A growing number of people have been expressing outrage at Larry Mead’s racist commentary in Society. @ZParolin helped draw attention to the piece and pointedly noted that “U.S. poverty research has so much progress to make.” https://twitter.com/ZParolin/status/1286706353470353408?s=20

This reckoning is long overdue, and it calls for serious reflection on all the ways scholars and institutions in poverty studies have enabled Mead and given him legitimacy and platforms over the years.

Mead’s latest essay/book lays bare many of the racist beliefs that guided his highly influential arguments for get-tough welfare reform in the 1980s and 90s. He is elaborating now on what he left implicit or mentioned in passing before.

No one, though, should be allowed to act as if the racist views advanced in the new work were not visible back then. People in poverty studies should not be allowed to say, “If we had known he was this bad back then, we never would have…”

The fact is that Mead has said these things explicitly, even if not in as much detail, all along. Due to covid, I don’t have access to my books. But I'll make do with the pdf file of one chapter from The New Politics of Poverty on my laptop.

Here are some examples of what Mead had to say in a chapter titled “Human Nature” in that book, published in 1992.

“In ghetto areas, residents are notably less functional than outside…The underlying cause appears to be that social authority breaks down in the ghetto” (p.146).

“Jews and Asians have done remarkably well [in the U.S.]. Their success in school and their diligence as workers overcame their disadvantages… [They] have been self-reliant optimizers, seizing chances for…

good schooling and careers with a minimum of claim making and appeal to government. They have chosen to ignore or endure bias rather than… ‘surrender to despair or exhaust themselves trying to reform others’” (p.148).

“The culture of black American is the most significant for an understanding of today’s nonwork and poverty… [T]he worldview of blacks makes them uniquely prone to the attitudes contrary to work, and thus vulnerable to poverty and dependency…

Other groups also experienced prejudice, albeit less intensely. Blacks are more distinctive in how they responded. They did not… rely on their own enterprise” (pp.148-9). “Blacks have had difficulty asserting themselves in conventional careers…

Their challenge is to seize chances to get ahead without giving personal offense. This requires conforming to common civilities and satisfying authority figures…

yet competing for success in legitimate ways. That is what better-off Americans of all races understand. By offending the authorities yet dropping out of school and not working, poor blacks do exactly the opposite” (p.150)

“Where blacks have been properly assertive, they too have succeeded. Much of the reason for extraordinary black achievement in the arts and athletics is that, in these fields, blacks work hard… without expecting help from whites” (p.151)

“Today, tragically, [Black culture] is more likely to mean rock music or the rapping of drug dealers on ghetto street corners [which, more] than any change in society, seems to lie at the origins of the underclass” (p.151)

After wading through these musings on racial differences, readers arrive at a section titled “The Third World," which directly foreshadows the recently published book and essay. It opens with this:

It continues...

The reason I'm taking us back to these arguments from 1992 is to suggest that the difference between reactions then and now has less to do with what Mead is saying than with what his audience will tolerate.

Debates over “the underclass” and its “pathologies” were mainstream back then. Engaging with folks like Mead was seen as important for being "policy relevant" and for proving one's open-minded willingness to take conservative critiques seriously and let the evidence decide.

Critics on the Left who dismissed Mead’s arguments as recycled racist BS were too often painted back then as overreacting ideologues: In a sense, they were accused of wanting to “cancel” Mead rather than engage with his intellectual arguments.

Today, in the midst of an uprising for racial justice, Mead’s claims for the superiority of Europeans and Asians and Jews sound different to a lot of people than then did back then.

Some of this difference can be traced to the historical period we live in and some, almost certainly, is due to new generations replacing older cohorts in relevant fields and institutions.

Regardless, we need to reckon with the recent past of poverty studies and related disciplines. It is unacceptable and untrue to say that Mead’s views weren’t clear back then. That claim is an excuse in search of absolution.

Why, for the first decade of my career (1997-2007) was I pressured so often to invite him to panels and speaker series? We need to talk about how leaders in the field contributed to Mead’s legitimacy and repeatedly gave him space on conference stages, symposia, and task forces.

We need to learn from this recent history because, above all, we have an obligation to think seriously about how similar dynamics continue to be at work in poverty studies and across the social sciences today. /fin

See this closely realted thread by @pamela_herd as well, which I just saw after posting mine. https://twitter.com/pamela_herd/status/1287116278080118788?s=20