Theory versus practice

When we were vacationing in Paris a few years ago, we saw a great headline: "Fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?" Ah, those tricky French! So self-aware they even joke about their passion for abstraction.

But it's not only the French. It's academics across the board. "How does it work in theory?" seems to be the operative question behind the critics of Ruby Payne, an education specialist featured in yesterday's New York Times Magazine. A teacher, a middle-class woman whose defining reality was her marriage to a man raised in poverty, she has made a career out of teaching other teachers how to recognize certain behavioral patterns of poor children and to work with them, not to change them but to help them better understand and negotiate the complex social worlds in which we all move.

At the heart of Payne’s philosophy is a one-page chart, titled “Hidden Rules Among Classes,” which appears in most of her books. There are three columns, for poverty, middle class and wealth, and 15 rows, covering everything from time to love to money to language. In a few words, Payne explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class? About situations. In wealth? About social faux pas. In poverty, the present is most important. In the middle class, it’s the future. In wealth, it’s the past. The key question about food in poverty: Did you have enough? In the middle class: Did you like it? In wealth: Was it presented well?

Her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty has sold thousands and thousands of copies. She has worked her way into personal wealth. Among teachers she's in great demand. But academics look at her with skepticism. She's buying into stereotypes, reinforcing the structures of racism and classism, say her critics. Even worse,

Payne's critics seem less aggrieved by what she includes in her analysis than by what they say she has left out: an acknowledgment that the American economy and American schools systematically discriminate against poor people.

I'm familiar with this line of criticism. Why tinker around the edges when the whole system is unjust?

Take Walter Benn Michaels for example, chair of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His latest, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, looks to be a fine catalogue of persistent economic injustices. I'm not far into it yet, but I see that one of the goals of the book is "to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American life." He finds it "hard to accept" that "we Americans just aren't all that committed to equal opportunity after all." I have no doubt that the observations in this book are earnest and well-conceived and meant to change the world.

What got my attention--what got me to pick up the book off the shelf of new books at the law library--was the afterword, which for some reason he writes in the third person. Here we learn that Walter Benn Michaels

makes $175,000 a year. But he wants more; one of his motives for writing this book was the cash advance offered him by his publishers. Some readers will be tempted to see a discrepancy between these facts and the arguments against economic inequality made in the preceding chapters. But they should remember that those arguments are true (if they are true) even if Michaels's motives are bad, and they would be false (if they were false) even if his motives were good. Not to put too fine a point on it, the validity of the argument does not depend on the virtue of the person making them. Furthermore, the point of the book is not that people, including its author, should be virtuous. During the summer in which most of this book was written, a homeless man lived in the railroad underpass Michaels can see out his study window. A more virtuous person might have been tempted to go down and bring him some breakfast or maybe even invite him in for a shower and a meal. It never occurred to Michaels to do either of these things. Mainly he wished the man would go away. And his desire for the man to just not be there does not contradict the argument of this book; it's more like the motive for the argument of this book. The point is not that we should be nicer to the homeless; it's that no one should be homeless.

This passage, in all of its tedious and cynical self-consciousness, leaves me speechless.

Ms. Payne's work reminded me of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, the formerly homeless educator I blogged about in April. Looking back over my notes, I see that she actually had been in one of Ruby Payne's seminars, where she found a number of truths revealed.

If I want to get out of generational poverty there are hidden rules. For instance when my kids were small if you came to my house to eat, I’m going to make sure you get enough. I'm going to feed you! But if you came when my kids were teenagers I’d say let me fix you something else, because what was important then was that they like it, now how much. Now that I’m hanging around with other people sometimes, I’ve noticed that in affluent situations, they don’t care about whether you like it or if it’s enough, it’s all about how beautiful it is, the presentation and how lovely it is. If I don’t know those hidden rules, if I come into that situation and try to mingle, I’m already ostracized.

For Nussbaum-Beach, it would have been useful as a schoolgirl to be offered the tools to understand class differences. For teachers, it could ease the frustration of working with poor kids. Said a science teacher quoted in the Times article, "I realized, these kids aren't dumb. . . . They just haven't had the enriching experiences that I had growing up."

I'd like to change the world too. I'd like for nobody to be homeless or poor. In the long meanwhile, I wish Ruby Payne many more standing ovations.

Poverty Awareness Week at UNC

The Campus Y's annual week of social awareness, this year focusing on poverty, ends today with a speech by NAACP President William Barber, 11 a.m., Campus Y building (which I wish I could hear!). Last night, I participated in a panel in the Pit that focused on homelessness. It was moderated by Mayor Kevin Foy; other panelists were Chris Moran of the IFC and Stephen Kirton, a formerly homeless former Marine who now works at the men's shelter. Sen. Ellie Kinnaird capped the panel with a brief address.

This event was the beginning of the "box-out," meaning that later on students would hole up in cardboard boxes and spend the night there in the Pit. I don't know how many stayed to do that, but a good crowd turned out for the panel and discussion. It's just a small sampling, but I had a feeling that these were students really working to understand the complex issues that surround poverty and homelessness and are wanting to help.

Earlier, two students spent the night in the men's shelter and up the road at Homestart, the shelter for women and children.

