Plough: There's an awful lot of political rhetoric these days on solutions to poverty, and on welfare reform. Much of it seems to revolve around the question of how much taxpayers are willing to "spend on the poor." We've been led to believe that poverty is primarily an economic condition. Any thoughts?

To be honest, it always fascinates me when this question is raised. I'm speaking of the last sentence there: "We've been led to believe that poverty is primarily an economic condition." Well, I realize you're sort of playing the devil's advocate there, so don't think my answer is at your expense.
It fascinates me that this point is raised so often, not simply by conservatives, but even by the allegedly impartial mainstream press. The typical headline is something to this effect: "Is Money Really the Issue?" It's extraordinary – as though it were strange to suggest that poverty is primarily a matter of economics. Would we doubt this if we were talking about people starving in Haiti? or Calcutta? Of course not. We would say they're poor not because they don't have the right values, or something of that sort, but because of their economic condition.
Only in the United States, it seems, do we question whether poverty is caused by a lack of money. There's almost a sense here that we can't conceive the presence of economic injustice in our own society – only in other societies. Why should our society be different from any other society? Of course, spending money is not the only way to solve the problem of unequal schools, for example, but it would be a beginning.
When I wrote Savage Inequalities, I would frequently have members of Congress say to me something of this sort: "Jonathan, this book is very upsetting." They'd say, "Sure it's unfair that poor kids in the South Bronx should get only half as much money spent on their education as rich kids out in Great Neck on Long Island. I can see that. But can you really solve this kind of problem by throwing money at it?"
They'll always use that phrase, "throwing money," and sometimes, when I'm in a whimsical mood, I'll say, "Sure! That's the best way I know. Throw it. Just throw it. Put it in a helicopter and just sprinkle it gently over the school yards. I don't know a better way to put a new roof on a school or to buy computers for kids in the inner city schools than with money."
Now, I agree that there are limitless numbers of other forces at stake here, but economic justice is at the very heart of things, even if it's not conceded very often in the mainstream press. I find it bizarre when people suggest otherwise. Of course, it's not surprising that the press will do everything it can to appease readers. What better way to appease them than to argue that the ultimate solution to these problems is not primarily economic? It's a very comforting way to address injustice.

Plough: Another hot topic these days is what the Religious Right calls family values. Are these so-called values an issue for the urban poor? Are they even viable in a ghetto created by the very people who are preaching to them?

You know, I'm not sure whether I can really answer that question. But let me point something out: when people talk about the breakdown of the family –and that's heard not only from the religious right, but also from many secular neo-conservatives who can sometimes be quite vindictive in the way they use the phrase – I'm always reminded of the person who pointed out to me that there is a curious narrowness in the way the word "family" is applied. If you mean the family of humanity, then there is another kind of breakdown that has nothing to do with single-parent families, or with any of the clichés we hear about poor people. There's a breakdown of the "family" in the larger sense of the word – of society. In a sense, we have exiled millions of poor people from the family of our humanity. That is an area of family breakdown that I would love to see given more attention. I realize that that's not the sense in which politicians use the word "family," but they should.

Plough: For a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes scholar it seems odd that you should have spent so much of your adult life so far among the poor. What attracted you to them in the first place?

Many people ask me this question, and I've often speculated on it, because I don't know the answer. I know one important influence in my life was my mother's religious conviction when I was a child. She's 93 now, and still a very religious woman.

