The rightward lurch in American politics has reinvigorated the study of poor and working-class communities. But instead of blazing new trails in this endeavor, the emerging literature seems to be reworking tired old tropes. In a review of four recent books, I show that approaches that are rightly rejected as explanations of social behavior among impoverished black communities are adopted with great aplomb in the study of working-class whites. Rather than seeing their political culture as a product of their social conditions, these works often see workers’ culture as built-in and unchanging. I observe that this just amounts to a revived “culture of poverty” discourse in the study of the working class.
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posted 1724 days ago