Prometheus 6

This is The Möbius point...where the trail is subtly twisted so that when you close the loop you're actually on the other side of the reality you started out describing. Mead's tool is “as such.”

Again, first the video

then the notes.

What is the connection of all this to poverty

1. The End of History shaped the poverty issue

   1. Low income “as such” was never a political issue until the 1960s because “more pressing, more threatening issue were still operative”

      • Like racism/White Supremacy

      • Note the timing. Also note that the statement takes no real notice of Black people, to whom poverty was a critical issue due to their exclusion

   2. The non-poor were more politically formidable than the poor

   3. “The traditional class antagonism of workers and race questions related to, uh, that issue that, that, uh, dominated the political discussion. It was only after those groups had received their essential satisfaction that you could get poverty on the agenda.”

      • The class groups defined themselves in terms of their economic position instead of their poverty

        • That's the same thing...to say otherwise is nothing more or less than mendacity

      • Poverty “as such” wasn't an issue in The New Deal...the issue was unemployment

        • That's the same thing...to say otherwise is nothing more or less than mendacity

   4. The Civil Rights movement wasn't about poverty, it was about equal rights for Blacks. It was only at the end of history that poverty “in the current sense” came to occupy politics

      • Previously the poor were actually aided by programs aimed at the working class

        • Black people were constrained from participating in those programs...see Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform and Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

   5. There were “probably” fewer poor than before when the Great Society programs began, but the poverty that remained was more visible and “disordered.”

      • Since the statistics that were kept ignored people who were outside the employment market and Black people were forced out of it, this singularly myopic view is further evidence of the acceptability of that exclusion to those who would present this argument.

   6. “So the shift in social policy is away from the workplace...

      • ...from which Black people were basically excluded and so received no benefits from that policy

   7. ...and toward the family and private life that never was previously the focus of social poverty. The family came into the agenda in a big way because of the changing nature of poverty, not because uh, ah, in a way that never happened before

      • The stammer is there. I would speculate on what he was denying was responsible for the new focus on the family.

   8. This attention exposed the poor to a kind of scrutiny they were unable to sustain.

2. Poverty is one of the reasons history halted. Dealing with poverty showed “the social problems in western society is no longer to be due...to be blamed centrally on capitalism or, in the U.S., racism....this transforms their position politically.”

   1. Here we see the crux of the argument. Remember...The End of History means “the end of what we're willing to do.” This longish segment (which frankly I have no stomach for at the moment), roughly half way through the clip, demonstrates WHY Black people have been conflated with the poor. Mead argues about poverty and says, “That goes for Black people, too.”