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Racial and Class Discrimination in Assessments of Desert in Postapartheid Cape Town

Jeremy Seekings

in Discrimination in an Unequal World

In multiracial or otherwise multicultural societies, people may discriminate in the allocation of scarce resources against members of particular racial or cultural groups. This chapter examines how ... More

In multiracial or otherwise multicultural societies, people may discriminate in the allocation of scarce resources against members of particular racial or cultural groups. This chapter examines how people in postapartheid South Africa assess the desert of others in terms of access to social assistance from the state and employment opportunities. It uses attitudinal survey data from Cape Town — a city characterized by both inequality and cultural diversity — to examine who is viewed as deserving and undeserving of public assistance. In particular, it explores whether perceptions of desert reflect racial discrimination. It is shown that there are clear perceptions of what kinds of poor people are considered deserving of public assistance and who is considered undeserving, that these perceptions are shared widely across the population, and that explicit racial consideration makes little or no differences to these perceptions. These patterns contrast with those in some other areas of public life — including, notably, employment decisions — where racial differences are evident. One lesson from the chapter is that there are some areas of public policy that are likely to be relatively amenable to building cross-racial support for interracial redistribution.Less

Conclusion

Ida Susser

in Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood, Updated Edition

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts. Poor working-class people in Greenpoint–Williamsburg were engaged in constant conflict with the New York City ... More

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts. Poor working-class people in Greenpoint–Williamsburg were engaged in constant conflict with the New York City administration and the state and federal agencies which affected their environment and subsistence. When protest surfaced, it was a manifestation of anger and frustration built up in relation to poor employment conditions, government agencies that caused delay and humiliation, absentee landlords, and inadequate city services. The forms protest took and the demands for city services reflected the dependent position to which the workers of Greenpoint–Williamsburg had been reduced. The racial divisions within poor people's movements were clearly related to real estate trends precipitated by the same regional developments which had led to high levels of unemployment and a rising need for public assistance among black, white, and Hispanic workers.Less

Intellectual Property and Development as Freedom

Madhavi Sunder

in The Development Agenda: Global Intellectual Property and Developing Countries

Since 1990, the United Nations has understood development in the broad terms of expanding human capabilities, thanks in part to Amartya Sen. Sen's vision of “development as freedom” is pluralist, ... More

Since 1990, the United Nations has understood development in the broad terms of expanding human capabilities, thanks in part to Amartya Sen. Sen's vision of “development as freedom” is pluralist, measuring development on the capacity for many freedoms. These freedoms range from basic needs, such as the right to life and health, to more expansive freedoms of movement, creative work, and participation in social, economic, and cultural institutions. Intellectual property (IP) law is essential to all of these freedoms and regulates our capacity to participate in cultural and scientific creation. A broader understanding of IP and development as freedom recognizes the importance of participating in the process of knowledge creation. The poor must be recognized as both receivers and producers of knowledge. In the Knowledge Age, wealth lies not simply in access to other people's knowledge, but also in the ability to produce new knowledge and to benefit from this creation, culturally and economically.Less

Some remarks on the economics of child labour*

Sonia Bhalotra

in The Role of Labour Standards in Development: From theory to sustainable practice?

The responsibility for child labour is often cast as resting with (exploitative) employers. This creates a demand for legislation that bars employers from employing children. However, a careful look ... More

The responsibility for child labour is often cast as resting with (exploitative) employers. This creates a demand for legislation that bars employers from employing children. However, a careful look at household survey data suggests that the majority of employers are parents and, when not, parents have volunteered the child for work. This chapter focuses on the majority case of children working to help the family survive. It briefly discusses the role of legislation in curbing child labour, while arguing that it is not a substitute for efforts directed at creating income-generating opportunities amongst the poor and improving their access to education. Even when legislation is effective in lowering the incidence of child labour, it remains relevant to consider where children removed from the labour market go, which is why so much of the emphasis in the contemporary development literature is on education.Less

Enter the Poor: American Welfare Reform, Solidarity, and the Capability of Human Flourishing

Vincent D. Rougeau

in Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order

This chapter describes how a materialistic vision of society and the lack of a sense of common purpose in American life have made it extremely difficult for law and public policy to confront poverty ... More

