Deprivation In Mical Raz What's Wrong With The Poor

A child’s well-being plays a major role in political debates and decisions. Whether the debate is about a child’s mental health, their social class, or the effects of their parents, politicians are constantly striving to improve the lives of the future generations. In Mical Raz’s book, What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty, she argues that maternal deprivation, sensory deprivation, and cultural deprivation shaped public policy. Ultimately, Raz believes that interpretations of race and social class influenced the different types of deprivation. While Raz’s argument is valid, the practical application of deprivation is premature. The generalization of deprivation has caused more social issues and long-term negative effects such as sexism and racism.

Raz begins by focusing on maternal deprivation. In 1950, British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby “argued,

Alvin Schorr, a social worker, wrote a book where he disagreed with the culture of poverty theory, “Yet he did not reject the idea that certain behaviors and personality traits characterized the poor; rather, he merely attributed those phenomena to a clear biological cause: nutritional deprivation.” The influence of medical professionals led to the discovery of a new type of deprivation. The idea of nutritional deprivation had become a starting point for the University of Tennessee’s professor of education, Ernest Austin. He placed an emphasis on the need to feed and care for children in schools because they could not learn properly, but this alone would not solve the problems of cultural deprivation. In fact, it added to the long term stereotypes of low-income African American