Poverty, Welfare, and the Affirmative State

Ethnographic study of American poverty from the Progressive Era to the present has provided a sympathetic window on the lives of the poor. Ethnographers bear witness to the world of need, oppression, and survival, but the best ethnography has always provided more than the stark facts of life in poverty. Carol Stack, Elliott Liebow, Joyce Ladner, and earlier generations of scholars helped us do more than put faces on the poor; their mission was to understand poverty in its social and institutional context—how the institutions of a democratic society create poverty and limit the capacity of the poor to participate fully in social life. Their scholarship grew first from a powerful moral and political principle: unless such institutions “work” for the poor as well as the better off, we cannot say that the poor have received an equal opportunity to become autonomous, successful participants in our society. Second, their scholarship exposes the myth of universal citizenship rights in the American welfare state, revealing such rights to be contingent upon identity.