The Culture of Poverty

Joe Klein has apparently written a column about African Americans and the culture of poverty, a term from the past. I have not read the column, so I can't comment on it, but I am interested in the term: culture of poverty. It's a difficult term. What can it mean?

The culture of poverty might be an elongated way of saying "poverty," as in "Black people are held down in our country by (a culture of) poverty."

Or the culture of poverty might be a way of saying that it is the fault of Latinos when authority figures tell them to shut up or die. People who aren't white have the wrong culture. According to this theory, wrong-culture people should submit.

Am I right that there is some sort of tie between the culture of poverty formulation and racism? Racism is the belief that the color of your skin determines how you behave. For example, a palomino runs on four legs, but a bay horse uses only the two on its left side. It has the wrong culture, and you can tell it's wrong because the horse is brown. I mean you can see color from a distance, probably. 

 

 
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