Assignment 14: Seeing Poverty through My Wide Angle Lens

This assignment brings me full circle to the name I gave my blog when this course began:  Anna’s Wide Angle Lens.  My goal for this course was to expand my up-close and personal, one-person-at-a-time telephoto lens perspective as a psychology major.  As this course comes to an end, I can see that it has certainly given me a wider perspective on the society-wide forces that influence our lives.  I think I am starting to learn how to use my wide angle lens.

My broadened perspective is especially apparent when I consider the issue of poverty.  Although I attended Minneapolis Public Schools where many students come from families below the poverty line, I never really thought about the social forces, social structure, social institutions and cultural beliefs that underlie poverty in the United States, and, for that matter, the world.  Growing up in a comfortable upper middle class family, I knew that many of my classmates came from families that were poor, but I didn’t really give much thought to why those families might be living in poverty. 

If I thought about it at all, I’m afraid that I mostly believed that perhaps my poor classmates’ parents didn’t work hard enough or lacked the necessary traits or abilities to get out of poverty.  Now I know that my view was based on an individualistic explanation called “competitive individualism” which most our parents taught us from an early age:  Competitive individualism is the cultural view that we are fully responsible for our own economic fates, and anyone can be successful if they just want it badly enough and work hard enough (Newman, p. 324).  In considering my less economically fortunate classmates, I think my view was that if they just studied hard enough, they would get to college, get good jobs, and be done with poverty. This class has made me see that my competitive individualistic view of poverty was simplistic, narrow, and just plain wrong.

After this course, I now see that poverty is primarily a social issue with complex causes, many, if not most, of which are social and are not related to individual effort or abilities. Nearly every chapter of our text provides a sociological perspective on this pervasive issue.  For example:

·    In Chapter 2 we learned about values and that different societies emphasize different values, with success, independence and individual achievement being seen as important values in U.S. society (Newman, p. 32).  We also learned in Chapter 2 that even a value such as privacy differs by social class, with poor families having less privacy than more well-to-do families.  In that same chapter we also learned about the three sociological perspectives on social order, including the conflict perspective that is offered in Chapter 10 as an explanation for the persistence of poverty:  The “economic, political, and educational systems…support the interests of those who control the wealth” (Newman, p. 46).   

·    In Chapter 3 we learned that even the way in which words are defined, especially by governments, can have serious social implications, with the example of how “homelessness” is defined determining eligibility for governmental help.

·    Chapter 5 introduced us to the concept of social class and the way it is linked to socialization and the promotion of values, and that middle class parents are more likely to promote the values of self-direction, independence and curiosity, while working class parents are more likely to emphasize conformity to external authority (Newman, p. 137). 

·    In Chapter 6 we learned that being overweight is likely to be equated with poverty, with a higher percentage of poor children being overweight than non-poor children and fast-food companies targeting poor, inner-city neighborhoods (Newman, p. 162).

·    In Chapter 7 we learned how the economy affects nearly every aspect of family life, and that sustaining a supportive and nurturing family is nearly impossible without adequate income, and that economic hardship stresses a family’s bonds (Newman, p. 204). 

·    In Chapter 8 we learned that according to the conflict perspective, most societies make sure that the offenders that get processed through the criminal justice system are members of the lowest socioeconomic class, with poor people more likely to get arrested, charged, tried, convicted, imprisoned, and even executed than more affluent citizens.

Chapter 10 also really opened my eyes to what Newman calls the “enduring disparities in income and wealth” (Newman, p. 320).  A few days ago, President Obama spoke of a very serious challenge he sees our country facing: the disappearance of the middle class. After doing Assignment 10, I could certainly understand what he was talking about.  When I started “crunching the numbers” I could see how very challenging it is for U.S. families to meet even basic needs on an annual income that didn’t sound so low.  I calculated that my hypothetical family of four would need nearly $60,000 to live in Minneapolis very modestly with no extras of any kind, and the hypothetical parents in my example were working awfully hard to just barely get by!  And they didn't even begin to meet the “official” definition of "poverty" in the United States.  I saw an internet poll last week based on a report that the median family income in the country is about $50,000.  The poll asked people to say whether they thought they could live in their area on that, and over half of the respondents said that they didn’t think they could, yet an annual income of $50,000 probably qualifies as middle class, not poor. 

I now can see the issue of poverty in the United States from different sociological perspectives.  The structural-functionalist perspective is that in our free market economy and competitive individualistic society, poverty plays a necessary institutional role to provide low-wage workers and people to serve in the military, and to legitimize the traditional values of hard work, thrift and honesty (Newman, p. 322-323).  The conflict perspective would say that the rich and politically powerful work together to create or maintain their status at the expense of the middle and lower classes (Newman, p. 302).  I think that this is what President Obama was talking about.  The recent “Occupy Wall Street” movement would seem to agree!  

My new wide angle sociological lens gives me a new perspective on the issue of poverty in the United States which makes me realize that as members of society, we are all responsible for this issue.  At the very least, we need to look through the wide angle lens when we go to the polls to choose our political leaders if we are going to have any chance of solving this issue during our lifetimes.   I think we should be very wary of any politician who blames the individuals who are poor without looking at the societal factors that contribute to their plight.  Like the rest of us, politicians would benefit from having a sociological perspective—a wide-angle lens.

Of course Chapter 10 addressed many aspects of the issue of poverty directly.  Learning about the challenges faced by children growing up in poverty was both sad and enlightening to me.  I can see now that in terms of education, my less fortunate classmates had the social “deck stacked against them” (Newman, p. 315).  The Minneapolis Public Schools have more than their fair share of students in poverty and must devote many resources to trying to help students who face challenges that can interfere with their education such as hunger, food insecurity, homelessness, and moving too often.  It was also enlightening for me to learn that even when children in poverty graduate from high school, most can’t afford to attend college, and those who do have much lower graduation rates than students from more affluent families (Newman, p. 317).  This is another piece of sociological evidence that make individualistic explanations of why people are poor unconvincing.

My new wide angle sociological lens gives me a new perspective on the issue of poverty in the United States which makes me realize that as members of society, we are all responsible for this issue.  At the very least, we need to look through the wide angle lens when we go to the polls to choose our political leaders if we are going to have any chance of solving this issue during our lifetimes.   I think we should be very wary of any politician who blames the individuals who are poor without looking at the societal factors that contribute to their plight.  Like the rest of us, politicians would benefit from having a sociological perspective—a wide-angle lens.