In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

obligation by establishing ownership. A Kansas state legislator has argued that impoverished women should be induced to accept Norplant birth-control implants as a way to hold down welfare costs and cut the size of the recipient population. State welfare departments have taken up marriage brokering, as in a Wisconsin plan to o¤er cash inducements for women who marry their way o¤ AFDC and to cut beneWts for “unwed teenage mothers.” These moves demonstrate unambiguously the repressive, antifeminist outlook lurking beneath the focus on family. It is imperative to reject all assumptions that poor people are behaviorally or attitudinally di¤erent from the rest of American society. Some percentage of all Americans take drugs, Wght in families, and abuse or neglect children. If the behavior exists across lines of class, race, and opportunity, then it cannot reasonably be held to produce poverty. If it does not cause poverty, therefore, we do not need to focus on it at all in the context of policy-oriented discussion about poverty. We should Wght for policy changes that will open opportunity structures: support for improving access to jobs, housing, schooling, real drug rehabilitation of the sort available to the relatively well o¤. A focus on behavior, after all, leads into a blind alley in policy terms. If we say that poor people are poor because they have bad values, we let government o¤ the hook, even though conscious government policy—for example, in the relations between support for metropolitan real estate speculation and increasing homelessness, malnutrition, and infant mortality—is directly implicated in causing poverty. 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. —Adolph L. Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. My Father’s Party Luis J. Rodríguez april 2008 My father was a Republican. Anybody who knows me may Wnd this hard to believe. You could not Wnd an apple as far away from the tree as the distance between my father and me. We didn’t agree on many things, but mostly we disagreed on politics. A little background: My father in 1956 made his Wnal trip to Los Angeles from Mexico in his early forties when I was two years old. He had bought whole hog into “the American Dream.” He worked hard—in dog food factories, construction, paint factories . He sold pots and pans, Bibles, and chicharrones (Mexican-style pork rinds). Finally, he landed a custodial position at a community college laboratory in the Los Angeles area, and that’s what he did for Wfteen years until he retired. After several years of false starts—including getting evicted a few times, going bankrupt, losing one home—we Wnally bought a house in San Gabriel, California, 126 p a r t 5 the civil rights movement in the late 1960s for $12,500 (his salary was around $14,000 at the time). It was a modest, wood-frame, two-bedroom for a family of six. Yet this made us one of the Wrst Mexican families to own a home in the area. I was thirteen years old and already in gangs and using drugs—hardly a model son for my parents. Their dreams failed to connect to anything I felt was important at the time. Something seemed hollow about my family pretending to “make it” when I knew otherwise: We may have bought a house, but we had money for barely anything else. My dad fell for the materialistic lure of American capitalism. In the process, he often forgot he was a janitor—a highly qualiWed one, yes, but a janitor nonetheless. He dealt with growing debt by getting into more debt. He also had very little emotional connection with his children or with my mother. He was a hard guy to Wgure out, to inXuence, even to love. Over the years, I saw his spirit get crushed. When I got into revolutionary politics in my late teens and early twenties—a vital process in removing myself from crime and drugs—my father and I often argued. About unions (he hated them), civil rights (he felt people should stop complaining), and who should run the country (he loved Richard Nixon). One time, my dad asked me to attend a meeting of a conservative political group. West San Gabriel Valley at the time had many middle-class, upwardly mobile white communities next to very...

Share