This chapter describes how a materialistic vision of society and the lack of a sense of common purpose in American life have made it extremely difficult for law and public policy to confront poverty in the United States in a way that takes seriously the full humanity of poor people. After explaining how current reforms of economic assistance for those who are impoverished fail to take key cultural problems into account, it argues that the creators of welfare reform had an impoverished sense of the fundamental needs of poor people.Less

Congressional Oversight and Social Welfare Policy

Michael D. Minta

in Oversight: Representing the Interests of Blacks and Latinos in Congress

This chapter examines the advocacy efforts of members of Congress for policies designed to help poor people. It investigates whether the differences that exist between black, Latino, and white ... More

This chapter examines the advocacy efforts of members of Congress for policies designed to help poor people. It investigates whether the differences that exist between black, Latino, and white legislators in racial and ethnic hearings also occur in social welfare hearings. It examine legislators' interventions in committee deliberations during part of the Clinton era (1993–1997) and the first term of the George W. Bush presidency (2001–2003). It focuses on how actively legislators engaged in the deliberations in terms of questioning witnesses and interacting with fellow members of Congress. It also examines other legislative interventions, such as testifying at hearings in favor of social welfare policies that benefit the poor and requesting hearings designed to help poor people, who are disproportionately minorities.Less

Freedom and Money

G. A. Cohen

Michael Otsuka (ed.)

in On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy

This chapter explains a disagreement that Cohen had with his teacher and friend, Isaiah Berlin, about freedom and, more particularly, about the relationship between freedom and money. Contrary to the ... More

This chapter explains a disagreement that Cohen had with his teacher and friend, Isaiah Berlin, about freedom and, more particularly, about the relationship between freedom and money. Contrary to the very influential things that Isaiah wrote, Cohen argues that lack of money, poverty, carries with it lack of freedom. He regards this as an overwhelmingly obvious truth, one that is worth defending only because it has been so influentially denied. While lack of money, poverty, is not the only circumstance that restricts a person's freedom, it is one of them, and one of the most important of them. To put the point more precisely—there are lots of things that, because they are poor, poor people are not free to do, things that nonpoor people are, by contrast, indeed free to do.Less

The Way We Live Now

Mathias Risse

in On Global Justice

This chapter examines several arguments that find fault with the way we live now, the system of states. It considers four strategies one may deploy to identify faults of the state system and to use ... More

This chapter examines several arguments that find fault with the way we live now, the system of states. It considers four strategies one may deploy to identify faults of the state system and to use the identified moral failings to reach the conclusion that there ought to be no system of states, and thus no global order. The chapter first describes the contingent nature of states before discussing the argument that what is morally problematic about the state system is the very existence of borders. It then analyzes the concern that the existence of borders is inconsistent with the value of freedom, liberal justice, or democracy. It also investigates the claim that the state system wrongfully harms the poor because developing countries would be much better off today had it not been for the emergence of a state system with its ensuing colonial ambitions.Less

Social marketing in developing countries

William A Smith

in Social Marketing and Public Health: Theory and practice

Social marketing designs products or services to meet the special needs of poor people. This chapter focuses on this unique contribution of social marketing, developed out of the necessity to ... More

Social marketing designs products or services to meet the special needs of poor people. This chapter focuses on this unique contribution of social marketing, developed out of the necessity to compensate for dysfunctional public systems. It offers lessons about social marketing to low-income rural populations; uses examples from developing countries to show that social marketing can work when targeting poorer communities; and provides valuable lessons that social marketers can learn and apply in their own local interventions.Less

Poverty, Peace, and King's Challenge

Gordon K. Mantler

in Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974

This chapter focuses on the time when Martin Luther King, Jr. formally announced SCLC's much-anticipated program of mass civil disobedience for the upcoming election year. The Poor People's Campaign ... More

This chapter focuses on the time when Martin Luther King, Jr. formally announced SCLC's much-anticipated program of mass civil disobedience for the upcoming election year. The Poor People's Campaign aimed to dramatize poverty in the United States, by leading “waves of the nation's poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C. . . . to secure at least jobs or income for all,” King stated. During the following spring, he continued, “we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.” At the heart of the plan was King's notion of “militant nonviolence,” illustrated through a series of planned marches, rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins designed to tie up federal agencies and Congress—all emanating from a central, semipermanent campout of poor people on the Washington Mall.Less

