pointed out that 50 million Americans lived below
the poverty line. Second, drawing on the work of Oscar
Lewis, the book argued that the poor had a culture of
poverty that required that they be assisted in learning
to help themselves. Harrington offered some critiques
on the housing problem. He wrote that housing "must
be seen as an important organism for the creation of
community life in the cities."
"The poor are not like everyone else . . . . They
think and feel differently; they look upon a different
America than the middle class looks upon," Harrington
wrote.
References:
|
