The Most Important Sentence - March Blog Post
"Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody's value could be measured by material standards. Value was connected to integrity, to being honest and hardworking."
I chose to examine this quote from the work titled "Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor", written by bell hooks. In this writing, hooks discusses the poignant differences between the way that the rich are viewed in comparison to the poor of society, and draws attention to the problems associated with this cultural portrayal and subsequent perception of the two groups. Hooks turns to life experiences to analyze the representation of the lower class within media. She states that she grew up essentially poor, but was taught from an early age that the source of the value of an individual had nothing to do with material possessions or economic status.
As mentioned in the selected excerpt, poverty was viewed as no disgrace in the household in which hooks grew up. She goes on to explain the shock that she felt in starting college and realizing that this was not the viewpoint that everyone held. It was at this point that she started to take notice to the way that others referred to the lower or "working" class, with the poor often being regarded as unintelligent, aimless, lazy, or sometimes inferior in some sense. She was especially disturbed by the notion that those living in a state of poverty were somehow void of value, given that the concept of value was something she had been taught within her family to connect to the individual regardless of income, and perhaps even more strongly relate to the hardworking lower class through personal experience.
This sparked hooks' alarm towards the manner in which American media and popular culture most commonly represents the lower class. Hooks discusses how such media and culture reveals a tendency to associate the lower class with negative stereotypes, and goes on to describe the harmful effects of such misrepresentation. She describes a sort of negative feedback loop, in which poor individuals view and consume media that represents lower class individuals as 'worthless', and in turn, lose a degree of personal motivation and sense of self confidence and esteem. She also highlights the monetary impact of a materialistic society; individuals who do not have enough money to make ends meet will often go into debt buying unnecessary materialistic items or comforts simply to convince others and the world around them that they are living above the standard of what is deemed as poor, sometimes even at the cost of buying basic necessities.
Hooks notes of the nihilistic perspective that is commonly adopted by lower class people, as they adopt a worldview that signifies their presumed lack of worth, and touches on the impacts of misrepresentation in regard to crime. Some individuals will stop at nothing to meet material standards, even without the means to support such an image, because culture has impressed upon them so deeply that their idea of self-worth is inseparable from economic status and displaying symbols of wealth to the world around you. Finally, hooks notes that if this cultural representation of the poor in media is not altered or, at the very least, recognized and commonly acknowledged, then the views that these images are espousing will never be challenged.
