This month marks 51 years since Lyndon Johnson\u2019s \u201cWar on Poverty\u201d speech. On January 8, 1964, during his State of the Union address, he urged the joint session of Congress to join him in a battle that the \u201crichest Nation on earth can afford to win.\u201d Over the past year, current elected officials have been reflecting on the legacy of Johnson\u2019s war on poverty as a way of assessing contemporary anti-poverty policies and programs. Some Republicans have taken the opportunity to expound on the failures of the current liberal-progressive agenda in light of a poor economy and the nearly 50 million people still living in below the poverty line. With Representative Paul Ryan as their spokesperson, they have collectively resurrected an assessment Ronald Reagan made in 1987 that the government \u201cwaged a war on poverty, and poverty won.\u201d Ryan has followed the standard conservative party logic: big government spending on \u201ccounterproductive\u201d federal programs induces the poverty trap\u2014a mechanism that impedes upward mobility from poverty to the middle class. For Ryan, who is the current chairman of the House Budget Committee and was the GOP\u2019s 2012 vice presidential candidate, the current federal policies dissuade the free-market values of work and independence that are essential to the American way of happiness and success.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Often overlooked in the cultural deficit hypothesis is the role that religion has played in stereotyping the urban, black lower class. In the late 1930s and 40s, liberal-minded social scientists began to study black laborers at the height of the New Deal era. They were invested in chronicling the psychological ramifications of segregation in urban race relations. In doing so, social scientists, such as E. Franklin Frazier, John Dollard, and Allison Davis, helped to legitimate the cultural assumptions about impoverished, black laborers\u2014from their parenting skills and sexual relationships to leisure activities and group affiliations. In her book Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, Barbara Savage writes that these social scientists \u201coften advanced old arguments without questioning them or listening to the ideas of their human subjects.\u201d Savage adds that within lower-class, black religious circles, these scholars \u201coccupied overlapping roles as trespassers, as intermediaries, as experts, and, ultimately, as creators of narratives they told about respectability and deviance in black communities.\u201d<\/p>\n