The Undeserving Poor

Hurricanes have a neat way of reminding Americans of their privilege. Louisiana State Representative John LaBruzzo experienced a reality check when he visited New Orleans residents seeking relief from Hurricane Gustav late last month. It is unfortunate that it takes a natural disaster for politicians, the media, and the rest of America’s elite to remember the existence of our nation’s poorest districts. It is even more unfortunate that when confronted with this reality, these eminently privileged and powerful individuals can do little more than blame and further punish the victims of a system in which they can already barely survive.

After confronting the poverty of his state, LaBruzzo, in his esteemed capacity as a policymaker, offered just such a solution. Horrified that welfare recipients should have cell phones and cigarettes on the state’s dime, he is considering a law to pay willing women $1000 to undergo Fallopian tube ligation and effectively promote state-sponsored sterilization of poor women. The law would also include tax incentives for wealthier, more educated couples to have more children. To him, the root of the welfare crisis lies in poor people reproducing faster than those who are presumably more qualified to have children. Poverty is a burden on the state, and diminishing that burden is apparently as simple as sterilizing poor people.

Let’s leave aside the echoes of eugenics, the race issues that are inextricably bound up with class here, and LaBruzzo’s arrant disregard for less dramatic measures, such as improving sexual education and access to contraceptives. Forget for a moment that the number of Louisiana welfare recipients has plummeted to four percent of its size since 1990. More alarmingly than all this is the popular response which LaBruzzo’s proposal has received.

Alongside protests from civil rights groups and churches are cries of approval. Commentary on blogs and news articles and conversations among friends show a frightening sympathy with LaBruzzo’s purpose. All other heinous aspects aside, LaBruzzo and his supporters speak to America’s abominable attitude toward our poor citizens.

Poor people in America are too often seen as parasites who must prove that they deserve assistance, even when the job market, the education and health care system, and the shortage of affordable housing make survival tenuous for so many Americans. But the help we deign to provide comes with strings that tie up poor people’s worth as human beings into their status as dependents. We suddenly gain the authority to tell them how they ought to live and even attempt to sterilize them, as if a human’s worth to a society were solely in her economic productivity. We develop myths about welfare queens, making public assistance recipients into ingrates who ought to be thankful for the little they receive from our hard-earned, taxpayer dollars.

When some drop out of school, have children out of wedlock, and go to prison, the wealthy can shake their heads at the undeserving poor with no place in our society. We begrudge them cigarettes and cell phones, alcohol and drug use, unmarried sex, and even their ability to have children, forgetting King Lear in Act II: “O, reason not the need!... / Allow not nature more than nature need, / Man life’s as cheap as beast’s.” Instead, let’s look to Act III: “Take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, / And show the heavens more just.” In a society of ever-increasing inequality, let us show ourselves more just with a more gracious attitude to the unacknowledged citizens of our country.

Rachel M Singh ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.