A New Introduction to Poverty: The Role of Race, Power, and Politics / Edition 1

by Louis Kushnick, James Jennings

Overview

Since the end of the Second World War, poverty in the United States has been a persistent focus of social anxiety, public debate, and federal policy. This volume argues convincingly that we will not be able to reduce or eliminate poverty until we take the political factors that contribute to its continuation into account.
Ideal for course use, A New Introduction to Poverty opens with a historical overview of the major intellectual and political debates surrounding poverty in the United States. Several factors have received inadequate attention: the impact of poverty on women; the synergy of racism and poverty; race and gender stratification of the workplace; and, crucially, the ways in which the powerful use their resources to maintain the economic status quo.
Contributors include Mimi Abramovitz, Peter Alcock, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Raymond Franklin, Herman George Jr., Michael B. Katz, Marlene Kim, Rebecca Morales, Sandra Patton, Valerie Polakow, Jackie Pope, Jill Quadagno, David C. Ranney, Barbara Ransby, Bette Woody, and Maxine Baca Zinn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814742396
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1999
Series:	South-East Asian Social Science
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Louis Kushnick is Director of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation, Eurocentrism, and Marginality in the Department of Sociology in Manchester, where he is a Senior Lecturer. Author of Race, Class, and Struggle: Essays on Racism and Inequality in Britain and the United States and Western Europe, he is currently Vice Chair of the Institute of Race Relations and has been the editor of Sage Race Relations Abstracts since 1980.

James Jennings is Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Director of the Trotter Institute, he is the author of numerous books, including The Politics of Black Empowerment, Understanding the Nature of Poverty in Urban America, Race and Politics, and Blacks, Latinos, and Asians: Status and Prospects for Activism.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This collection of 17 essays examines poverty and its causes from a variety of angles. The common thread is a concern for the structural causes of poverty; the book therefore offers a welcome alternative to the dominant ideological views that portray poverty as a result of individuals' decisions, attributes and/or moral failings...The authors show the connections between capitalism, slavery and the development of state policies and ideologies that maintained the oppressed and exploited status of African Americans after the Civil War and constituted the basis for the emergence of white identity and privilege to the detriment of working class identities based on a recognition of the common plight of workers, regardless of skin color...this is an outstanding collection, useful for courses in social stratification, the sociology of work, and race and ethnic relations."

-Science and Society

Editorial Reviews

"This collection of 17 essays examines poverty and its causes from a variety of angles. The common thread is a concern for the structural causes of poverty; the book therefore offers a welcome alternative to the dominant ideological views that portray poverty as a result of individuals' decisions, attributes and/or moral failings...The authors show the connections between capitalism, slavery and the development of state policies and ideologies that maintained the oppressed and exploited status of African Americans after the Civil War and constituted the basis for the emergence of white identity and privilege to the detriment of working class identities based on a recognition of the common plight of workers, regardless of skin color...this is an outstanding collection, useful for courses in social stratification, the sociology of work, and race and ethnic relations."

Science and Society

In this important book, Kushnick and Jennings bring together the writings of scholars concerned with the institutional and structural roots of poverty in America. All the articles challenge the myth that poverty is the result of individual failure or inadequacy or some communal culture of poverty and dependency. A major theme of the volume is that racial and gender hierarchies are important features for the maintainence of wealth and political power: the racializing of poverty strengthens institutional arrangements and social arrangements that keep high proportions of women and people of colour in economically vulnerable and impoverished positions. . . . This is a major contribution to the literature in this area.SAGE RACE RELATIONS ABSTRACTS

Sage Race Relations Abstracts

"This collection of 17 essays examines poverty and its causes from a variety of angles. The common thread is a concern for the structural causes of poverty; the book therefore offers a welcome alternative to the dominant ideological views that portray poverty as a result of individuals' decisions, attributes and/or moral failings...The authors show the connections between capitalism, slavery and the development of state policies and ideologies that maintained the oppressed and exploited status of African Americans after the Civil War and constituted the basis for the emergence of white identity and privilege to the detriment of working class identities based on a recognition of the common plight of workers, regardless of skin color...this is an outstanding collection, useful for courses in social stratification, the sociology of work, and race and ethnic relations."

-Science and Society

From the Publisher