When Poverty Was White (or yet another reason Charles Murray is full of s***) [View all]

[salvorhardin]

CARRIE BUCK, or rather her last name, appears just once in the books of Charles Murray, the conservative sociologist and author of the recent work “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” his portrait of the decline of poor white Americans. To find it, you have to look through the endnotes for the introduction to his most famous book, “The Bell Curve,” in which he cites Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court case that approved Ms. Buck’s involuntary sterilization.
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It’s a striking omission, because her case highlights the historical blindness of Mr. Murray’s narrow focus on the cultural and policy changes of the 1960s as the root of white America’s decline. The story of white poverty, as Ms. Buck’s story illustrates, is much longer and more complex than he and his admirers realize or want to admit.

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Involuntary sterilization was the early 20th century’s remedy for what Mr. Murray blames on changes in the 1960s. But it was precisely the changes of that era — for black civil rights, women’s rights, poor people’s rights — and socially committed Catholicism that ended this inhumane practice.

Along the way, though, something got lost. Ms. Buck, sterilization, white poverty — this older history disappeared in the mid-20th century, when prosperity isolated the stigmata of poverty in black Americans. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” laid blame on a black “tangle of pathology” of ghetto culture. Mr. Moynihan voiced a logic widespread at the time, translating the disarray associated with poverty into a racial trait.

Full oped: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/when-poverty-was-white.html&pagewanted=all