Before reading Ted Evanoff’s Commercial Appeal article, I thought it was going to confirm my assumption that Memphis is, in fact, “a stricken outlier” and among the poorest of the poor cities in America. After finishing it, I don’t know if I feel relieved for Memphis or more sorrowful for our country as a whole. Memphis, a city that I have grown to love, has always been viewed by the vast majority of people I’ve talked to as a place of dysfunction and mass poverty; even as someone originally from a city that is very close to Memphis in terms of wealth and diversity, I have always viewed it as more of a deviation from the norm.
The inclusion of statistics from the Brookings Institution was necessary to drive Evanoff’s point, and I am glad that he included a decent list to go with his claims. However--and this may be because of Common Ground--I could not help but notice a severe lack of information about what causes this poverty, and how it reflects other aspects of the cities, such as racial makeup. It seems that there would be a direct correlation with the amount of minorities and prevalence of poverty given the inevitable, haunting truth that white people are generally making more money. I am not sure whether Evanoff left it off because it is controversial or because he simply felt it was not the most relevant piece of information for an article on the economy, but as a sociology student I would have garnered more from the piece with that information.
Devin, I agree with you that Evanoff’s article would have benefitted from incorporating some discussion of the roots of widespread poverty in Memphis and the United States as a whole. According to its head note, “Memphis Poverty: Preparing for the new frugality” is something of a postscript to several special reports about local poverty that Evanoff contributed to last year. Those special reports “explor[ed] the landscape of poverty in Memphis”, and I figure that this exploration must have included at least a little examination of where modern poverty in our city and society springs from. Evanoff may have assumed when he was writing his article that most of the people who would choose to read it would be familiar with the special reports.
ReplyDeleteEvanoff’s suggestions for local action against class disadvantages stand out among our class readings so far as refreshingly hopeful, but he does not provide much information about how most Memphians can begin to enact the changes he proposes. By analyzing the sources of the problems he wants to fix, I feel that he could have more successfully galvanized his readers to address them themselves. Many Memphis residents are aware that our city has a large population of undertrained young adults and a poor public transit system, for example, but many of us simultaneously feel helpless to address these issues because we do not know why they exist and cannot address themselves. Therefore, if we learned that many young adults in Memphis do not seek training because they cannot find affordable or efficient transportation to the places where they may receive training, those of us who are willing might try to negotiate with bus owners to extend their routes into the neighborhoods of these people. Information like that may be difficult to collect, however, and might have made his optimistic ideas seem uneasily attainable.