For Charlie McGeehan, used to quiet nights, the noise associated with sharing the floor with a crowd of other men--the lack of privacy--was disconcerting. The food was terrible, and morning came too soon. But he did not fear for his safety, as friends had warned him he should. He left as early as possible, feeling both drained and a little guilty. "Although I spent the night at the shelter, I still have the safety net of my life at the University. Beyond that, I have the safety net of my parents." He left early, but he came away with a new insight: "I look up to the men who stay there daily and still have the energy and the mental toughness to work all day because it would be very difficult for me. When you think of the homeless, think of these men."

For Elizabeth Szypulski, the women at Homestart seemed more familiar than she would have predicted. What she heard from them "made the problem of homelessness far more real than statistics or anti-poverty campaigns ever have for me."

I realize now that the worries I had about the difference between me and the women I met are not as serious as I'd thought, in large part because there aren't actually too many differences to speak of.

None grew up expecting to find themselves in their current situation; when I keep that in mind that it's not far-fetched to think that I, or someone I'm close to, could find themselves in similar need sometime in the future.

I know that much of life comes down to choice and decision-making, but a lot of our choices are limited by where we start out, which is left up to chance. No one chooses where or to whom they're born, and none of us are able to control the amount of money or education our parents have, the health concerns we're likely to inherit, or the prejudices and discrimination we will or won't face because of race, sex, or socio-economic status.

While I probably can't go back and work at [Homestart] this semester - some of the same women will be there - I plan on going back and helping next year, and telling everyone I know interested in that type of work about the shelter and how to get involved. It's not that I think the women need me, specifically, or that I can make more of a difference than anyone else could. I'll do it with the hope someone else will do the same for me if I ever need it.

On our panel, all of us encouraged the students to make a point to get to know homeless people, to help us to continue to challenge the stereotypes, to volunteer when they could, to prepare to live their lives in ways that recognize that the privileges they'll enjoy as UNC grads come with responsibilities to others. Thanks to Mike Tarrant and the other organizers of Poverty Awareness Week 2007 for bringing this message home.

Poor America

According to a recent report, "The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's 'haves' and 'have-nots' continues to widen."

Tonight at a Council budget work session we heard about our public housing program's predicted funding shortfall for this year and the major reason behind it:

The Public Housing Program is funded solely through the federal government and rent from the public housing residents.

Not only has the funding from the federal government declined, but there has been a major shift in the way HUD wants these programs to be administered.

The federal government is no longer adequately funding any of the overhead and administration costs that are vital to the management and success of the program.

Instead, the feds are forcing housing programs to seek funding from outside sources.

The source of income that is being encouraged is to select tenants who can pay more rent. For example, giving preference to the family who is in the 50 percent of median income as opposed to the family making 20 percent.

In other words, the bottom of the safety net is about to break for some folks as HUD moves toward a profit-based model.

And so it falls to the Council to fill the gap. From what I heard my colleagues say tonight, it's looking like this is another perspective we share with leaders in Madison, Wisconsin: "Madison's progressive tradition of providing quality public housing may depend upon Madison's ability to resist the federal government's efforts." At least I hope so.

"Monopoly" was invented by a woman.

Lizzie Magie, a Maryland Quaker, called it The Landlord's Game, and she patented it in 1904.

Early attempts at publication of The Landlord’s Game yielded mixed results. Landlord was published in 1906 by the Economic Game Company of New York, in which Magie herself was principal shareholder. In 1913 it appeared in Scotland under the title Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. (Don’t ask.) George Parker rejected it in 1909 as being too complicated and unengagingly political, and did so again in 1924 when Magie revised the game and renewed her patent.

It did, however, achieve success in an entirely different direction. To understand why, we need to note that our inventive Quaker, far from devoting a game to the praise of Mammon, actually devised it as a moral tale showing how unfair rents could be charged by unscrupulous landlords, for which, if there is any justice in the world, they will—in the game world, at least—rightly fetch up in jail.

From a review of Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game and How It Got That Way, by Philip E. Orbanes. The review goes on to explain the difference between "war games" (e.g. chess, checkers) and "race games"--and to describe some of the innovative ways in which Lizzie Magie changed the face of the "race games" for good.

The Kelo backlash and the poor

Back in January, while writing about the devastating effects of the so-called "urban renewal" program on Durham's Hayti neighborhood, it occurred to me that the outrage that we already were witnessing (culminating in last week's elections) in response to the Kelo decision was conspicuously missing in the aftermath of Kelo's key precedent: Berman v. Parker, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that authorized cities to enter into wholesale displacement and destruction for the sake of cleaning up "blighted" neighborhoods. (Pointedly, this decision said that non-"blighted" buildings could justifiably be torn down if they were within a "blighted" area. In Durham, this analysis played out in the demolition of a fine old church where Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken.) The ultimate outcome of the "urban renewal" projects that followed this decision was supposed to be improved housing options for the people who were displaced. But as Fitz Brundage writes in his narrative of Hayti, that wasn't what happened in Durham--a story that was repeated many times in other places. Where was the outrage then? I asked in January.

In a new online legal journal/weblog, Northwestern Colloquy (noticed via Balkinization), I find an article that addresses this question in very smart ways:

This Essay provides a review of the changes in state law following Kelo v. City of New London, and in particular focuses on the dominant reform: the prohibition of economic development condemnations in non-poor areas (which Kelo allows, as a matter of federal constitutional law) coupled with continued allowance for blight condemnations in poor areas. This dominant reform, the Essay argues, privileges the stability of middle-class households over the stability of poor ones, and thus expressively devalues poor people and poor communities in legal and political discourse.