Poverty, by America

A great book with a great message

around which we should mobilize

In the park with Jetta a couple days ago, thinking about all sorts of people and things. About how I drifted home from the airport after dropping Marrianne off to catch a flight to Pittsburgh.

 

The rush hour traffic was jammed up on the Stevenson from Cicero Avenue pretty much all the way to the Dan Ryan. Drivers frantically changing lanes, sometimes changing back instantly, looking for ways to shave minutes off their commutes to work. Meanwhile, I was, like I said, drifting; sliding carefully over to the left lane knowing that the right-side exit ramps to the Ryan northbound and south were the targets of probably 90 percent of the drivers around me.

 

At 75, I’m enjoying a level of health that my Bronzeville neighbors, 10 and 20 years younger than me, don’t share. The privilege that drives my longer life expectancy and relative comfort is rooted in my whiteness, my gender, my sexual orientation, and my class background. Retired these past many years, I still have the energy to stay fit, to take care of my home, to travel and to, sometimes, write.

 

I am privileged to have walked thousands of miles with Jetta. To have thought about so many different things on those walks. To have admired beauty. To have perceived great stories written in grit and rooted in the sometimes-blighted city in which we live, to have witnessed so many Chicago stories full of heroes, both visible and, more often, unsung; the heroes, the ordinary folks, who have labored to create a city that always rises above the worst that it could be and do, and sometimes shines with rare beauty.

 

For the immediate future, though, a piece of every day is and will be about how I must urge tired, chronically alarmed, old Jetta to wander wherever in the park she might want to go after I let her off the leash. “You don’t have a lot of time left in this life, Jetta,” I tell her. “Enjoy this beautiful day.”

 

I think also of my friend Richard and the time some years back, that Richard set aside an afternoon for a community of friends to stop by to say goodbye to Ginger, a noble-looking, golden-haired German shepherd, about to be put to sleep before she was 8 years old. I think about Richard himself, a big, dignified, Black man, who nevertheless was also a chronic complainer, constantly annoyed by both trivial and significant matters, Richard who gave of himself always to take care of his frail mom and his disabled brother, and was my best DC friend, a gay man who flamed exuberantly on Facebook, and who passed away before he was 60.

 

And here I am, 75 and healthy, privileged to take leisure whenever I spy the opportunity. Privileged to own the right clothes for any season and to live in a nice, big house with a brilliant, diligent, loving woman and to have children who have forgiven me for my failings more than I deserve.

And there is also, in my life, Isabel, a granddaughter who spreads cheer.

 

I have had what feels like years of running and jumping and hooping. I have acquired the language and perspective to express gratitude, and to recognize that my privilege is rooted in the price that others with less privilege have been forced to pay. Privilege that allowed a big, white, straight, middle-class guy to dodge the worst consequences of stupid risks that ended badly, the same or similar mistakes for which others almost certainly paid a higher price.

 

But, now comes a book, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty by America, that makes it clear that the cost of the wealth and power that some of us enjoy in a lifetime is paid by others who suffer, repeatedly, the injuries of class and race and other systemic hatreds, the outrageous cost of being poor in America. Desmond makes it clear from the start that his book is not about the lives of the poor, not about the “what” of poverty, but is about the “why.”

 

There have been plenty of good books, great ones, Desmond writes, about poverty and the poor. The list of reliable and noteworthy accounts of what the poor live with every day is long, stretching back to the 19^thcentury, Desmond notes, specifically citing books by Jacob Riis, Jane Adams, James Agee and Walker Evans, and the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange. Desmond ends the list with Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which, along with the impetus created by the Civil Rights movement, directly inspired Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

 

These are “books [that] help us understand the nature of poverty. They are vital. But they do not—and in fact cannot—answer the most fundamental question, which is: Why? Why all this American poverty? I’ve learned that this question requires a different approach. To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering? This book is my attempt to answer that question, addressed to that ‘we.’ Which makes this a book about poverty that is not just about the poor. Instead, it’s a book about how the other other half lives, about how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” 

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 7-8)

 

On pages 176 and 177, Desmond quotes James Baldwin as part of his effort to explain why the United States, which celebrates itself for its great wealth, would tolerate endemic poverty. The quote nowhere near captures the range and subtlety of Desmond’s explanation, but it’s a foundational piece in the structure of his argument.

 

“’Any real change,’ writes James Baldwin, ‘implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.”

 

At the time, Baldwin was pointing to pending desegregation as the threat on the horizon for (mostly) white folks that warned of a coming dispossession that would strip white people of their most celebrated entitlement, their supremacy, which might be the last of many privileges to go, but would, they feared, crumble and collapse, swept away by a tide of enemies, hated and feared, people not like them.

