The idea of the culture of poverty is a direct continuation
of the Imperial ideals of the “White Man’s Burden” and shows the ability for
colonial powers to operate inside of national borders as strongly as they do
outside.
This use of culture is not new, as Kaplan points out, and
instead follows a national trend of creating the threat of an ambiguous and
terrifying Other, which justifies and carries within it inherent contradiction,
taking what form needed to justify any U.S. action. Kaplan, in this reading,
focuses heavily case of Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, and
explains how in the assenting opinion, Justice White sets up the idea of being “foreign
in the domestic sense”. This construction is uniquely problematic because it
creates a purgatorial state for Puerto Rico where they lack the independence of
a free state but also are not given the rights and protection bestowed on the
states that are full members of the union. This state justifies not incorporating
Cuba fully from a variety of nightmarish ideas about the foreign Other, about
how they will destabilize the US in the “family of nations” and weaken it
internally in a way family lineages are “weakened by the presence of newcomers”
(10), implying the savagery and inherent weakness of the Puerto Rican people;
about how incorporating Puerto Rico will weaned the notion of citizenship in
the nation, that “it is fleet…subject to be sold at any time. To protect a
newly acquired people…is in essential to degrade the whole body of American
citizenship” (9). This phenomenal threat construction made it clear that
without the intervention of the US, these people would be helpless and unable
to provide for themselves adequately, but that they could not be accepted fully
into the state as they were “the bearers of revolution and anarchy with the
power to overthrow ‘the whole structure of government’”.
This line of thinking is parallel to that which justified
and perpetuated the mindset like that seen in Kipling’s, “The White Man’s
Burden”. This is a particularly interesting case as it involves a British man
praising and instructing the US to intervene and engage in the colonial project
in the Philippines – showing the direct link between the American Imperial
project and the traditional colonial project of European powers. Kipling
constructed the tenets and necessity of colonialism by making reference to the
same ideals as White, giving instruction for the US to help “Your new-caught,
sullen peoples/Half devil and half child/Take up the White Man’s burden/In
patience to abide/To veil the threat of terror/And check the show of pride”.
Here Kipling makes clear that the creation of colonial borders is not merely
spatial, it is culture – it creates a distinction between the familiar and just
“us” and the savage and dangerous “them”, that both reinforces a nation’s
strength and belief in its own principles in identity by using its resources to
help the Other, but does not weaken that nation by inviting the “Other” into its
home as a full and equal member.
The culture of poverty attributes to the poor a mindset or
value structure that dooms them to their current sad state of existence and
makes them unable to assist or move themselves out in a way that someone who
had not been a part of this culture, but who was temporarily without financial
stability, could theoretically have done. This is an attractive
characterization of the poor for the dominant, imperial powers of the US because
it allows the victimizing and pitying of the poor without having to engage them
as equals in any way, as they are simply too entrenched in their “culture” to
understand how to improve their lives. This directly correlates to the lines
upon which the US has drawn the lines between itself and the foreign Other
embodied by Puerto Rico; one direct line of parallel is the idea of the family –
we justified (as mentioned earlier) that the introduction of Puerto Rico and
other foreign states would weaken our family structure in the same way the rhetoric
that theorists who espouse as belief in the culture of poverty, like Moynihan,
talked about the black family, citing “the high rates of divorce, non-marital
childbearing, and welfare use among black families in urban centers and
described these families as exhibiting a “tangle of pathology.” By theorizing
that the structure of black families were “pathologically” weaker, Moynihan
creates a cultural connection between blackness and instability – which at once
denies Black persons agency by claiming they cannot help but have terrible
families, and also blames them for their current situation by criticizing their
choices to use things like government-assistance to help support their
families. This cultural condemnation can be seen as having taken structural
roots within the US by the fact that we measure the success of an economy or
economic program “by how few
people are using government programs and not by the well-being of American
families themselves”.
This cultural demarcation
of poverty is one way through which we can create the foreign Other even within
our own “domestic sphere” even though we don’t even have to tangle with the
stickiness of true annexation. Instead, we can deal with the Other that is not
truly “American” or “normal”, but that instead bears all the contradictory and anarchic
possibilities that we want it to in order to justify any action we wish to
take. It is precisely in this way that the culture of poverty justifies the
White Man’s Burden – by constructing the poor as helpless and needing
assistance, we create a culture that views them without agency and so in need
of our intervention in precisely the same way we viewed Puerto Rico and older European
powers viewed their colonies. The imperial powers draw these lines in such a way
that they exclude as many non-majority groups as possible (race, gender, class)
and then hold them accountable for problems that were imposed onto them by
bearing the brunt of the cost of imperial development.
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