A New Introduction to Poverty: The Role of Race, Power, and Politics

Front Cover
Louis Kushnick, James Jennings
NYU Press, 1999 - Political Science - 330 pages

Since the end of the Second World War, poverty in the United States has been a persistent focus of social anxiety, public debate, and federal policy. This volume argues convincingly that we will not be able to reduce or eliminate poverty until we take the political factors that contribute to its continuation into account.
Ideal for course use, A New Introduction to Poverty opens with a historical overview of the major intellectual and political debates surrounding poverty in the United States. Several factors have received inadequate attention: the impact of poverty on women; the synergy of racism and poverty; race and gender stratification of the workplace; and, crucially, the ways in which the powerful use their resources to maintain the economic status quo.
Contributors include Mimi Abramovitz, Peter Alcock, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Raymond Franklin, Herman George Jr., Michael B. Katz, Marlene Kim, Rebecca Morales, Sandra Patton, Valerie Polakow, Jackie Pope, Jill Quadagno, David C. Ranney, Barbara Ransby, Bette Woody, and Maxine Baca Zinn.

 

Contents

Poverty as Race Power and Wealth
1
The Causes and Extent of Poverty
11
Researching Race and Poverty The Absence of History
57
Poverty and Race as Functions of Economic and Political Power
103
Poverty and Race Gender as Fundamental
215
Poverty Race and the Distribution of Jobs
305
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About the author (1999)

Louis Kushnick is Director of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation, Eurocentrism, and Marginality in the Department of Sociology in Manchester, where he is a Senior Lecturer. Author of Race, Class, and Struggle: Essays on Racism and Inequality in Britain and the United States and Western Europe, he is currently Vice Chair of the Institute of Race Relations and has been the editor of Sage Race Relations Abstracts since 1980. James Jennings is Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Director of the Trotter Institute, he is the author of numerous books, including The Politics of Black Empowerment, Understanding the Nature of Poverty in Urban America, Race and Politics, and Blacks, Latinos, and Asians: Status and Prospects for Activism.

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