Editor: Welcome back to our blog for 2015. We will start the new year with a
continuation of a discussion that was begun at the end of 2014 on our blog
between two authors whose articles were published earlier in our journal. Readers will recall that Paul Thomas in an earlier
post began by criticizing those who blame poor parents for the limited vocabulary
of their children. Curt Dudley-Marling
expanded on this deficit thinking in education while also commenting on the hostile
responses that Thomas’ article had received in the Washington Post as part of
the larger problem. Below Paul continues
the conversation. The exchange between
these two authors is a good introduction to the upcoming issue of the journal
that will focus on the theme: “Challenging the Deficit Model and the
Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models.”
By P. L. Thomas
Soon
after The Washington Post reprinted my piece from The Conversation
UK, Stop blaming poor parents for
their children’s vocabulary,
Curt Dudley-Marling emailed. Curt was pleased to see a somewhat mainstream
acknowledgement of scholarly challenges to both the often-cited work of Hart
and Risley and the deficit perspective inherent in that work and lurking
beneath why so many people accept the claims without critique.
But
Curt was also deeply concerned, it seemed, about the comments posted—comments
that were strongly committed to deficit perspectives of language and of people
and children trapped in poverty.
In his response here, Curt explains that he has “not
lost hope,” and then ends with what I believe is an important point: “The
enduring lesson here is that we can more effectively counter deficit thinking
by showing students’ competence when they are engaged in thoughtful, engaging
curricula rather than merely telling about the problems of deficit
thinking through scholarly critiques.”
In
fact, Curt’s concluding statement hits on how important public work of scholars and educators is when compared to scholarly
work, which remains mostly among the scholars, and how action will always
trumps words.
While
we continue the conversation here and even in JEC and other scholarly venues,
we must be resolved to act in ways
that are counter to deficit narratives and deficit practices.
Below
is a follow-up blog post after Curt emailed me, spurring me to think longer and
harder about the comments posted.
•
The
Good
Middle-class and affluent parents are good because they pass on
to their children good cultural capital (such as good literacy).
The
Bad
Impoverished parents and working-poor parents are bad because
they pass on to their children bad cultural capital (such as bad literacy).
The
Ugly
Many, if not most people, in the U.S. embrace the above class-
(and race-) based views of parenting and language (vocabulary, grammar,
reading, and writing).
•
I’m thinking of what has
been called the “return of individualism,” a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy
which tends to destroy the philosophical foundations of the welfare state and
in particular the notion of collective responsibility….The return to the
individual is also what makes it possible to “blame the victim,” who is
entirely responsible for his or her own misfortune, and to preach the gospel of
self-help, all of this being justified by the endlessly repeated need to reduce
costs for companies….
In the United States, the
state is splitting into two, with on the one hand a state which provides social
guarantees, but only for the privileged, who are sufficiently well-off to
provide themselves with insurance, with guarantees, and a repressive, policing
state, for the populace. (pp. 7, 32)
But these deficit views that feed an environment of victim
blaming also have been echoed in the comment section of a recent piece of
mine refuting those very deficit views (see the reposting and comments at The Washington Post's PostEverything).
The ugliness rests on two separate and related issues—parents
and language.
Parenting:
Good or Bad versus Scarcity or Slack
Within a cultural of individualism, perceptions of good or bad parenting
are strongly correlated with social class—as noted above. Unpacking why
and how those perceptions exist reveals the ugliness.
Despite evidence to the contrary—evidence that shows class and race are
more powerfully correlated with success than effort—impoverished
parents are blamed as bad and affluent parents are praised as good when we
assume that individual effort of those parents has determined their status.
The focus on the individual also feeds assumptions about whether
or not parents can, will, or even want to provide the necessary care and
initial teaching for their children. See this comment as one of several such
claims:
Being poor is not the
problem.....acceptance of poverty and the social position it implies is the
problem. When the poor decide that they would like their children to be better
off than their parents, efforts will be made in that direction.....but, if the
poor decide to instill in their children the idea that being poor is better
than being rich, and that the rich are the bad guys in the play, the poor will
remain resentful and poor which will define them and their children.
What is often missing in all of this are the tight margins of
living in scarcity (poverty)
as compared to the slack of living in affluence.
For example, good but impoverished parents may appear to be
"bad" when compared to poor or neglectful affluent parents who appear
to be "good"—especially when we focus on proxies for the quality of parenting such as a
child's vocabulary.
Good and conscientious but impoverished parents, doing the best
they can under the stress and within the tight margins of poverty, may be
accurately associated with a non-standard home language, and as a result, their
children may enter school with measurable literacy that is deemed behind affluent
children, whose parents may have been neglectful. However, those affluent
children raised in the slack of affluence may have had surrogate people and
experiences that mask the weak parenting.
