How would you define the poor? What stereotypes of the poor doessociety hold? In addition, what is the “Feminizationof Poverty”? and should povertybe a concern for society or is it just an individual issue?Please be detailed in your answer.
In addition, when discussing prejudice and discrimination towards minorities. How do discrimination and racial disparities apply to everyday issues such as education andemployment? Please be detailed in your answer.
Your response and DQ answers should be at least 250 - 300 words in length. Please be detailed in your answers to all questions and follow APA guidelines and provide in-text citations as well as include at least two (2) references.
10.5 Explain the problems in drawing the poverty line and how poverty is related to geography, race– ethnicity, education, feminization, and age. Many Americans find that the “limitless possibilities” of the American dream are quite elusive. As illustrated in Figure 10.6, the working poor and underclass together form about one-fifth of the U.S. population. This translates into a huge number: more than 60 million people. Who are these people? High rates of rural poverty have been a part of the United States from its origin to the present. This 1937 photo shows a 32-year-old woman who had seven children and no food. She was part of a huge migration of people from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma in search of a new life in California. Drawing the Poverty Line To determine who is poor, the U.S. government draws a poverty line. This measure was set in the 1960s, when poor people were thought to spend about one-third of their incomes on food. On the basis of this assumption, each year, the government computes a low-cost food budget and multiplies it by 3. Families whose incomes are less than this amount are classified as poor; those whose incomes are higher—even by a dollar—are considered “not poor.” This official measure of poverty is grossly inadequate. Poor people actually spend only about one-fifth of their income on food, so to determine a poverty line, we ought to multiply their food budget by 5 instead of 3 (Chandy and Smith 2014). Another problem is that mothers who work outside the home and have to pay for child care are treated the same as mothers who don’t have this expense. The poverty line is also the same for everyone across the nation, even though the cost of living is much higher in New York than in Alabama. On the other hand, much of the income of the poor is not counted: food stamps, rent assistance, public housing, subsidized child care, and the earned income tax credit (Meyer and Mittag 2015). In the face of these criticisms, the Census Bureau has developed alternative ways to measure poverty. These show higher poverty, but the official measure has not changed. 10.5-23 Full Alternative Text That a change in the poverty line can instantly make millions of people poor—or take away their poverty—would be laughable, if it weren’t so serious. Although this line is arbitrary, because it is the official measure of poverty, we’ll use it to see who in the United States is poor. Before we do this, though, how do you think that your ideas of the poor match up with sociological findings? You can find out in the following Down-to-Earth Sociology. DOWN-TO-EARTH SOCIOLOGY What Do You Know about Poverty? A Reality Check Check what you think you know with these answers. Poverty is unusual. False. Over a three-year period, one-third of all Americans experience poverty for at least two months (DeNavas-Walt, et al. 2013). People with less education are more likely to be poor. True. Most definitely. See Figure 10.12. Most poor people are poor because they do not want to work. False. About 40 percent of the poor are under age 18 and another 10 percent are age 65 or older. Most of the rest work at jobs that are seasonal, undependable, or pay poverty wages (O’Hare 1996a, 1996b; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a). Most of the poor are trapped in a cycle of poverty. We have to go true and false on this one. Most poverty lasts less than a year (DeNavas-Walt et al. 2013), but just over half of those who escape poverty will return to poverty within five years (Ratcliffe and McKernan 2010). The percentage of children who are poor is higher than the percentage of adults who are poor. True. Look at Figure 10.15. Most children who are born in poverty are poor as adults. False. See Figure 10.7. Most African Americans are poor. False. This one was easy. We just reviewed some statistics in the box on upward mobility—plus you have Figure 10.14. Most of the poor are African Americans. False. There are many more poor whites than any other group. Look at Figure 10.10. Figure 10.10 An Overview of Poverty in the United States Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 2017:Table 35. Most of the poor live in the inner city. False. Most of the poor live in the suburbs (Kneebone 2016). Most of the poor are single mothers and their children. False. About 38 percent of the poor match this stereotype, but 34 percent of the poor live in married-couple families, 22 percent live alone or with nonrelatives, and 6 percent live in other settings (O’Hare 1996a, 1996b; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). Most of the poor live on welfare. False. Most of the incomes of people in