For your blogs due this week (9/17), I would like you to think about the legacies of the White Man's Burden and the ideological underpinnings of American Empire building to the myth of "The Culture of Poverty". After reading Kaplan's Introduction to Anarchy of Empire (and the original version of Kipling's "The White Man's Burden"), reflect upon how the concept of "culture" and the ways in which the "foreign Other" is constructed and (mis)used to aid in the growing sense of how U.S. nationhood ("the domestic") was also being formed.
Kaplan argues:
"The dream of imperial expansion is the nightmare of its own
success, a nightmare in which movement outward in the world threatens to
incorporate the foreign and dismantle the domestic sphere of the nation. Imperialism does not emanate from the solid
center of a fully formed nation; rather, the meaning of the nation itself is
both questioned and redefined through the outward reach of empire. (12)"
How then is "culture" used to redefine the meaning of "the nation". What does "race" have to do with it? Then, read this short article about the "Culture of Poverty" http://thesocietypages.org/roundtables/culture-of-poverty/ and draw out any continuities. Use YOUR voice to analyze the materials and bring them into "conversation".
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I feel that culture shouldn't be used to redefine the meaning of a nation. Just because nations are made up of numerous people of different races and ethnicity. Among the diverse array of people, each possess a certain culture; whether it being influenced by their heritage or an area that they may have grown up around. But our society likes to look at a certain amount of people something may consist of and slap the term culture on it and not look at the bigger issue behind it. For example, the term "welfare" is used to associate blacks and Latinos, while ignoring the fact at 67% of people on welfare or government aid are Caucasian. Also ignoring the fact blacks for years were unable to own their own homes and still deal with inequalities within the housing market.
ReplyDeleteI feel like "race" has an influence on the way we view culture but I don't feel that one can associate a culture with race. For the simple fact that cultures influence other cultures and many cultures have taken up traits from those cultures. An example of this would be Hip Hop culture. In the late 80s-early 90s, this genre and the fashion that came along with it rooted from black neighborhoods that was brought into mainstream media. Today, America has adopted that culture of it's own and Hip Hop culture has influenced how people dress, talk, and the music they listen to, which stemmed from the black struggle. In the article "Culture of Poverty" Mario Luis Small stated that the people that analyze poverty and it's patterns rarely take things into consideration. Like the the Hip Hop example, or the limited access people that do live in poverty have to outside resources to sustain a life that will eventually lead them out of poverty.