Reagan and other politicians in the 1980s adopted Darwin's theory of natural selection to justify the current social situation. This assumption was further justified by various "scientific" reports that supposedly proved this theory. One example of such a report is Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). In this Moynihan holds blacks “accountable for their own misery [and] for their own failure to ‘assimilate’ as individuals into a supposedly ‘accomodative’ and increasingly ‘color-blind’ society” (Reeves, p. 95, 1994). Moynihan’s report especially justified the cut in federal spending, including anti-welfare reforms, witnessed during this era. Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), still felt the after-effects of these reforms fifteen years later during her experience living as a low-wage worker. She reports, “in the rhetorical buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one” (Ehrenreich, p. 196, 2001). Her book completely refutes such a notion; sometimes even holding two low-wage jobs did not provide enough income for her to survive. Obviously, blame cannot be placed entirely on a person for a failure to ‘assimilate’. Ehrenreich alsoreports that, while wages for the upper class enlarge exponentially, “wages for people near the bottom of the labor market remain fairly flat, even ‘stagnant’” (p. 212, 2001). The fact that the majority of America’s wages are not increasing with inflation points to the discrepancies in American society. Another related aspect of social Darwinism is the idea that “to preserve the unfit in any way was to court disaster” (Reeves, p.95, 1994). Placing all of the blame on the poor themselves, middle class America was led to believe that they were “the truly victimized” (p. 97, 1994). From this thought base stems American society’s rejection of the black poor, in particular black male urban youth, in favor of protecting themselves.
Illustration by Eric Drooker
Created
by: maynard@lclark.edu
Updated: December 13, 2001