Code-Switching and the Culture of Poverty

I linked to it last night and praised in on Twitter, but I wanted to specifically post on Ta-Nehisi Coates brilliant piece reconceptualizing the "culture of poverty" concept as a form of code-switching. His analysis seems correct to me, and also a useful way to perhaps ratchet-down the level of emotion and victim-blaming that often attaches to this whole conversation. The point is that, basically, we all understand that when you go from place to place there are different kind of norms and that to succeed in any given context you have to understand the relevant norms and abide by them. And in the United States of America there's a substantial gap between the norms that prevail on "the street" and those that prevail in middle-class society.

This is all related to the very important and insufficiently discussed paper by Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, Susan Mayer, Robin Tepper, and Monique Payne "The Apple Does Not Fall Far From the Tree" (PDF) which indicates that a large number of poor children seem to pick up attributes that tend to keep them in poverty by imitating parental role models. In Coates' terms, just as kids learn to speak their parents' language they tend to instinctively pick up their parents' locally adaptive norms, norms that may not be ideal to carry over into other contexts.

I would conjecture that this sort of thing explains a large part of the success of the more successful kind of educational interventions. Nurse home visits and high-quality preschool both involve injecting a more bourgeois presence into a kid's life at formative moments, and KIPP explicitly instructs poor children in modes of behavior that middle class white people deem appropriate. This is all kind of condescending and distasteful, but it seems to work. And it's not really so strange that a bit of condescension works to help people adapt to novel situations—I was only able to exchange business cards with Chinese people in the appropriate way because someone explicitly told me how to do it. There's nothing "wrong" about the western way of doing it, but if you're in Asia you need to make an effort to do things the Asian way.