In bell hooks’ “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, she discusses the portrayal and misrepresentation of poverty in our society and the methods behind the dilemma. In this excerpt, retrieved from her book Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994), hooks focuses on the negative effects of contemporary popular culture and its contribution to the negative societal views on poverty. hooks recalls from personal experience the lessons she learned when she was growing up in a poor family. She says that in her household, no one was ashamed of living in poverty; instead, it was a “breeding ground of moral integrity” (hooks 433). hooks remembers her parents and grandparents teaching her about the value and the worth of a person. She grew up knowing that a person’s value was worth more than their material possessions (433). In addition, her grandparents informed her that no matter how many degrees a person may have, it did not prove their intelligence nor integrity (433). bell hooks reveals that she can only characterize the world as a place where you either have money to spend or you don’t (433). In college, she recollects how her professors and peers reinforced through countless …show more content…
hooks mentions Carol Stacks, a female anthropologist, who discovered a value system among the poor. In her book, The Culture of Poverty, Stacks discovers a structure based on the sharing of resources among the poor (435). In relation to Stack’s discovery, hooks proposes a solution to change the face of poverty through the redistribution of wealth and resources (436). Additionally, she recommends “community-based literacy programs” to teach critical thinking and to help the poverty-stricken reorganize their lives; “to live well in poverty and to move out of such circumstances” (hooks
Professor at Baylor University, Dianne Kendall, in her essay “Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption,” published in 2005 touches on the fact that what we see from the media is a humongous influence on how we define social classes and argues that the media tends to trivialize issues of class and to downplay the existential problems poverty entails. Television shows such as “Family Guy”, and “Keeping up with the Kardashians” use frames to alter how we perceive social classes, whether it be for good or bad. These frames, in turn, affect how we think about class divisions and economic inequality, how we relate to the affluent and the poor. Class representations are filtered through a number of frames, which are organized hierarchically:
David K. Shipler in his essay At the Edge of Poverty talks about the forgotten America. He tries to make the readers feel how hard is to live at the edge of poverty in America. Shipler states “Poverty, then, does not lend itself to easy definition” (252). He lays emphasis on the fact that there is no single universal definition of poverty. In fact poverty is a widespread concept with different dimensions; every person, country or culture has its own definition for poverty and its own definition of a comfortable life.
Shorris wanted to explore on poverty in America and write a book based on opinions on what keeps people poor. Therefore, as results of varied conversations with special people in prison, Shorris came to support the prisoner, Viniece Walker’s, argument that destitute students are those most in need of a liberal education. Viniece introduced Shorris to the thought of the “moral life of downtown”, meaning to expose them to museums, lectures, etc. (Page 2), which he understood as the need for reflection for the poor. This emphasizes the very fact that in order for the poor to escape from their “surround of force” (Page 1) they must undergo a transformation rooted in reflection and self-realization. Shorris believes that “the surround of force is what keeps the poor from being political and the absence of politics in their lives is what keeps them poor.”(Page 1) He further explains that by political he means: “activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community city-state”(Page 1). This idea of a different type of learning, instead of your everyday math and English, but a broader education where there isn’t always a right or wrong answer is what Shorris believes is the key difference maker. Thus with these new realizations, Shorris set up an experiment to verify his theory of the importa...
“All Kids Should Take Poverty 101” could have been a wonderful piece if the age of those taking Poverty 101 had been older, and if the focus had been more on how those in poverty can end the cycle on their own. However Beegle’s desire to teach children empathy and awareness is a noble
The media portrays the upper class as something to strive for. Obtaining wealth and material possessions will bring you a happy life. The only way to get ahead is to emulate the rich and powerful and to live vicariously through them (Kendall 316). The media’s emphasis on the upper class takes away from people living life for themselves. Instead, they are persuaded to obtain a lifestyle that is realistically out of their means. Kendall states, “Largely through marketing and advertising, television promoted the myth of the classless society, offering on one hand the images of the American dream fulfilled wherein any and everyone can become rich and on the other suggesting that the lived experience of this lack of class hierarchy was expressed by our equal right to purchase anything we could afford”. Exaggerated views of the rich and successful in America are largely portrayed via television. Which gives a false idea of what happiness, wealth and material possessions can bring (Kendall 317). The poor and homeless are at the bottom of the class structure and are often overlooked, ignored and only portrayed as deserving of sympathy. They are stereotyped to be people who have problems such as drugs or alcohol (Kendall 318). Kendall goes on to explain that the middle class is considered the “working class” and are
In the book Bone Black, Bell Hooks gives a vivid look into her childhood. She starts off by talking about a quilt that her mother gave her from her mother. She thinks that this is special because her mother gave it to her and not one of her other sisters. Then she goes into describing how the children in her family never knew that they were poor until they grew up. They liked the dolls that they played with and the food that they ate. They never wondered why they didn’t have the things that their white neighbors did have. You would seldomly hear them complain because they had to walk to school and the white kids rode the school bus. She thought that they had a pretty normal family.