poverty come from wages, pensions, and Social Security. Somewhere between 11 percent and 25 percent of their incomes come from welfare (O’Hare 1996a, 1996b; Lang 2012). There is more poverty in urban than in rural areas. False. We’ll review this in the following section. For Your Consideration What stereotypes of the poor do you (or people you know) hold? How would you test these stereotypes? Who Are the Poor? To better understand American society, it is important to understand poverty. Let’s start by exploring a myth. Breaking a Myth A common idea is that most of the poor in the United States are African Americans who crowd the welfare rolls. Look at Figure 10.10. You can see that there are more poor white Americans than poor Americans of any other racial–ethnic group. The reason is that there are so many more white Americans than those of any other racial–ethnic group. With this in mind, let’s turn to the geography of poverty, how the poor are distributed in the county. Figure 10.11 Patterns of Poverty Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 2017:Table 734. Figure 10.11 Full Alternative Text The Geography of Poverty From the following Social Map, you can see how poverty varies by region. The striking clustering of poverty in the South has prevailed for more than 150 years. A second pattern of geography, rural poverty, also goes back a couple of centuries. At 16 percent, rural poverty is higher than the national average of 15 percent. Helping to maintain this higher rate are the lower education of the rural poor and the scarcity of rural jobs. 10.6 Contrast the dynamics of poverty with the culture of poverty, explain why people are poor and how deferred gratification is related to poverty, and comment on the Horatio Alger myth. Some have suggested that the poor get trapped in a culture of poverty (Lewis 1966a; Suh and Heise 2014). They assume that the values and behaviors of the poor “make them fundamentally different from other Americans and that these factors are largely responsible for their continued long-term poverty” (Ruggles 1989:7). Lurking behind this concept is the idea that the poor are lazy people who bring poverty on themselves. Certainly, some individuals and families do match this stereotype—many of us have known them. But is a self-perpetuating culture—one that poor people transmit across generations and that locks them in poverty—the basic reason for U.S. poverty? Contrary to the stereotype of lazy people who contentedly sit back sucking welfare, poverty is dynamic. Many people live on the edge of poverty, managing, but barely, to keep their heads above poverty. But then comes some dramatic life change, such as a divorce, an accident, an illness, or the loss of a job. This poverty trigger propels them over the edge they were holding onto, and they find themselves in the poverty they fiercely had been trying to avoid (Western et al. 2012). With people moving in and out of poverty, most poverty is short-lived, lasting less than a year. Yet from one year to the next, the number of poor people remains about the same. This means that the people who move out of poverty are replaced by people who move into poverty. Most of these newly poor will also move out of poverty within a year. Some people even bounce back and forth, never quite making it securely out of poverty (Rank and Hirschi 2015). Few poor people enjoy poverty—and they do what they can to avoid being poor. In the end, though, poverty touches a lot more people than the annual totals indicate. Although 15 percent of Americans may be poor at any one time, before they turn 65, about 60 percent of the U.S. population will experience a year of poverty (Rank and Hirschi 2015). Why Are People Poor? Two explanations for poverty compete for our attention. The first, which sociologists prefer, focuses on social structure. Sociologists stress that features of society deny some people access to education or training in job skills. They emphasize racial–ethnic, age, and gender discrimination, as well as changes in the job market—fewer unskilled jobs, businesses closing, and manufacturing jobs moving overseas. In short, some people find their escape route from poverty blocked. A competing explanation focuses on the characteristics of individuals. Sociologists reject explanations, such as laziness and lack of intelligence, viewing these as worthless stereotypes. Individualistic explanations that sociologists reluctantly acknowledge include dropping out of school and bearing children in the teen years. Most sociologists are reluctant to speak of such factors in this context because they appear to blame the victim, something that sociologists bend over backward not to do. A third explanation is the poverty triggers that were just mentioned, the unexpected events in life that push people into poverty. Deferred Gratification Not all poverty is short, and about 12 percent of Americans are poor for ten years or longer (Rank and Hirschi 2015). One consequence of a life of deprivation punctuated by emergencies—and of viewing the future as promising more of the same—is a lack of deferred gratification, giving up things in the present for the sake of greater gains in the future. It is difficult to practice this middle-class virtue of deferring gratification if you do not have a middle-class surplus—or middle-class hope. In a