The Culture of Poverty and Imagined Constraints

Guy Deutscher studies how language shapes our worldview. Unfortunately for him, he’s working against generations of pseudo-science that sometimes made past linguists sound more like tonic-selling charlatans than experts. For instance, In the 1940s Daniel Whorf peddled the idea that our mother language functions like a prison. The anthropologist hypothesized that without words to describe concepts, such as “love” or “future”, speakers were unable to understand the concept.

Years later, scientists like Deutscher have rebutted that idea. He explains, “Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune?” It seems obvious now that language doesn’t prohibit our understanding of phenomena, but that doesn’t mean how we speak is void of influence. Deutscher explains that language helps define understanding of colors, special reasoning and even masculinity versus femininity. In other words, language affects us all but doesn’t indefinitely bind us to one way of thinking.

This critical distinction between something that influences us and something that becomes us is often a missing piece in the ongoing war around “the culture of poverty.” Advocates of this argument have, like Daniel Whorf, led us to believe that those from low-income areas experience a prison built of weak familial ties, geography and a grim outlook on life which disallow them from ever breaking free. The culture of poverty debate centers around the notion that the human brain is immutably fixed in its ideas, in its language, in its ecology, in its poverty.

But common sense steps in and suggests that while our brain can be influenced, it’s anything but an organ that resists change. We are constantly searching for ways to break free of ties that bind. Most of us can attest to the fact that we actively work to overcome ways of thinking, bad habits and other modes of thinking that prohibit success both now and in the future. It’s human nature to be influenced by the bad but hopeful and amenable to the good.

In fact, in a recent study conducted by Gallop which measures students’ overall wellbeing, 53% of students age 10-18 say that they are hopeful for the future, 73% describe themselves as “thriving” and an overwhelming 92% strongly agree that they will graduate from high school. Since we know that roughly 1 in 3 students drop out of school before earning their high school diploma, there is a decided break in what students think and feel and what they are accomplishing. This evidence suggests that the majority of students, socioeconomic factors aside, aren’t trapped in a prison of their circumstances.

Students who grow up in our poorest areas are inevitably influenced by their surroundings, but not defined by them. What characterizes them is their ability to grow, mature, change and pursue those behaviors and activities that will lead to a successful adult life. It may just be possible that all we need to overcome the culture of poverty is to believe that students have the hope, tenacity and potential to be successful and we just need to help nurture them. If we provide them opportunities to exercise their minds and follow through on their hopes and dreams, we can help undo the damage done by our own imagined constraints.