I grew up in a Reform Jewish tradition, and among the people with whom I grew up, there was very little reference to God or to good and evil. To some degree the community in which I grew up was more a cultural community than it was a religious community, which was characteristic of many Reform Jewish communities during the 1940s and 50s, and it may still be to some degree. The sermons we heard didn't very often have much to do with religion. They tended to be book reviews. It was quite secular. But my mother read the Bible and she took it very seriously, and in a sense she and my grandmother on my father's side gave me my sense of religion. My mother quoted Isaiah and Jeremiah to me when I was a child.
Much of it, of course, was washed out of me when I was in Harvard because there was a sense when I was there that you just didn't speak about religion. It was slightly embarrassing to do that. Even people who believed in God wouldn't often concede that for fear that somebody would make fun of them. Someone might say, "Didn't you take Philosophy I?" So to some degree those memories were suppressed when I was in college and afterwards, but they came back later, especially in these past two to three years when I've been with so many deeply devout black and Hispanic people, particularly the mothers and grandmothers in the South Bronx. In some ways they remind me of my mother and my grandmother.
I've always remembered certain passages from the Old Testament, for example the injunction to "welcome the stranger to our midst." Something like, "the stranger shall dwell with thee in the place where ye dwell too, and thou shalt not oppress him." As Jewish people we were reminded that we were once strangers in the land of Egypt, and we were challenged, therefore, to welcome the stranger in our midst. It's hard to know what effect these memories had, but they've always been there.
But back to your question. It was the late spring of 1964 when those three young civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. Somehow, their disappearance and then their death drew me across town from Harvard Square to Roxbury, which is Boston's black and Hispanic community. One day I simply got on the subway in Harvard Square and went to the end of the line, which in those days was Roxbury, and I volunteered to tutor in a "freedom school," as we called it in those days: a summer school for black children. I enjoyed teaching so much that when September came I decided to become a teacher. I signed up to teach in the Boston public schools, and then very quickly I was drawn into civil disobedience. I also became a housing organizer in the civil rights movement.
Once I was sent out to visit an apartment where a child had been bitten by a rat. This was late summer or fall of 1964. When I walked in, the tenants were meeting in the kitchen, and they had just decided to organize a rent strike. I didn't even know what a rent strike was. I asked who was running this rent strike, and they said, "You are!" So my first day as a housing organizer for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) I was running a rent strike, and by the end of the year I had been in demonstrations, and briefly jailed, and the year ended with my being fired from the Boston public schools for reading the poetry of Langston Hughes.
When I decided to join the civil rights movement and become a teacher in Roxbury, I was very pretentious, as young people tend to be, and I remember announcing to all my literary friends at Harvard that I was giving up writing, as though that were of great significance to the world. You know how pompous young people can be. Anyhow, I announced this to them, and the irony is that that year, the year I had officially given up writing, I actually lived through something worth writing about, and by the end of the year I had filled a notebook with journal entries which became my book Death At An Early Age.

Plough: Your book carries the strong implication that the ghetto is not a social mistake, but a sin. That's pretty strong language.

If the ghetto were a mistake, we would have fixed it by now. Mistakes can be fixed quite easily. I think that the ghetto is a sinister creation that serves a function for the larger society. It provides us with a place to put our outcasts. It provides us with an opportunity to cleanse our own neighborhoods of people we may regard as less than human. It also provides us with a place to put our undesirable municipal facilities, our waste burners, our sewage plants, as well as human beings who are sometimes metaphorically equated with waste.
In New York, the ghettos serve a very important function for the privileged. If there were no ghetto – if there were no South Bronx – the rich and the privileged would have to look into the eyes of the poor every day. Of course, the South Bronx is different from some ghettos in that it's more than a ghetto. Ten years ago it already had the basic elements of a segregated ghetto, but its worst aspects were intentionally compounded by the decision of New York City to move its poor and homeless to that neighborhood. In the early and mid 1980s, thousands of families became homeless in New York, partly as a consequence of the policies of the Reagan era.
Inevitably these people walked the streets and stood outside the restaurants and theaters, and their presence was abhorrent in the middle of Manhattan. The civic boosters of the city were alarmed. This would hurt tourism. The last thing theater owners wanted was to have a wealthy couple spend $200 to see Les Miserables and then come out from the theater and see the real thing! There was often bitter irony in that situation. I walked by that theater sometimes and would notice people who had presumably been weeping for the poor children in Paris a few minutes before in the theater; now, coming out on the street, they were miserably offended by the sight of people begging on the sidewalk.
The city had to put these people somewhere else. So they moved at least 3,000 families right into the heart of the South Bronx, where Amazing Grace takes place. To this degree the South Bronx is not simply another ghetto; it is an artfully created place of quarantine. And this was done with considerable ingenuity. Perhaps not with malice, but certainly with ample awareness. If that is not a sin, I don't know what the word "sin" means. I don't know where else we can use the word.
You know, the powerful people of New York are often graduates of Ivy League schools like Harvard Business. They are very good at doing things effectively when those things are important to them. That's