Trapped in Poverty: A Conceptual Framework to Evaluate the Culture of Poverty vs the Culture of Inequality Theses for Black Female-headed Families
Dr. Val Livingston, Dr. Dianne Davis-Wagner, Dr. Insoo Chung, Dr. Breshell Jackson Nevels, Mr. Nickolas Gabriel, MSW
Abstract
For more than 50 years, the Black, female-headed family has been vilified as the source of pathological behaviors including delinquency, teen pregnancy, criminal activity, school failure, poor work ethic and overall low morals and values. Cited by Moynihan as a “tangle of pathology”, this family structure was linked to intergenerational poverty and welfare dependency. The cycle of poverty thesis was used to explain the entrapment of roughly 20% of Black Americans living in unending poverty. The literature provides a plethora of viable explanations for Black poverty that are not dependent solely on the Black female head but inclusive of race and gender discrimination, a capitalistic economy, social structure and blocked opportunities, low wage-work, environmental stress, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The culture of inequality is dissected as a possible explanation of intergenerational Black poverty and is undergirded by slavery, past and present brutality and institutional racism.