Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen By Stephen Pimpare

791.43652 P644 2017 Stephen Pimpare I listened to a fascinating lecture the author gave at the Humanist Hub in Harvard Square. The event titled Poverty in Culture and the Culture of Poverty: Representations of Poor and Homeless Americans in the Movies. I was impressed enough by his talk that I bought a copy of his book, which he was gracious enough to sign for me. I am so glad I did purchase the book. I knew our media is populated by and biased toward the elites, but I had no idea how deep this bias went, or how long and how pervasively they had pushed the poor-are-lazy meme. Reading his work was a real eye opener to how we'd get a politician like Romney talking about the lazy, greedy 47% who don't want to work, and one like Hillary talking about the half the nation that is a basket of deplorables. Stephen Pimpare

Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today. It provides a novel kind of guide to social policy, exploring how ideas about poor and homeless people have been reflected in popular culture and evaluating those images against the historical and contemporary reality. Richly illustrated and examining nearly 300 American-made films released between 1902 and 2015, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens finds and describes representations of poor and homeless people and the places they have inhabited throughout the century-long history of U.S. cinema. It moves beyond the merely descriptive to deliberate whether cinematic representations of homelessness and poverty changed over time, and if there are patterns to be discerned. Ultimately, the text offers a preliminary response to a handful of harder questions about causation and consequence: Why are these portrayals as
they are? Where do they come from? Are they a reflection of American attitudes and policies toward marginalized populations, or do they help create them? What does this all mean for politics and policymaking?

Of interest to movie buffs and film scholars, cultural critics and historians, policy analysts, and those curious to know more about homelessness and American poverty, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens is a unique window into American politics, history, policy, and culture -- it is an entertaining and enlightening journey.
Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen

Read ´ eBook, PDF or Kindle ePUB ´ Stephen Pimpare