Medicine, the Environment and the Poor

John Henderson

in Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City

This chapter emphasises the importance of taking seriously seventeenth-century medical theory, and its understanding of the environmental factors associated with plague. The increasing belief in the ... More

This chapter emphasises the importance of taking seriously seventeenth-century medical theory, and its understanding of the environmental factors associated with plague. The increasing belief in the link between environment and disease led to closer attention by government and medical staff to the living conditions of the poor. In Florence, as in some other Italian cities at the time, the public health authorities instituted a detailed house-by-house survey of the living conditions of the poor. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the survey, and in the process reveals the crowded and insanitary living conditions of the poorer members of society. It stresses that measures taken to address these problems are not just evidence of insanitary conditions, but are also part of a long tradition of proactive sanitary legislation which sought to cleanse houses and streets of the filth seen as causing disease. More broadly, the chapter seeks to understand these measures in relation to attitudes towards the poorer members of society, as reflected in contemporary medical and government rhetoric, which even sought to blame the poor for the worsening epidemic through their poor diet, lifestyle, and behaviour.Less

Bringing the Moon to Mankind: The Civil Rights Narrative and the Space Age

David Miguel Molina and P. J. Blount

in NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and ... More

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.Less

“Our Sole Habitation”: A Contemporary Approach to Collective Ownership of the Earth

Mathias Risse

in On Global Justice

This chapter examines from a secular standpoint the notion that the earth belongs to humankind collectively by offering a view on the ownership status of the earth that it calls Common Ownership. It ... More

This chapter examines from a secular standpoint the notion that the earth belongs to humankind collectively by offering a view on the ownership status of the earth that it calls Common Ownership. It first considers collective ownership of the earth and some of its conceptions, especially Common Ownership, before describing what work Common Ownership does in an engagement with libertarianism. It then defends Common Ownership against objections in terms of the value of the environment and discusses two alternative conceptions of collective ownership. It relates the results to global justice and shows how Common Ownership enters into debates in the philosophical literature. Finally, it explores one version of left-libertarianism and one of Thomas Pogge's arguments for the claim that the global order harms the poor.Less

Rhetoric of oppression and social critique

Sarah Dayens

in Time and Memory in Reggae Music: The Politics of Hope

The message contained in reggae music is above all a message of denunciation: the point is to show what is really happening, based on the fundamental distinction made by Rastafari between Good and ... More

The message contained in reggae music is above all a message of denunciation: the point is to show what is really happening, based on the fundamental distinction made by Rastafari between Good and Evil, between Zion and Babylon. Within a world viewed as a permanent struggle, reggae music develops a social critique and a denunciation of oppression. Reggae is therefore a music of resistance, based on a rhetoric of oppression that defines the terms which govern a worldview, and is rooted in the daily reality of the lives of poor people in Jamaica. Reggae music argues that poverty is neither a shameful condition nor in the order of things, but rather is only the consequence of the corruption of an elite that maintains a society based on exploitation, which therefore could be changed. Rastafari can be considered as a strong critique of consumer society and, more generally, capitalism. The rhetoric of oppression developed by reggae music articulates a fundamental opposition between the oppressors and the oppressed (based on the essential distinction of Babylon/Evil and Zion/Good), and the notion of hope.Less

Democratic Politics Now

Todd May

in Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière: Equality in Action

This chapter explains the current status of democratic politics. Liberals reject utopia, seeing in it a dangerous illusion. Leftists embrace utopia, seeing in it a sign of hope. The distinction ... More

This chapter explains the current status of democratic politics. Liberals reject utopia, seeing in it a dangerous illusion. Leftists embrace utopia, seeing in it a sign of hope. The distinction between reform and revolution has played an important role in the left's view of itself. Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's approach to poor people's movements claims that they arise during periods of massive dislocation. They have provided significant conditions for a poor people's movement, but have neglected the spark of the movement itself, the conditions under which one moves from a situation ready for struggle to a movement. The difference and similarity of withdrawal and identity politics is covered. Jacques Rancière has pointed to the rarity of democratic politics, and Piven and Cloward are sober about the emergence of poor people's movements. Rancière has given a framework from within which to think about a democratic politics.Less