Bell Hooks writes not only to help others find strength to hold on to their pasts, but for their own resistance as well. Her audience is assured by her motives to educate and inform. Whereas Hooks’s personal experience strengthens her ethos, a certain rigidity used in addressing the audience simultaneously weakens her credibility. For example, Hook’s tendency to label academics and groups unlike herself pushes the reader to see her as self-righteous. She separates people into classes of those she perceives as right and those she sees as wrong.
Basic education is mandatory for all kids in the United States. There are laws with minimum and maximum age limits for required free education, but this does not make all education equal. The minimum age varies from four to five to begin kindergarten, while most students graduate high school by age of eighteen or nineteen. However, there are kids that begin their education much earlier. Bell Hooks’ “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, Jonathan Kozol’s “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s “How I Discovered the Truth About Poverty” have a common topic, “poverty”. Moreover, each of these readings has a different perspective with a different agenda attached, but “poverty”
“…it is said that there are inevitable associations of white with light and therefore safety, and black with dark and therefore danger…’(hooks 49). This is a quote from an article called ‘Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination’ written by bell hooks an outstanding black female author. Racism has been a big issue ever since slavery and this paper will examine this article in particular to argue that whiteness has become a symbol of terror of the black imagination. To begin this essay I will summarize the article ‘Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination’ and discuss the main argument of the article. Furthermore we will also look at how bell hooks uses intersectionality in her work. Intersectionality is looking at one topic and
It discusses the “poverty, marginality, and oppression, [within a] regenerate culture of poverty shared by and reproduced intergenerationally among the poor” (Sanabria, 2007, p. 8). The theory suggests a sort of circle of life phenomenon where people living in shantytowns are isolated from the thriving communities nearby, and left to fend for themselves without outside resources. Because of this failure to integrate the poor within the greater society, these people fail to attain proper education, adequate employment opportunities, or stability for their families (pp. 8-9), ensuring great or probability of similar fates for future generations. Lewis characterizes the culture of poverty as crossing into and shaping physical, emotional, economic, and spiritual realms (9), which significantly influence the future of those living in
In her book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks describes how she helps her students find their voice within her classroom.She discusses her use of authority to enable her students.For her, teacher authority is a necessary part of helping her students find their voices:
...anion] wanted to know whether or not I knew them" (91). bell hooks did not personally know these people , but they represent her family and her past. hook finds it unsettling that in her experiences, she has found no black bonds among professors and students. She feels this lack of bonds prevents many brilliant black students from thriving. hooks is disturbed by the lack of positive ties to ethnicity.
Throughout Society, many families have seen struggle and lived through poverty. The economy is not always thriving which takes a toll on people who suffer through unemployment or low wage jobs. The Frontline documentary, “Two American Families”, is the perfect example of struggle in the United States. It shows the lives of two struggling families and their efforts to survive. Two essays, “The Sociological Imagination” by C. Wright Mills, and “The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All” by Herbert J. Hans, support the analysis of the video strongly. They express many ideas that relate to the world and struggle throughout society. Also, there are many sociological terms that depict the events that occurred in the documentary.
Poverty is an undeniable problem in America. In 2014, 14.8 percent of the United States was in poverty (“Hunger and Poverty Fact Sheet”). There are more people in the United States than it seems that do not have their basic necessities. In an
Poverty is prevalent throughout the world around us. We watch television and see famous people begging us to sponsor a child for only ten dollars a month. We think in our own minds that ten dollars is only pocket change, but to those children and their families, that ten dollars is a large portion of their annual income. We see images of starving children in far away countries, and our hearts go out to them. But we really do not know the implications of poverty, why it exists, or even what we can do to help combat this giant problem in our world.