Instead of allowing ourselves to be misled about a culture of poverty, we need to critically examine the culture of denial that has become institutionalized in our society and has caused the study of poverty in the last 20 years to be more concerned with promoting a theory of individual culpability than with addressing institutionalized inequities. We need to understand that the poor themselves are not the problem; the problem is the fact that the poor do not have realistic opportunities to escape from poverty.
