“Choice, Social Class, and Agency”

My friend Julianne suggested this interesting talk by Nicole Stephens. Let me summarize several points that I believe she makes and that are importantL

• Poor people often have fewer real alternatives to chose among than do more affluent people from the same culture.
• Poor people tend to focus more on community with others as compared to middle class Americans who focus more on self-actualization goals in making choices.
• Middle class institutions tend to institutionalize the assumption of middle class values and middle class decision making.
• In doing so, they create institutions that are less welcoming to the poor.
• Middle class people tend to blame the poor for bad choices when the poor may in fact have had or perceived little choice, or to have made choices which were rational under their value systems.

Although she does not say so, blaming the victims is a means of avoiding blame for the people who had the power to ameliorate the risks in the first place. Thus the politicians who blamed the victims of Hurricane Katrina were not coincidentally unwilling to shoulder the blame for allowing the conditions to exist in which the risks were created for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

The perception that the poor may be more likely to choose the course chosen by their friends and neighbors than are those in the middle class is quite important. So too is the recognition that the middle class (doctors, lawyers, government bureaucrats, etc.) may often misunderstand the values that the poor will utilize in choosing alternatives.