Intersectionality describes how identities overlap, creating a socially constructed ethnographic portrait. It can also be performative, entangling people in the cyclical learned behaviors and culture of their race and class. Despite the stratification of people into niche categories by intersectionality, generally, the pride in one’s perceived culture and rigid external constructs link economic and social poverty to marginalized races, diminishing the probability of upward mobility.
A common argument suggests that poverty befalls marginalized races because of their values, but according to Alford Young Jr.’s study of low-income African American men, an ideal job “ranged from specific skilled, blue-collar work opportunities to emphases on job characteristics and qualities such as autonomy, freedom, and the capacity to engage creativity.” In addition to these noble values, Philippe Bourgois’ study of the sale of crack in Spanish Harlem shows the legitimacy of alternative value systems, where impoverished populations desire the dignity and upward movement of the American dream, often becoming aggressive private entrepreneurs to make it out of confined roles fast.
It is clear poverty in marginalized races cannot be a result of fundamentally wrong or nonwhite values — instead, a person’s “frame” and “repertoire” begin to explain the differences in their means to achieve upward mobility.
These terms are defined in “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty” — a frame is described as the premise that different individuals perceive the same event differently based on prior experiences and a repertoire is a list of strategies and actions in a person’s mind making them unlikely to engage with an action that is not in their list. Even while holding the same values, individuals must possess different frames and have access to different repertoires based on their environment and cultural upbringing.
Frame and repertoire are thus imbued with intersectional, intergenerational and cyclical barriers. Namely, access to economic, social and cultural capital offers a cyclical barrier to upward mobility for marginalized and economically disadvantaged individuals. Starting centrally in the cycle, educational opportunities differ socioeconomically — middle- and upper-class children inherit advantages from their parents who pass on behaviors and knowledge favorable to education systems and by extension, labor markets, compared to poor and working-class parents. Similarly, teachers tend to hold Black students to lower behavior standards and move to recommend more severe punishment as compared to white students.
As a result, lower-income students of color generally receive less educational opportunities and external motivations for actions like attending highly ranked universities. By missing these opportunities, they lose the social capital, the ability to network, job opportunities and the cultural capital of graduating from a prestigious college. Further, when seeking economic mobility, people may utilize their cultural capital — skills, education, network or charisma — as an advantage to gain other forms of capital. Without these, lower-income marginalized groups may struggle to reenter society in a different state from their parents before them, with only the skills their parents had to pass on to their children.
By losing these forms of capital, upward mobility becomes near impossible. Pierre Bourdieu expresses this cycle in his theory of social reproduction, suggesting that “the social structures and hierarchies that exist within a society are perpetuated over time through the actions of individuals and institutions, resulting in the reproduction of class, race, and gender inequalities,” and offering us an intersectional view of culture.
Culture is a construct formed socially, politically, economically, institutionally and at the individual level. At each step, a person acquires their frame and repertoire as mentioned above, but, in the cases of lower-income marginalized communities, this often leads to a struggle between upward mobility and constructions on what is inherent to their race and class, resulting in self-destruction and stagnation.
James Baldwin wrote, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” He was referring to several phenomena. One is the short-term cost of quality products versus the long-term cost of cheap products — such as $100 boots, which last for a decade, and $20 boots, which last for a year. The cheap boots will eventually cost double the expensive pair in the same decade upon repurchase. Culturally, this phenomenon is cemented in the rise of consumerist marketing that motivates buyers to want to fit in, pushing low-income individuals to participate in conspicuous consumption and the idea that affording the trendy item is expensive, but having it hides the class disparity.
Feeling trapped by these systems, low-income marginalized communities may blame the whiteness of the job market, turning to alternative methods of upward mobility. Whiteness here refers to the social construction of ideologies that result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin color. Returning to Bourgois’ look into Spanish Harlem, there is a refusal to accept low-wage, entry-level jobs to avoid being exploited by the “White Man” by playing into society’s racist role-playing and affirming notions of culture. While these individuals feel dignified in their autonomy by working for themselves in the illicit economy of crack-selling, falling into this market essentially negates any potential to enter white-collar jobs, increase their capital and class as well as lower the status of “whiteness” of those positions to nonnormative work.
Falling into these behaviors is self-destructive, but based on the culture, frame and repertoire they forcibly learn, lower-income POC may be set up to fail. Should a person somehow defy the cycle, societal reinforcements — such as self-sabotage within one’s community — will continuously attempt to knock them back down. The crabs in the bucket theory describes how individuals may attempt to prevent others from gaining favorable positions despite the result bearing no effect on the attempted preventer. When culture is isolated as a rigid phenomenon, many in marginalized communities may aim to diminish the upward mobility of their group for fear of losing the niche culture found at the intersection between low-income and marginalized races.
These communities uphold their niche culture with dignity, so erasing it would not only diminish the culture’s merit over past generations but would also continue the history of stripping culture from minorities in favor of normative and white-dominated values. Therefore, this fear of losing culture to the rich white man is real and justly resisted, but that resistance to assimilation comes at the cost of poverty and remaining marginalized — this conjunction between culture and identity cannot be abandoned by intersectional thinking.
At the core, marginalized communities cannot be asked to lose their culture to climb the ladder. Instead, we must acknowledge that, at a fundamental level, the concepts of social, economic and cultural capital, often racist, elitist and classist, need correcting. From there, and with the prevention of the cyclical lack of opportunities and institutionalized barriers, low-income POC can retain the dignity found in their cultural values and experience comfortable living and social networks.
Allison Bonaventura is a freshman double-majoring in comparative literature and anthropology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.