La TEM está incrementada en muestras intestinales que rodean el tracto de la fístula en pacientes con EC

When white America gets a cold, black America gets pneumonia. (American Saying)

The 1960s witnessed profound social and cultural changes within US society. America‘s ―grand experiment with elite cultural values,‖ according to conservative scholar Myron Magnet, ―loosened its crime and welfare policies, had its fling with the sexual revolution,

remade its mores from top to bottom, instituted affirmative action, and turned its universities into academies of the new culture (2).‖ These changes, according to Magnet and other conservative behaviorist thinkers, negatively affected American culture as a whole and had catastrophic consequences for urban African American neighborhoods.

Magnet concedes that the visions and desires which had prompted the change in culture had been well intentioned. Distinguishing between the ―Haves,‖ (American mainstream white culture) and the ―Have-Nots‖ (the poor and the black), he identifies two distinct strands of motivation within the activist forces of the 1960s. For one, the Civil Rights Movement, guided by democratic ideals, sought ―the political and economic liberation of the Have-Nots,‖ (14). On the other hand, the Haves sought liberation for themselves as they tried to escape ―a sense of anxious, stifling conformity‖ prevalent in the 1950s (15). The latter manifested itself in two expressions: the sexual revolution, ―whose attitudes … so transformed values and behavior that they ultimately reshaped family life, increasing divorce, illegitimacy, and female-headed families on all levels of society,‖ and the ―sixties counterculture … [which] rejected traditional bourgeois culture as sick, repressive, and destructive‖ (15). To Magnet, the effects of the Cultural Revolution were devastating, particularly in the black ghettos:

Instead of ending poverty for the Have-Nots—despite the civil rights movement, despite the War on Poverty—the new cultural order fostered, in the underclass and the homeless, a new, intractable poverty that shocked and dismayed, that seemed to belong more to the era of ragged chimney sweeps than to modern America, that went beyond the economic realm into the realm of pathology. Poverty turned pathological … because the new culture that the Haves invented—their remade system of beliefs, norms, and institutions—permitted, even celebrated, behavior that, when poor people practice it, will imprison them inextricably in poverty. (17)

Irving Kristol describes the new predicament of poor blacks by pointing out that ―[i]t‘s hard to rise above poverty if society keeps deriding the human qualities that allow you to escape from it‖ (qtd. in Magnet 17). As a consequence, Magnet points out, black urban residential areas were turned into ―anarchy … [by ruining] their schools [in] making racial balance, students‘ rights, and a ‗multicultural‘ curriculum more important than the genuine education vitally needed to rise‖ (18). Thus, Magnet concludes, not only did the Haves harm themselves with the new cultural order they brought into being by weakening their family and community life, the Have-Nots were failed by the new cultural program as well, as is evidenced in the increase of the underclass and the homeless.

The cultural changes in American society during the 1960s are, of course, noted by all social and historical analysts. Nevertheless, the interpretation of how these changes affected

American society varies. Christopher Jencks observes that ―single parenthood began its rapid spread during the 1960s, when elite attitudes toward sex, marriage, divorce, and parenthood were undergoing a dramatic change‖ (134). However, unlike Magnet, Jencks does not think that these changes had a negative effect on all of American society. Concerning the educated elite, Jencks holds that the liberalization of morals ―certainly improved their lives,‖ as it afforded them a greater measure of freedom and self-determination (134). Jencks agrees with Magnet, however, that ―poor children have suffered the most from our newly permissive approach to reproduction‖ (135). Caught in the ―conjunction of economic vulnerability and cultural change,‖ the demise of traditional norms about marriage and divorce placed most of them on the outer margins of society (135). As Jencks points out: ―Shotgun weddings and lifetime marriages caused adults a lot of misery, but they ensured that almost every child had a claim on some adult male‘s earnings unless his father died. That is no longer the case‖ (135). As a result, two thirds of all black children living in female headed households are poor, a figure which has remained virtually the same from 1970 onward (see Jencks 130). Jencks considers the cultural changes of the 1960s ―a byproduct of growing individualism and commitment to personal freedom,‖ supported by growing material prosperity. There is no question that the social changes which occurred in American society at large affected black inner-city communities as well. However, it is a matter of contention among scholars of the underclass debate how and why African American urban ghettos changed so dramatically during that period. Was it primarily a matter of changed values which wreaked havoc in the black ghetto, as cultural behaviorist scholars suggest, or are structural forces to blame which accelerated the outmigration of middle- and working class blacks, leaving behind the most unfortunate segments of the black urban population? These questions shall be contended with in the synopsis of the present chapter after landmark changes in urban African American communities which took place during the 1960s have been considered. The chapter will conclude with a literary case-in-point analysis of Cupcake Brown‘s bestselling life narrative,