Impoverished parents, on the other hand, have all of their
decisions and all of the factors outside of their control amplified negatively
by their poverty; while affluent parents have their weaknesses masked or even
mitigated by their affluence.
Class-based differences in child rearing are not "good"
versus "bad," as much as more affluent children's rearing matches
social expectations, ands thus appears "good" in that context.
Annette Lareau, author of Unequal
Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, explains about the
differences in child rearing by class between middle-class and working-class/poor
families:
The differences are
striking....
Neither the approach of
concerted cultivation or the accomplishment of natural growth is without flaws. Both have strengths and weaknesses [emphasis added]. Middle-class
children, for example, are often exhausted, have vicious fights with siblings,
and do not have as much contact with their extended families as working-class
and poor children. But when children enter institutions such as schools and
health care settings, the strategy of middle-class child rearing of
concerted cultivation is far more in compliance with the current standards of
professionals than is the approach of the accomplishment of natural growth.
There are signs that middle-class children gain advantages, including
potentially in the world of work, from the experience of concerted cultivation.
Working-class and poor children do not gain this benefit.
Poverty creates reduced circumstances, razor-thin margins, and
relentless stress; as Sendhil
Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir note, people cannot take
vacations from poverty.
Affluence, however, allows slack, an abundance of time and money
that buffers mistakes, carelessness, and behaviors that would otherwise be
considered "bad."
Whether parents are "good" or "bad"
is profoundly impacted by status (class and race)—more so than by
individual qualities alone.
The
Lingering, but Flawed, Connection Between Language and Character
The related ugly is our lingering, but flawed, connection
between language and character. Many in the U.S. remain convinced that
vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation are signals of not just
intelligence but the "good" or "bad" in a person.
Non-standard English is associated with race and class,
revealing more about our classism and racism than about linguistics or
individual character (again, read the comments section linked above).
Deficit views of language perpetuate beliefs that the poor
and racial minorities speak broken or inferior forms of English; that their
language is not merely different, but inferior.
Alice Walker's The
Color Purple is an
epistolary novel, a story told in letters. As impoverished, black women, Celie
and Nettie create a rich tapestry of using language to confront and recreate
their worlds. Walker's novel, then, is a powerful rebuking of the belief that
poverty and racial minorities are the provinces of flawed or deficient
language.
The impoverished do not pass on "bad," but socially marginalized language to their children; we must
admit that non-standard forms of language trigger the dual ugliness of classism
and racism in the U.S.
“Language is equipment for
living,” to quote Kenneth Burke. One uses the language which helps to preserve
one’s life, which helps to make one feel at peace in the world, and which
screens out the greatest amount of chaos. All human beings do this.
Further, Ellison rejects the deficit view held about the
language of poor blacks:
Some of us look at the Negro
community in the South and say that these kids have no capacity to manipulate
language. Well, these are not the Negroes I know. Because I know that the
wordplay of Negro kids in the South would make the experimental poets, the
modern poets, green with envy. I don’t mean that these kids possess broad
dictionary knowledge, but within the bounds of their familiar environment and
within the bounds of their rich oral culture, they possess a great virtuosity
with the music and poetry of words. The question is how can you get this skill
into the mainstream of the language, because it is without doubt there. And
much of it finds its way into the broader language. Now I know this just as
William Faulkner knew it. This does not require a lot of testing; all you have
to do is to walk into a Negro church.
Also unmasking deficit views of language related to class and
race, in 1979, James Baldwin asked, "If Black
English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?":
The argument concerning the
use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American
history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument
supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language
itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably,
reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the
other–and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that
has never been able to recognize him.
Like Ellison, Baldwin recognizes poetry where others see
deficit:
Now, I do not know what
white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in
the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz,
for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby,
but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which
means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all
hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was
once the black’s most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed
into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely,
composed of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty,
trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing,
doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks,
never dreamed of doing–we were funky, baby, like funk was
going out of style.
Ultimately, then, Baldwin states boldly his own recognition of
the ugly:
The brutal truth is that the
bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black
people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s
language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is
his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a
child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose
demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that
gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and
in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too
many black children that way.
•
And now we are still confronted with "the brutal
truth," as Baldwin puts it. Why do we cling to deficit views of poverty
and language, and why are so many angry and bitter toward people—families and
children—who find themselves in poverty—while simultaneously praising the
affluent?
It may well be that neither the quantity or quality of words
children bring to school nor that both are strongly correlated with the
socioeconomic status of those children's parents matters as much as our
cultural bitterness, callousness.
More important is how adults use words to demonize the
marginalized and create an Other so that they do not have to confront
themselves. [1] Again, if you doubt me, return to those comments that
suggest to me that if we wish to judge parents by their children, there we have ample evidence to
draw some pretty harsh conclusions.
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