Managing Difference: White Parenting Practices in Socioeconomically Diverse Neighborhoods

2021 ◽  
pp. 153568412098101
Author(s):  
Megan R. Underhill
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spatial Distance ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
White Parents ◽  
Black Residents ◽  
Block Level ◽  
Poor White

Drawing on 40 interviews with white parents in two mixed-income neighborhoods—one that is majority-white and the other that is multiracial—this article examines how residence in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods conditions the parenting practices of middle-class whites, specifically concerning parents’ management of their children’s contact with the poor. The data reveal that white parents in both neighborhoods work to ensure symbolic and spatial distance between their children and their poor neighbors resulting in distinctive patterns of micro-segregation in each neighborhood. However, how parents engage in this work depends on the race of their neighbors and the block-level geography of their community. I find that parents deploy more contact-avoidant practices toward their poor white rather than their poor black neighbors. Among participants, poor whites conjure feelings of disgust and are actively avoided, whereas poor black residents provoke feelings of ambivalence, as contact with them is judged to be both valuable and threatening.

scholarly journals Levinas, Social Vulnerability, and the Logic of South African Racism

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-101
Author(s):  
Robert Bernasconi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Vulnerability ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The Way

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was at the forefront of the promotion of the idea of vulnerability in philosophy. For Levinas, my primary vulnerability concerns not my pain, but my pain at the other’s pain. Vulnerablity also has an ambiguous character in so far as it is not easily separated from my self-absorption in enjoyment. In this paper I show how Levinas’s account can illuminate the way that the idea of vulnerability sometimes operates within racist societies to maintain existing divisions. In particular I focus on the Carnegie Commission’s 1932 study The Poor White Problem in South Africa where concern for the vulnerability of poor whites concealed a tendency to naturalize the vulnerability of South African Blacks. Keywords: Carnegie commission, poor whites, racism, vulnerability, Emmanuel Levinas,South Africa

Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN A. KEELY
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Family Study ◽  
Rural Poverty ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
White Family ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Erskine Caldwell ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
Poor White

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.

The Wall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Holding Back

Any comparison of the 1850s with 1830 would conclude that the struggle for equal rights had made substantial progress. Almost all legal discriminations had ended. There was increased opportunity for advancement. Some black New Englanders gained wealth, political positions, access to cultural venues, and all the other trappings of the affluent middle class. But a wall of poverty and limited economic opportunities limited most. They faced the double hardship of racism and disdain for the poor. Poverty was a wall holding back people of all ethnicities, and it was much more difficult to surmount than barriers separating working class from lower middle class or middle class from upper middle class. For African Americans, the wall was reinforced by racism. Desegregating schools and eliminating the ban on mixed marriages proved to be much easier than ending poverty.

If “Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola” Then “Cold Drink Means Toilet Cleaner”: Environmentalism of the Dispossessed in Liberalizing India

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 114-135
Author(s):  
Amanda Ciafone
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Economic Liberalization ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Corporate Globalization ◽  
Consumer Citizenship ◽  
Village Communities

AbstractWith the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic liberalization, the branded commodity became a sign of both aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India's urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of material and symbolic resources to fuel this consumption. Village communities around several of Coca-Cola's rural plants, including in Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh, organized against the company's operations, which they accused of exploiting and polluting common groundwater in the production of bottled drinks as an increasing expanse of the country fell into a crisis of water scarcity. This “environmentalism of the poor” has articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and privatization, illuminating the exploitation of the resources of the rural poor for the consumption of those on the other side of an increasingly widening economic divide.

Jill McCorkle: The Rough South from One Remove

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bennett
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Elementary School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Old South ◽  
White Trash ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White

This chapter discusses Jill McCorkle's fiction, which reflects the whole South, rather than just its middle class. McCorkle did not grow up amid poverty, and in fact calls her upbringing in 1960s Lumberton, North Carolina, “very much middle-class”—even upper class by the standards of her elementary school classmates. Her 1990 novel, Ferris Beach, features a character named Kitty Burns, a transition figure between the old South, with its clear divisions of class, and the new, where what a person does is more important than where that person came from. Another character, Merle Hucks, at first seems to fit the “poor white trash” stereotype, and whose family encompasses all the Rough South stereotypes. Merle, however, transcends the Rough South stereotype and distinguishes himself from his family and friends. McCorkle also published a novel called Life After Life in 2013.

