Deprivation, Mobility, and Orientation Toward Protest of the Urban Poor

Abstract

AUTHORS' NOTE: The authors wish to express their appreciation to Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation which funded the larger project of which the research reported in this paper is a part. 0 Dissatisfaction breeds unrest. Dissatisfaction among the urban poor in the United States has led to protest, picketing, demonstrating, marching, and rioting. These statements are widely accepted, albeit there is lack of agreement about the sources and nature of the lack of satisfaction which leads to unrest in general, or to the unrest of America's urban poor in particular.Perhaps the simplest hypothesis in this area is that there is a linear relationship between actual economic deprivation and protest. This hypothesis is sometimes, and incorrectly, attributed to Marx, who, in denying the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, was in effect indicating that severe deprivation did not lead to revolution, but rather to political quiescence. The lumpenproletariat were incapable of action because they could conceive of no alternative to their impoverishment. More recent theorists have emphasized the importance of felt deprivation rather than deprivation which was objectively defined. The common assumption here is that the deprivation which leads to unrest is that which is relative to some other standard. Sometimes dissatisfaction is thought to be the result of deprivation relative to increased aspirations which are part of a &dquo;revolution of rising expectations&dquo; or of a &dquo;demonstration effect.&dquo; For other theorists, dissatisfaction is the result of deprivation relative to an individual's own experience -e.g., downward mobility. In this paper we utilize survey data from a sample of persons living in the poverty areas of a large American city to explore the relationship between felt deprivation, personal mobility, and their evaluations of several kinds of protest activities.In April and May, 1967, an opinion survey was conducted among the residents of Cleveland's nine officially designated poverty areas. Interviews were conducted with 500 persons selected on the basis of a block quota design, who constituted a 1.4% sample of the neighborhoods in which they lived. Of the respondents, 78%, representative of the pattern of race and ethnicity in their neighborhoods, were Negro. Of the remainder, 10% were native white, 9% were whites of identifiable ethnicity, and 2% were Spanish-speaking. The interviews were conducted nine months after the Hough riot of the previous summer. THE PROTEST ORIENTATIONSince we wanted to investigate the degree to which respondents living in conditions of deprivation evaluated protest activities, a series of questions were asked about such activities as picketing, demonstrations, public protests, marching, and the like. Like most segments of the American population, a majority of these respondents disapprove of such behavior. But a rather significant minority not only approve of them but also believe that tactics of this kind are efficacious. Specifically, 30% of the sample belie...

Perceiving and Feeling Personal Discrimination: Motivation or Inhibition for Collective Action?

“…Consistent with this hypothesis, perceptions of personal deprivation have been found to be related to actions that enhance one's individual status (Hafer & Olson, 1993;Kawakami & Dion, 1993), but unrelated to participation in collective actions (Barnes & Kaase, 1979;Birt & Dion, 1987;Bowen, Bowen, Gawiser & Masotti, 1968;Geschwender & Geschwender, 1973;Muller, 1973;Guimond & Dubé-Simard, 1983;Walker & Mann, 1987;Walker & Pettigrew, 1984).…”

Relative Deprivation and Social Movements: A Critical Look at Twenty Years of Theory and Research

“…Measurement strategies are not always consistent with conceptualization. For example, while most researchers locate the sources of movement activity in intrapsychic processes, the studies are divided between those which obtain aggregate data on RD (Aberle, 1966;Davies, 1962Davies, , 1969Feierabend et al, 1969;Geschwender, 1964;Gurr, 1969Gurr, , 1970 and those which use self-report data on individuals (Bowen et al, 1968;Crawford and Naditch, 1970;Geschwender and Singer, 1970;Grofman and Muller, 1973;Pinard, Kirk, and von Eschen, 1969;Searles and Williams, 1962;Sears and McConahay, 1970). Writers using the frustrationaggression framework might be expected to relate individual psychological tension to movement activity; yet researchers such as Gurr do not do so but instead infer RD from economic and political indicators.…”

“…The literature also varies on what is being explained: movement emergence or individual participation. Some researchers (Searles and Williams, 1962;Bowen et al, 1968;Pinard, Kirk, and von Eschen, 1969) clearly are concerned with the latter. Others (Gurr, 1969(Gurr, , 1970Feierabend et al, 1969) seem more interested in the origins of movement activity.…”

“…Matching and sampling are used in hypothesis-testing studies in the RD literature, but, unfortunately, they are used so haphazardly as to render the bulk of the research highly suspect. Examples of less-than-adequate designs include that of Bowen et al (1968) which uses random samples, but no controls; that of Crawford and Naditch (1970) which reports high RD levels among samples of individuals living in riot-stricken sections of communities, but which does not contain data on RD in nonriot areas; and that of Geschwender and Singer (1970) which employs matching techniques, but on a nonrepresentative sample. (They find high RD levels among a random sample of Detroit "rioters," compared with a control group, but their "rioters" are a sample of persons arrested and incarcerated during the riots.)…”

Black Separatists

“…In fact, the notion of relative deprivation or related concepts has been widely employed to explain both the emergence of radical social movements and the outbreak of violence among black Americans (Caplan and Paige, 1968;Bowen et al, 1968;Geschwender et al, 1969;Murphy and Watson, 1969). The failure of those interpretations to stress the political purposes of black separatism and urban unrest, however, has been sharply criticized by Lupsha (1969) and Skolnick (1969).…”