Weekly Shares (4/30/23) - Review of Poverty, By America
I finished reading Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America this week and it is definitely a must-read. This is Desmond’s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 2016, Evicted.
The prologue to the book begins with “Why is there so much poverty in America? I wrote this book because I needed to answer that question.”
Desmond’s combination of storytelling along with the utilization of data shows a clear picture of the systemic issues that have created the conditions where growing numbers of Americans face poverty. He also highlights the narratives that we sustain that blame those entrenched in poverty for their plight instead of looking more closely at the systems that continue to prey upon them.
In addition to clearly showing the systems that have disproportionality impacted BIPOC citizens and immigrants, Desmond provides some pathways that could begin to change outcomes. I will be going back through these chapters again and again to review the research that clarifies how we sustain poverty and more importantly, how we can create a more equitable future for all.
Below are the chapter titles with an excerpt from each.
The Kind Of Problem Poverty Is
“There is no metropolitan area in the United States where whites experience extreme concentrations of disadvantage, living in neighborhoods with poverty rates in excess of 40 percent. But across the nation, many poor Black and Hispanic families live under these conditions.”
Why We Haven’t Made More Progress
“In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.”
How We Undercut Workers
“When poor workers receive a raise, their health care improves dramatically. Studies have found that when minimum wages go up, rates of child neglect, underage alcohol consumption, and teen births go down.”
How We Force The Poor To Pay More
“Racism and exploitation feed on one another…during the Great Migration which stretched from 1915 to 1970...The districts where Black families could live were written into the law and enforced by the police. Ghetto landlords had a captive tenant base, and because they could charge more, they did. For much of the migration, Blacks often paid double for what white tenants had previously been charged for the worst housing in the city…If millions of poor renters accept exploitative housing conditions, it’s not because they can’t afford better alternatives; it’s because they aren’t offered any.”
How We Rely On Welfare
“Most of us believe that working hard helps us get ahead - because of course it does - but most of us also recognize that advantages flow from being white or having highly educated parents or knowing the right people. We sense that our bootstraps can be pulled up only so far, that self-platitudes about grit and self-control and putting in the hours is fine advice for our children, but it’s no substitute for a theory of how the world works. For as long as there has been poverty alongside great wealth, the winners have cultivated rationalizations for that arrangement.”
How We Buy Opportunity
“We went from banning certain kinds of people from our communities to banning the kinds of housing in which people lived - namely, apartment buildings designed for multiple families - achieving the same ends.”
Invest in Ending Poverty
“We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday loan outlets that issue exorbitant fines and fees. If we fail to address the many forms of exploitation at the bottom of the market, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another fifty years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty. We need to empower the poor.”
Other things I am reading/watching/listening to:
New Report: 28% Rise in School Book Bans Over First Half of 2022-23 School Year - PEN America
The numbers are a bit eye-popping as the report highlights the following:
1,477 individual book bans affecting 874 unique titles have been put in place during the first half of the 2022-23 school year.
nearly a third of the book bans this school year were the direct result of newly-enacted state laws in Florida, Utah, and Missouri.
Also, whose stories are being erased from libraries?
Of the 1,477 books banned this school year, 30 percent are about race, racism, or include characters of color, while 26 percent have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
the most frequently banned books so far this school year are Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (banned in 15 districts), Flamer by Mike Curato (banned in 15 districts), Tricks by Ellen Hopkins (banned in 13 districts), and The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault (banned in 12 districts)…
…More on this here - PEN America Urges Tennessee Gov. Lee to Reject Legislation that Would Subject Publishers and Book Distributors to Criminal Penalties for ‘Obscene Materials’ Sent to Public School
Florida bans teaching about gender identity in all public schools - The Washington Post - New legislation in Florida states that teachers in grades four through 12 “shall not provide classroom instruction … on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
More from the article on what this means for teachers and students in Florida:
“During public comment before the vote, Joe Saunders, senior political director for Equality Florida, asked the board whether its members believed it would be wrong to teach students in an 11th-grade civics course about the landmark Supreme Court ruling that granted the right to marry to same-sex couples. “Under the vague new rules, a teacher who taught this would be fired and their career would end,” Saunders said. “This rule is by design a tool for curating fear, anxiety and the erasure of our LGBTQ community.”
Why Is Going to the Wrong Place a Deadly Risk in America? - Opinion piece from The New York Times -
“Because of our complacency, the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States is now gun violence, eclipsing vehicle crashes. In 2020, more than 4,300 young people died in America from firearms; the figure in the Netherlands for 2019 was two. At this rate, it will take a couple of millenniums for the Netherlands to lose as many kids to guns as we do annually.”
Summing up this article with one line from the author: “It is unsettling to discover how many white people have convinced themselves that Black people and other minorities now have more rights than they do.”
College Board Will Change Its AP African American Studies Course - The New York Times
I wrote a bit about this back in February when the College Board revised its AP African American Studies Course after getting pressure from the state of Florida. It’s hard to be optimistic about significant changes if the College Board continues to look at this as a balancing act where it can keep make everyone happy with the final product.
Below are some of the newsletters I subscribe to each week:
Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American
Sharon's Anti-Racism Newsletter
Weekly Shares 4/23/23
I started writing a weekly post back in October and last week (4/23/23) was the first week I haven’t posted something since then. It was April break for my youngest and we took the week to head to California for a couple of college visits and to a see a state and a couple of cities, San Diego and Los Angeles, she has not been to previously.