Editor's Note
This is the first of five entries on Robin Marie Averbeck’s Liberalism is Not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Today’s entry comes to you from Mical Raz, MD/PhD, at the University of Rochester. See below for a taste of her distinguished resume. Tomorrow’s entry will come from Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Wednesday’s from me (Tim Lacy), and Thursday’s will be authored by Daniel Geary. Averbeck’s response will come on Friday (12/2). Happy reading! – TL
Is American liberalism a form of racism? In this short volume, Robin Marie Averbeck maps the intellectual history of liberalism’s engagement and lack thereof with questions of poverty and structural racism. Rather than being seen as a “contradictory element” or corruption of liberalism (p. 5), Averbeck argues that racism is inherent to American liberalism, and the liberal state “laid the groundwork and actively started construction on the political projects that would go on to devastate and destroy the lives of countless black, brown and poor people” (p. 9). Racial liberalism, she pithily summarizes, “is liberal racism” (p. 97).
This synthetic volume begins with President Johnson’s famed 1965 Howard University commencement address, in which Johnson laid the groundwork for the “liberal justification of affirmative action.” This could be seen, Averback argues, as the beginning of a strong commitment to social justice and ensuring equality of opportunities. Yet this would not be the case. Even at its heyday, Averbeck argues, Great Society liberalism never attempted “a sustained, serious attack” on racial inequality (p. 2).
Averbeck walks the reader through a number of key moments in the rise of post-WWII liberalism. Chapter 1 analyzes liberal political theory, tying it to postwar social scientists focus on the mental health of middle class Americans; Chapter 2 focuses on antipoverty efforts, including projects funded by the Ford Foundation and by federal anti-delinquency efforts, Chapter 3 revisits the culture of poverty hypothesis, analyzing both the Moynihan report and the Kerner Commission report, and Chapter 4 focuses on how the culture of poverty hypothesis was co-opted to provide the intellectual underpinnings for both the liberal and conservative backlash to Black attempts to organize and seize power in the 1960s and beyond.
Analyzing primarily published sources and government reports, Averbeck compellingly shows how liberalism embraced racist and classist stereotypes of Black and poor communities, and how these pernicious stereotypes influenced policy choices. Because poverty was believed to be a mindset rather than a lack of money, she explains, liberals maintained that simply providing resources would not solve the problem. In this way, policymakers embraced negative stereotypes that absolved them of the need to provide social policies such as housing desegregation or employment barriers that could improve the lives of Black and poor Americans. Furthermore, these tropes were then co-opted by backlash warriors and conservatives who by the early 1970s weaponized culture of poverty ideas into policies designed to punish the poor. So even if one might want to argue that pathologizing poverty is a useful way to argue for the necessity of anti-poverty funding and intervention, this pathologization remains stigmatizing and ripe for abuse by anti-liberal factions.
Averbeck’s focus on separating intent from impact (p. 49) provides a valuable framework for the profound questions her book raises. Noting that many liberal theories of poverty were based on the flimsiest of evidence, she argues that we should ask “what work such ideas did for the liberal elites that produced and popularized them” (p. 50).
Towards the end of the book, Averbeck argues against what she terms a “just so” story that liberals shied away from the culture of poverty theory to avoid accusations of racism, thus missing an opportunity to address a valuable facet of poverty, ceding ground to conservatives. This is a myth I was not familiar with, though Averbeck does provide evidence that in certain circles it is still widely accepted (p. 95-6). Her analysis here is particularly thoughtful, arguing that the liberal failure to engage with conservative arguments about a culture of poverty was not a result of being “cowed by the ferocity of racial and identity politics.” Rather, she argues that liberals did not push back against culture of poverty ideas because they were fundamentally complementary to their own views. Liberals did not provide alternative explanations for poverty because “in terms of ideology.. and policy.. they simply had nowhere else to go” (p. 97).
This synthetic volume offers insight on the limits of Great Society liberalism and offers a disheartening interpretation of liberalism’s failures to address structural racism and economic exploitation. This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on post WWII liberalism and would be well suited to appear on a graduate seminar syllabus.
Notes
Mical Raz, MD/PhD, is a Professor of History in the University of Rochester Department of History, as well as the Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor in Public Health and Policy, and Professor of Clinical Medicine in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. She completed her medical training at Tel Aviv University, where she also received a PhD in history of medicine. Before moving to the US for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, she worked at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2015, followed by a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a practicing hospitalist at URMC at Strong Memorial Hospital, and is board certified in internal medicine. Raz authored The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery (University of Rochester 2013), which was awarded the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award. Her second book was What’s Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (UNC Press 2013). Her latest book is Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way (UNC Press 2020). Dedicated to highlighting the current implications of her historical work, Raz has published a number of public facing essays in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and other venues.
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You can also hear a conversation with Averbeck on the podcast from New Books Network hosted by me discussing Liberalism is Not Enough.
https://newbooksnetwork.com/robin-marie-averbeck-liberalism-is-not-enough-race-and-poverty-in-postwar-political-thought-unc-press-2018
Hopefully some attempt at defining what is meant by “liberalism” will rear it’s amorphous head at some point in this roundtable. During my halcyon days in junior college I had the benefit having Professor Francine Medieros critique the odious Five Families of Oscar Lewis and Edward Banfield’s theories of poverty and its so called trans-generational propensities. Not all liberals or participants in U.S. society at that time bought in to these theories.