The Future of Poverty

What are some stereotypical things people say about the poor? 

 

Claim: We judge on how poverty happened to the poor and we look no deeper than that. We assume that the poor do these negative things but we don’t look carefully enough to understand the life that they're living in.

 

Evidence:

"More than 1.6 million of the nation's children go to sleep without a home each year. Homeless children experience a lack of safety, comfort, privacy, reassuring routines, adequate health care, uninterrupted schooling, sustaining relationships, and a sense of community. These factors combine to create a life-altering experience that inflicts profound and lasting scars. (National Center on Family Homelessness, 2012)"

"All people, regardless of the languages and language varieties they speak, use a full continuum of language registers (Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008). What's more, linguists have known for decades that all language varieties are highly structured with complex grammatical rules (Gee, 2004; Hess, 1974; Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005). What often are assumed to be deficient varieties of English—Appalachian varieties, perhaps, or what some refer to as Black English Vernacular—are no less sophisticated than so-called 'standard English.'"

(Paul Gorski, April 2008)