The Ruby Payne "Tribute to Academic Dishonesty" Blog
I don't necessarily have a lot to say about Ms. Payne's book other than that I think it is first and foremost a moneymaking scheme for her and her company. It takes a rare book to be completely devoid of salient points (the broken clock rule), so if you search hard enough you can find helpful bits of advice and whatnot (the "this is how poor people respond do adversity" chart), but on the whole this book is maddeningly trivial and unsystematic.
What needs to be realized first is that this is NOT an academic book. Payne may list herself as a PhD, but nowhere in the book does she tell us the university from which it came. Furthermore, you have to dig deeply on her website before she reveals the university to you (South Texas something-or-another). Her research is shoddy and seems to rely almost solely on anecdotes she either witnessed or heard about (for more on this, check out academia's virulent online response to Payne's books). An example: She has as a "case study" Jose or someone who: 1. is dirt poor 2. has a drug addict mom 3. has a gang-leader uncle 4. no one speaks english 5. the gang-leader uncle wants to take Jose out of school and hide out in Mexico because the uncle wants to spend time with Jose before he dies since in the gang business no one lives past 30. ETC. ETC. ETC.
This sort of story may titillate a speaking-tour audience, but I doubt that it's relevant to the great majority of people in poverty that Ms. Payne professes to want to help.
That, and her "hidden middle-class rules" make me want to set her book on fire. As I see it, these are anachronistic and bigoted: the "upper-class rules" have more to do with an imagined Victorian society than anything else, and the "lower-class rules" stem from the worst sort of prejudices about the black poor.
In summary, Ms. Payne's book is full of nonsense that could have been avoided if she'd approached her topic from an academically rigorous angle instead of some misguided philanthropic one or (what is much more likely) a cynical attempt to cash in on the sympathies of well-meaning people.
Comments
Are all philanthopist approaches to understanding poverty inevitably misguided and doomed to misunderstanding? Which social scientists/academics (for example) have writeten about poverty with credibility, without either regurgitating the Victorian view of "how poor people live" OR glorifying poverty?
I have no idea which social scientists have written credibly about poverty; but Dickens has, and Flaubert has, and Gogol and Tolstoy have, among others. It's easy to write about poverty. All it takes is an understanding of history, economy, and human motives, mixed with equal parts empathy and critical judgment. But adding profit motives (of any type) into the mix spoils the dish.