13 - “The Message”: Resisting Cultures of Poverty in Urban America

Summary

Etienne Toussaint uses Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s 1982 song, “The Message,” to argue that poverty policy has been broken since at least the time of the Moynihan Report. The Message directly engaged ongoing debates by American sociologists on the “culture of poverty” concept in social theory, including the analysis of Black ghetto poverty presented by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In so doing, “The Message” provided three critiques to economic development policies in urban ghettos: (1) it revealed the residents of urban ghettos as prisoners of poverty, clarifying shortcomings of both public housing programs and James Q. Wilson’s “broken-windows” criminological theory; (2) it conveyed the homeless and mentally-ill as survivors of neglect, highlighting the dearth of social welfare services in urban ghettos due to severe budget crises during the 1970s and 80s; and (3) it exposed ambitious urban residents as victims of circumstance, explaining how inadequate educational opportunities and a paralyzed labor movement sapped the optimism of an already fractured community.