“Diversity Is Important to Me”: White Parents and Exposure-to-Diversity Parenting Practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan R. Underhill
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
White Child ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
High Status ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
White Parent ◽  
White Parents ◽  
Social Dynamic

Drawing upon interviews with 40 parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, the author explores how “exposure to diversity,” an implicit racial socialization practice, has become a defining feature of how some middle-class white parents teach their children about race and reflect on what it means to be a good white parent. Exposure to diversity involves white parents’ active efforts to expose their children to people of color via trips to multiracial parks, enrollment in multiracial schools, or residence in multiracial neighborhoods. The author argues that white parents’ efforts are informed by their adherence to both a “diversity ideology” wherein racial diversity is frequently, but not always, framed as a positive social dynamic that enriches their family’s white life, and a middle-class desire to craft a high-status white child via distinction-oriented parenting practices. Taken together, white middle-class parents pursue an exposure-to-diversity strategy because they believe, whether consciously or not, that diversity provides them and their children with the means to facilitate small-scale social change and to craft a comfortable, open-minded white child who possesses racial and class distinction.

“Work in the Factory Itself ”

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-182
Author(s):  
Elizabeth D. Esch
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Carnegie Corporation ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Social Scientific

This chapter examines how the Poor White Investigation of the Carnegie Corporation provided a social-scientific rationale for the racial segregation of industrial work with which Ford, who would become one of the most powerful multinational employers in South Africa, complied. Targeted during the antiapartheid movement to divest, the roots of Ford’s relationship with this racist state are in the 1920s and 1930s, built on Ford’s reputation for racial paternalism and so-called progressivism in the United States. In South Africa, an interest in Ford’s processes of mass production and mass consumption were both mobilized in projects of racial improvement, though the Carnegie report specifically endorsed the idea of work in the factory as the most effective route to the racial improvement and discipline of so-called poor whites, recommending “white managerialist” efforts to address the “problem of poor whites.”

Elevated above the Real: The Poor White Southerner in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Child Of God ◽  
White Southerner

This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).

“We Ain’t Nothing but White Trash”. The Ethnography of Poor Whites and the Politics of Stigma in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee.

2021 ◽  
pp. 092137402110533
Author(s):  
Djemila Zeneidi
Keyword(s):  
Objective Analysis ◽  
White Population ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Group ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Seraph On The Suwanee ◽  
Subjective Side

This article aims to demonstrate the documentary value of Zora Neale, Hurston’s descriptions, in her novel Seraph on the Suwanee, of the condition of the poor white US Southerners known as “crackers.” By, depicting a “cracker” woman’s upward social trajectory through, marriage, Hurston reveals the social and existential reality of this, segment of the white population. Her novel presents an objective, analysis of the crackers as a socio-historical group distinct from other, whites. However, Hurston also explores the subjective side of belonging to this discredited group by offering an account of her heroine’s experience of stigmatization.

That Person Should Be the Next President Who…

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Robert Coles ◽  
Theodore M. Hesburgh ◽  
Herbert Scoville
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Degree Of Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
Severe Stress ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The One

That person should be the next President who is wilting to make a major issue of who owns what in our economic system. I am not saying that a candidate who is interested in explicitly and candidly analyzing our economic system stands a good chance of being nominated, let alone being elected President. I am simply saying that for me one of the major problems confronting this nation is the enormous disparity between the rich and the upper middle class on the one hand and, on the other, the working people and the poor, who make up the overwhelming majority of our people. I value this country's political institutions; they are not to be dismissed lightly. They are imperfect and have recently been subjected to severe stress. But they offer each of us a precious degree of freedom.

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