Different kinds of poverty

[xiphias]

So I've been talking to my sister's fiance, and he was talking about growing up poor. And I realized that there is a difference between "redneck poor" and "urban poor". They both suck, and I don't know that one sucks worse than the other, but they suck differently. With "redneck poor", there are still resources available, which require specific training to extract. If you live in a place with lots of game, fish, and edible plants, and you know how to track, hunt, fish, and gather, you're not going to go hungry. But those are NOT trivial skills.

There are different sets of survival skills that you need in different poverty contexts. Urban poverty survival is about dealing with people in groups and organizations. Rural poverty survival is about dealing with individuals and smaller groups, and nature.

The notion of "self-reliance" is fundamentally absurd in an urban setting. Urban settings are entirely communal. "Self-reliance" in a rural setting is more believable, but, in a world with seven billion humans on it, requires a lot of behind-the-scenes resource management to be possible: no matter how good a fisherman you are, if industry is allowed to dump into riverways, there isn't going to be anything to catch. So even rugged individualism requires government oversight.

But the experiences of both forms of poverty are very different.

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*nod* My experience of what you've called 'redneck poor' here is knowing kids in Jamaica with one change of clothes and no shoes who were still quite well nourished (skinny but well nourished) because of the island's numerous food resources, but I've seen the different kinds you're describing here.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Actually, you came up in the conversation as someone who grew up with the redneck skills and attitude of "make it work". I mentioned the story of when you came to my place and there wasn't any food in the house and you made food out of it, which is something that Kent also does.

Things like keeping chickens in the backyard, that's also part of this. Rednecks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other immigrant populations were doing this long before this became an eco-friendly, middle-class thing to do.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*blushes* I will never stop being delighted that I impressed you by being able to cook. ANd yeah, I know what you mean about the chickens.

[cbpotts.livejournal.com]

People really don't see the amount of work that goes into redneck poor, either. More than once, I've had people who are urban poor tell me 'you don't understand, if we don't work, we don't eat' - what are those hours in the garden if they're not working? I think they think fish just spontaneously throw themselves on the shore at our approach.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

And that goes both ways. You also see people who aren't poor saying that, well, there are now urban gardens, and if those urban poor people would just get a garden plot and some chickens, then everything would be better.

And, well, yeah. Those ARE good things. But, first, you need TIME to make food out of those things, and second, you need SKILLS.

Also, this goes the other way, too, and one of the reasons that rural poor people look down on urban poor people. Because people tend to denigrate the skills they have. Yes, urban poor people use more community-supported resources than rural people do, and the rural poor look down on urban poor for needing to -- because they don't recognize the amount of skill and training that they themselves have, and just disdain people who don't have those skills, because, well, OBVIOUSLY EVERYBODY would have those skills, so anyone who doesn't is just to be looked down upon.

Which is a case of people not realizing the value of their own skills, by considering them just the baseline minimums, rather than things that they actually should take pride in.

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

Really good observation.

I think that one of the things that drives a lot of really unfortunate political attitudes in the US is a human tendency to take the world we are born into for granted, and fail to recognize all the resources that it took to get it that way, and (most especially) all the resources it takes to maintain it.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

"Work" isn't a simple, single concept. In the country it means "put time and sweat and effort on physical things, making or growing or hunting or gathering them (or making it possible to do such), producing a result you can see and use / eat / give / sell". In the city it means "be employed; spend time and effort doing something that benefits somebody other than you, somebody you don't know, very often a nameless, faceless corporation". (Much oversimplification in both, I know.) So those urban poor people don't see the gardening and fishing and so on as "work".

I do language, so I'm analyzing this in those terms -- heh, in terms of terms, and the uses of a term. But I think there really is a gulf of understanding here, that the people on opposite sides of it might be able to bridge by talking about what they each mean by the word.

Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

[quietann.livejournal.com]

This is so insightful... I can't offer a lot of observations, but having known people from both kinds of poverty, I see what you're saying.

Interesting transplant issue: rural poor who move to the city. There are a huge number of working-class white people in California who have rural poor in their backgrounds within a generation or two. And a lot of them are merciless in their judgment of "ghetto people" -- but they use the same resources. I think it's a matter of believing that they are still the self-sufficient individualists that their grandparents were. (And in a lot of cases, they don't realize that those "ghetto poor" also have a rural background, whether it's rural Mexico or the rural US South.)

I've also heard of urban poor -- mostly African-Americans -- sending their kids "back home" to rural poor relatives, because it's safer than the ghetto and can gain them some self-sufficiency skills they just won't get in a city.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

Things can still get pretty tough for the rural poor too though right? I mean, you still have to live somewhere, hunting equipment still costs money, you still need to keep warm in the winter, and so on. Heck, if you are talking about whether people will starve or not, there are soup kitchens for people in urban areas if they really get THAT desperate.

Perhaps I'm missing the point...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Things are probably equally tough for urban and rural poor. They're just both different experiences that require different skills. In either case, you're very close to disaster -- that's what "poor" means.