Myths About the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities

The volume argues that dominant accounts of poverty, welfare, and the 'underclass' systematically misattribute the causes of inequality to the deficiencies of the poor themselves, thereby sustaining the very arrangements that produce suffering. The editors explicitly build on William Ryan's notions of 'blaming the victim' and 'fair shares vs. fair play' as jumping-off points for the contributors' critical analyses . The book's distinctive mechanism is not merely to refute victim-blaming claims case by case but to expose the underlying assumptions—about culture, structure, and morality—that make such claims persuasive. The volume's conversation between Ryan and M. Brinton Lykes that closes the book frames the collection as a direct engagement with his intellectual legacy.

Rappaport co-authored the volume's chapter 'Art as Community Narrative: A Resource for Social Change' with R. Elizabeth Thomas . The chapter applies the narrative framework Rappaport developed elsewhere to the volume's central concern with contesting social inequalities. Community narratives—stories shared among a group and communicated through texts, rituals, images, and performances—are presented as resources through which marginalized communities can articulate identities that resist dominant myths about their powerlessness. The chapter's placement in Part V, 'Consciousness-Raising, Action, and Community Change,' signals its role in the volume's argument: narrative is not merely cultural expression but a mechanism for political mobilization and social change.

The volume assembles contributions from leading critical scholars across psychology and social policy. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward contribute 'Welfare Reform and the New Class War'; Herbert Gans writes on 'The So-Called Underclass and the Future of Antipoverty Policy'; Michelle Fine and colleagues examine 'Insisting on Innocence: Accounts of Accountability by Abusive Men'; Ramsay Liem and Joan Huser Liem analyze 'Mental Health and Unemployment'; M. Brinton Lykes addresses 'Meaning Making in a Context of Genocide and Silencing'; and Paula Doress-Worters, Jean Hardisty, and Ellen Leopold examine health care discrimination and cancer and poverty among women . The range reflects the volume's ambition to show that myths about the powerless operate across domains—welfare, health, gender, race, and political violence.

The volume's use of narrative as a resource for contesting inequality extends Rappaport's empowerment theory by specifying story as the medium through which power relations are reproduced and resisted. In Rappaport's earlier work, empowerment was defined as a process through which people gain control over their lives . The narrative framework answers how this process operates: dominant myths about the powerless are themselves narratives, and contesting them requires alternative stories that communities tell about themselves. This is consistent with Rappaport's consistent emphasis on 'creating settings' where marginalized voices can be heard, rather than imposing professional narratives from outside. The chapter in this volume thus represents an application of empowerment theory to the specific problem of ideological legitimation of inequality.

George W. Albee, Rappaport's colleague and the leading figure in the primary prevention movement, wrote the foreword to Myths About the Powerless . This connection places the volume within the intellectual lineage of community psychology's critical wing, which insisted that psychopathology and social suffering arise from structural conditions—poverty, exploitation, powerlessness—rather than individual deficiency. Albee's own work on prevention consistently argued that no mass disorder has ever been controlled by treating affected individuals, and that social change is therefore necessary. The volume's contributors extend this logic from mental health to the broader terrain of social inequality, examining how the myths that legitimate inequality function as obstacles to both prevention and justice.

The volume's core insight—that dominant narratives about the poor systematically misattribute structural problems to individual failings—remains highly relevant. The specific policy debates the contributors engaged (welfare reform, the 'underclass' discourse, health care discrimination) have evolved, but the rhetorical mechanisms they identified persist. Contemporary debates about poverty, immigration, and public health continue to feature claims that the disadvantaged are themselves responsible for their circumstances. The volume's contribution to this ongoing critique is its multi-domain demonstration that victim-blaming is not an isolated rhetorical error but a systematic feature of how inequality is legitimated. The narrative approach Rappaport and Thomas outline has been taken up in subsequent community psychology scholarship on storytelling and social change.