In his new book, Poverty, by America Matthew Desmond describes poverty with harrowing depth and precision.
He depicts the realities faced by more than 37.9 million Americans living in poverty. The palpable images he evokes are both relevant to 2023 present-day issues and haunting of our country’s racist sins through the ages.
Throughout the text, Desmond exposes and condemns how we all exploit the poor in ways we often do not even realize. He suggests that we could solve this societal problem if we really wanted to and he offers transformational ideas for how to do so.
Desmond charges us to all to become “poverty abolitionists.”
This call-to-action is novel. It is revolutionary. And, we should care about poverty, not only to develop more empathy for others, but because destitution leaves all of us empty in some way.
In Chapter 1, Desmond outlines “The Kind of Problem Poverty Is.”
“Poverty is pain, physical pain.”
It is in the backaches of home health aides and certified nursing assistants, who bend their bodies to hoist the old and sick out of beds and off toilets; it is in the feet and knees of cashiers made to stand while taking our orders and ringing up our items; it is in the skin rashes and migraines of maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with products containing ammonia and triclosan.”
“Poverty is traumatic,”
and since society isn’t investing in its treatment, poor people often have their own ways of coping with their pain.”
“Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.”
A third of Americans live without much economic security, working as bus drivers, farmers, teachers, cashiers, cooks, nurses, security guards, social workers…..What do you call it when you don’t qualify for a housing voucher but can’t get a mortgage either? When the rent takes half of your paycheck, and your student loan debt takes another quarter?”
“Poverty is the loss of liberty.”
The American prison system has no equal in any other country or any other epoch. Almost 2 million people sit in our prisons and jails each day. Another 3.7 million are on probation or parole. Hidden behind the system’s vague abstractions – justice, law and order – is the fact that the overwhelming majority of America’s current and former prisoners are very poor. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, almost seven in ten Black men who didn’t finish high school will have spent a portion of their life in a cage. Prison robs people of the primer of their life, taking not only the sleepy, slow years at the end but also the pulsing, hot years in the middle. In prisons, of course, they will remain poor, earning in their prison jobs between 14 cents and $1.41 an hour on average, depending on the state. The United States doesn’t just tuck its poor under overpasses and into mobile home parks far removed from central business districts. It disappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: The incarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in falsely rosy statistical picture of American progress.”
“Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you;”
that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.”
“Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing…
You feel it in the degradation rituals of the welfare office, where you are made to wait half a day for a ten-minute appointment with a caseworker who seems annoyed you showed up. You feel it when you go home to an apartment with cracked windows and cupboards full of cockroaches, and infestation the landlord blames on you.”
“Poverty is diminished life and personhood.
It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential. It shrinks the mental energy you can dedicate to decisions, forcing you to focus on the latest stressor – an overdue gas bill, a lost job, – at the expense of everything else. When someone is shot dead, the children who live on that block perform much worse on cognitive tests in the days following the murder. The violence captures their minds. Time passes, and the effect fades until someone else is dropped. Poverty can cause anyone to make decisions that look ill-advised and even down-right stupid to those of us unbothered by scarcity.”
“Still, poverty is no equalizer.
It can be intensified by racial disadvantages or easedd by racial privileges. Black poverty, Hispanic poverty, Native American poverty, Asian American poverty, and white poverty are all different. Black and Hispanic Americans are twice as likely to be poor, compared to white Americans owing not only to the country’s racial legacies, but also to present-day discrimination.”
“Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction – on and on it goes.
Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about – crime, health, education, housing – and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.”