Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame ‘the poor’

an article by Tracy Shildrick and Robert MacDonald (Teesside University) published in The Sociological Review Volume 61 Issue 2 (May 2013)

Abstract

Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north-east England who were caught up in ‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others.

Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’.

These findings are theorised in four ways:

• first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation;
• second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long-running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’;
• third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and
• fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working-class life are in decline.

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