The Brown Family and the Real World

My thoughts for this week come from Shapeshifters and specifically part one and the Brown family. This family, largely made up of women in a poor black community raises questions about the dynamics of intersectionality and how certain combinations of qualities such as blackness, girlhood, and poverty can be as Aimee Meredith Cox puts it “dangerous.” When we enroll in our women’s studies courses we sign up to talk about a whole bunch of intersectionality and really breaking down what this term even means and how different individuals are faced with different types of struggles because of their own intersectionality. Cox narrates the lives of a particular family that is made up of black women and girls in the poverty stricken middle of the city in Detroit. This ties into the article we read in class about the cycle of poverty because it goes through 3 generations of the Brown family and really gives us a look into whether the poverty cycle is a myth or not. What is also interesting about this portion of the book is that we get to see the certain levels of privilege that come into play due to intersectionality.

                So is the poverty cycle a myth or real? We could probably argue both ways if we just examined the Brown family because the second generation of women is stuck in the same sort of rut that their mother was when she was raising them. They have children to provide for with little education meaning they are limited to the type of work they can acquire and they receive little to no support from the father of their children. This is the exact situation many other real life families face in America and they are often deemed lazy for their class status, when in reality they could be working 2 to 3 jobs at a time with very little sleep and nourishment. So in this case this the poverty cycle could be seen as real because the hope for these women looks bleak and like there is very few ways out of the lifestyle they are living. However, the 3^rd generation Brown family can be proof for the other side of the argument that the poverty cycle is not real because a lot of the women that are the daughters of Bessie’s children are working hard to get more of an education or a vocational degree in order to be able to provide more financially and have a better chance at higher pay. However, not all of the women in this generation are able to get past some of the struggles that school provides them with and seem to be complacent with the consequences of giving up. But I think that the majority of the family are proof that the poverty cycle is a social construct made in order to keep individuals down and in the shadow of their family’s past.

                Another thing I saw to be interesting in this portion of shapeshifters is that we really got to see intersectionality in action. Black men are obviously often times stereotyped against as criminal and maybe even “ghetto.” But we see because they are males they still hold a high level of privilege in relation to black females. We can see this in movements like President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper,” and the Moynihan report that really demonizes black women to be at fault for their lack of support from the father of their children. This is also displayed through the views and attitudes towards the men in the Brown family. For example, Bessie was never angry at either her brothers for leaving her with the sole responsibility of their mother even though they were probably better off or her children’s fathers who took little responsibility for them. We also see it with Phillip and Bip because neither one of them are carrying much weight for the family while their sisters are all working double the amount, yet there is no animosity towards them and the young girls are first to move out when it gets overcrowded not them. This is yet another privilege the man gets to experience.