What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty

Conclusion

169 Conclusion During the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich argued that children from low-income families lacked role models to teach them the importance of a good work ethic; they thus failed to understand the concept of “showing up on Monday and staying all day.” They should be employed, he suggested, in jobs such as “assistant janitor” at their schools to help them learn the value of work as well as earn wages.1 With this controversial statement, Gingrich illustrated the extent to which images of deprivation in the home lives of low-income children remain a part of current political debates. By championing middleclass and wealthy mothers who choose to stay home to raise their children while simultaneously calling for eligibility criteria that require low-income mothers of young toddlers to work to receive public assistance, conservative politicians reveal deeply ingrained views of maternal deprivation and normative mothering. Time and again, politicians have enlisted a variety of images, words, and metaphors to argue thatthe poor have less. The interventions developed to provide the poor with what they are assumed to lack, however, do not provide them with the material goods they so desperately need: income, affordable housing, or access to health care, much less such basic amenities as food and clothing. Rather, many of these interventions attempt to remedy perceived psychological or experiential gaps. Even Gingrich’s proposal to employ poor children to clean school bathrooms was framed as a way of providing them with the experiences they sorely needed, helping them to developaworkethicthatmoreadvantagedchildrenwouldhavederivedfrom role models in their own communities. While the poor undeniably have less of certain resources, the interventions examined in this volume rarely targeted these material aspects of poverty . From encouraging mothers to “take interest” in their children to slowly familiarizing children with different shapes and sizes, many of the 1960s War 170 Conclusion on Poverty interventions were designed to provide the poor with things they in fact did not lack or did not need. Liberal-minded experts and politicians expressed confidence that they could effectively identify and provide what the poor needed. These perceived missing components often reflected a moralizing psychological interpretation of the personal failings believed to be common among low-income and particularly minority groups. Children were unloved or unstimulated; mothers were deficient both in their homemaking abilities and in their capacity to understand and care for their children; fathers lacked self-esteem and positive masculine role models. Many of the programs examined in What’s Wrong with the Poor? certainly had profound positive impacts on the lives of low-income families and their community, providing much-needed educational and health services. At the same time, the delivery of these services reflected deeply rooted stereotypes of what was “wrong” with society’s marginalized groups. Writing this history of the intersection of psychiatry, civil rights, and public policy in the 1960s places me in the uncomfortable position of criticizing programsIsupportandevenadmire,amongthemProjectHeadStartandthe ill-fated radical community action program Mobilization for Youth. While their negative views of low-income persons of color seem abrasive to the modern reader, these experts were not racial conservatives or bigots. Their liberal politics and idealistic goal of attaining social equality through early intervention reflected the giddy optimism of the era. From Carl Bereiter, who compared African American children to deaf children who “have no language,” through Bettye Caldwell, who lamented the lack of a “literacy test” for parenthood, to Susan Gray, who worried about how frying pans in disarray would interfere with children’s intellectual development, the child development experts who sought to prevent and treat deprivation were deeply committed to the children they hoped to help. Rejecting hereditarian explanations for the achievement gap, these experts firmly believed that compensatory education was the key to racial equality. Similarly, members of the Kerner Commission genuinely wanted to understand the causes of civil unrest; their recommendations would have radically transformed the structure of American society. Although much of their analysis was based on deprivation theory, their attempt to make sense of urban violence was ultimately far more sympathetic to the plight of low-income inner-city African Americans than any previous interpretation. Examining how key political moments in the 1960s embodied racially and socioeconomically biased interpretations of deprivation theory runs the 171 Conclusion risk of being read as a personal indictment of the main actors involved. That is certainly not my intention. Rather than...