 

But Baldwin, were he here today, might well be writing the same thing to assess MAGA, which developed out of the renewed threat white folks always knew was coming, had known for years, out of a past that was literally perceived by white folks as a black hole, and manifested itself finally just as Trump was preaching nativism and nostalgia for the edenic past, as Black. Lives. Matter.

 

I’m not saying that the various narcissistic and psychopathic demagogues, like Trump (who arise always to amplify and soothe those fears), require anything from the rest of us—no sympathy, no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness. But I am saying that we must understand what terrors infest the minds and hearts of those they incite.

 

We must understand those fears because the changes that must happen to eliminate the inequities and injustices that plague our society will take a bigger movement than any that have tackled the problem before. In his epilogue, Desmond describes a few movements that made a difference in the past.

 

“Behind every great blow dealt to the scourge of poverty, there have been ordinary Americans who have bound themselves to one another to accomplish extraordinary things. Social movements spark ideas, providing the blueprint for reform, as when the unemployed workers’ movement of the late nineteenth century called for a public works program decades before the New Deal,” he writes.

 

“Most important, movements apply the heat. The American labor movement was the dominant force behind the New Deal. The tenants’ union that rose up during the Depression provoked Congress to establish our public housing system. How was President Johnson able to break through congressional gridlock to deliver the civil rights acts, the Great Society and the War on Poverty? The civil rights movement forced his hand by putting unrelenting pressure on lawmakers. Johnson admitted as much in 1965, telling Congress that the actions of Black Americans who had joined the civil rights movement ‘called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress had it not been for [their] persistent bravery, and [their] faith in American democracy?’”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 183-184)

 

And, we must understand the fears of our fellow citizens who have been and are incited to hate and dread the progress that others make because the movement that must be built if we are ever to end poverty, by America, must necessarily be the largest in the history of this country and cannot be confined only to those who already believe that the arc of history bends toward justice. Without those who are afraid and wish to barricade themselves away from the future, we cannot build a movement big enough to force the change that we wish to see.

 

Because, if poverty in America, and all the social consequences that arise from poverty, is ever to end, it will be because Americans who have benefitted from the inequity that is an integral part of our society, will also have come to understand that what they must give up on the way to a country that is both equitable and just will be much less than what they gain.

 

“When your power comes from people,” Desmond writes. “you need a lot of them. The movement must grow, which means we can’t afford to write anyone off. As Alicia Garza, co-creator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, has put it, ‘To build the kind of movement that we need to get the things that we deserve, we can’t be afraid to establish a base that is larger than the people we feel comfortable with.’ That is, ‘We have to reach beyond the choir.’”

 

Indeed, it is likely that a significant percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump, and even the true believers who think that the 2020 election was stolen, follow Trump because his relentless fury at “outsiders,” at those who want their fair share of the wealth of this richest of all countries will get that share at the expense of those who live a precarious middle-class life, a life that they insist that they “earned.” Their stability and their luxurious, earned or otherwise, precarious or not, the goal of the demagogue is to stoke fear and hatred among them because when the demagogue succeeds at that work they are rewarded while the people who revere them find themselves alienated from their neighbors, and blind to genuinely common interests.

 

Desmond shares a story about activists trying to get signatures supporting a higher minimum wage at a mall in western Michigan, Maga country. “I really thought we were going to be punched or something was going to happen,” Sara Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, told Desmond.

 

“[Jayaraman] and her team stood out,” Desmond writes. “They were all women of color, including two wearing hijabs, in a place where nearly all the shoppers were white. ‘But we’d walk up to them and say. ‘Do you want to sign a petition for 15 [dollars an hour]?’ Ninety-nine percent of people said, ‘I already signed it,’ or ‘Where can I sign?’ It reminded Sara of what happened almost two years before, in November 2020. One Fair Wage were gathered outside the statehouse in Albany, New York, to call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for tipped workers. The crowd of mostly Black and Hispanic New Yorkers had bought with them a twenty-four-foot-high statue of a flexing and aproned Black woman nicknamed Elena the Essential worker. As the workers were chanting and cheering on speakers, a group of white men and women in red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats approached. Unbeknownst to One Fair Wage, the day of their rally was also the day the state legislature had scheduled to certify the results of the presidential election, and MAGA protesters had gathered earlier to challenge the count. When the pro-Trump protesters learned that the workers were there to push for higher wages, they shook hands and joined their protest.”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 187-188)

 

So, there it is. It’s not about the demagogues. It’s about the people who feel that they don’t have all that they need and are in danger of losing what they have. They should be the building blocks of an historic movement, one that works in their interests and ours. People need to know that their privilege, however limited it might be, is an obstacle in the way of our collective challenge to bend the moral arc. They need to know that giving up privilege opens a doorway to a better world.