Tag Archives: poor

The “Invisible” Poor & The Middle Class Mythology

19 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, race, Work, Youth

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Transparent (or invisible) Woman (cropped), July 19, 2012. (http://cgtrader.com).

This past weekend, I found myself drawn into the discussion of the middle class and middle class aspirations on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes (otherwise known as “Uppers”). It was a good and yet wholly unsatisfying discussion of technical definitions of what middle class is and of the political optics of only discussing the middle class as a socioeconomic category. Chris Hayes and his guests justified this with an all-too-common refrain. “If you’re poor, you’re aspiring to be middle class,” Hayes said on Saturday. With that, Hayes and his guests rendered America’s poor invisible, and failed to see beyond the politics of invisibility in the process.

There are two issues here, and many layers within them, about America’s poor, working, on welfare, or otherwise. One issue is that journalists, commentators, political operatives and most politicians treat the poor as if they are an unknowable group of people. It’s as if they all think the same way, as if there are all Black or of color, and a complete drag on the American economy and the federal budget. And that’s on a day in which the media and politics deem America’s poor as discussable. Most of the time, America’s poor are invisible, shoved into the middle class category by commentators and politicians at every turn.

Yes, America’s middle class is struggling too, fighting tooth and nail to not slip into the class of the invisible working poor, treading water to avoid food banks and food stamps. But they have something to struggle with — and for — at least. Their homes, their cars, a retirement account, their families’ net worth, all accoutrements of being middle class in America. America’s poor don’t possess anything to struggle with or for.

Chris Hayes on a train in Switzerland, November 10, 2008. (Matthew Yglesias via Wikimedia Commons/Flickr.com). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Except, maybe, with their vote, if they care to vote at all. Yet no mainstream commentator nor presidential candidate has truly spoken to their needs, their plight, to how their situation is completely interconnected with the struggles of the American middle class, not their aspirations. Not Chris Hayes, nor his weekend compadre, Melissa Harris-Perry, not President Barack Obama, and definitely not the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

It’s a story I’m all too familiar with, as someone who grew up in poverty in Mount Vernon, New York. Not to mention as someone who had to go to college and graduate school and then struggled for two years at part-time work before finding a job with a Ph.D. in ’99 (see my “The Five Senses of Poverty” post from July ’10). I was thirty years old by the time I earned a middle class income. Yet in all of that time, the only mainstream politician who spent time on the issues of the American poor as if these were real people was President Jimmy Carter, and we know what happened with him. Outside of my degrees and my publications, I was invisible until the fall of ’99.

Otherwise, it’s been four decades of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton concerned with “welfare queens,” “pink Cadillacs,” and “mend it, don’t end it” welfare policies, and the media following suit. It’s like being kicked hard by someone as one is laying on the ground with broken ribs and internal hemorrhaging, as if they want to poor to die, painfully.

But it’s not just the ones with microphones and word processing programs that kill America’s poor by rendering them invisible. Despite the general notion that the media and politicians nurture — that everyone not rich aspires to be firmly entrenched in the middle class — most Americans middle class and poor aspire to be rich, wealthy, well-off.

Creflo Dollar, pastor, World Changers Church International, November 1, 2010. (Zwicky Institut via Flickr.com). In public domain.

This is the other neglected issue, whether inadvertent like with Chris Hayes and his guests on Uppers, or deliberate on the part of President Obama and Romney. Why so? Because they don’t acknowledge that it’s hard to be truly middle class in America these days. To be in the middle class, one must borrow, borrow, borrow, beg and sometimes steal while struggling to pay student loans, car notes, a mortgage and child care costs.

This wasn’t the case even thirty years ago, before the severe double-dip recession, high interest rates and inflation and Reagan Revolution took full hold. Then, a high school diploma and raw initiative was all most folks needed to find a job at a GM plant or to get an administrative job in government or with a large corporation (although, typing at 90 words per minute enhanced a woman’s chances, at least). Now, two years of college or postsecondary technical training, some experience in a specialized field, and a personal connection is the floor for a living wage — not exactly middle class. Of course, no one wants to be in the basement with nearly one in five Americans, 50 million in all, working just to be poor.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

America’s poor and fledgling middle class both aspire to be rich (or die tryin’), and not just middle class. The rise of fundamentalist Christianity, mega-churches and the cult of prosperity as these pastors reimagine the New Testament. The endless lines for Powerball and Mega Millions whenever the pot is more than $100 million. The fascination with reality shows about the well-off or about competing to be well-off. All of this is the manifestation of the warping of the American Dream since the early 1970s, where the pursuit of riches has led to debt slavery for millions.

The old American Dream has become myth, and the old American middle class is but the story of Camelot, Timbuktu and Shangri-La. In our new world, “the poor will be with us always” has been made a plain and unyielding truth by those in power, reinforced by those with a media platform.

The Five Senses of Poverty

20 Tuesday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings

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Abandoned Building, November 2006

Being poor isn’t just a relative thing or simply a state of material lack. It can be measured by far more than the amount of money in someone’s savings account or by the gut-wrenching feeling at the bottom of one’s stomach when it’s time to choose between the telephone bill and the electric bill. Beyond the material and the emotional, the relative state between a lack of money and a lack of a spiritual center isn’t completely measurable. But, poverty, in its most general, community, and familial sense, can be experienced through all five of our physical senses.

1. Smell — This is perhaps the most powerful sense of poverty for any of us. Stairwell in project high-rises full of garbage. The tell-tale scent of overused cooking grease in an apartment or other impoverished living space. The odor of rotting animal flesh, of expelled farts, of roach spray and borax and cheap pine oil. The smell of clothes that have been exposed to all of these smells. Or,

better still, a smell of lingering cooking oil from frying chicken the night before, combined with the body odor and sweat of numerous people, combined with basura and excrement. Not to mention the release of flatulence and the drawing in of exhaust fumes from the outside world by fans running on high because of the lack of air conditioning.  There isn’t enough Febreeze in the world to cover up the smell of poverty.

2. Sight — We can all be fooled by what we see with our own eyes. At least by all but the poorest of the poor in the world and in the US. But children and their faces tell the truth of their lot in life more than any pair of Jordans or dress clothes can hide. The tired, almost dead looks of children, whether in the Bronx or in Burkina Faso. Their eyes detail a sense of hopelessness, a momentary glance that gives away their suspicion that there is no future for which they should be ready for. Of course, there are more commonplace signs around us. Homeless folk in their old, wrinkled, tattered, oily, soiled clothes, with aluminum cans and liter soda bottles in beat-up shopping carts. Women and children looking a bit older than the few years they’ve spent in this world. Unkempt hair, chipped and worn fingernails, dirty faces in public places, can all be signs. But the eyes are the key window into someone else’s poverty.

3. Hearing — The sound of poverty is deafening. It cannot be hidden by clothes, nor covered up by an aerosol can. Take any urban community in which poverty has taken a firm grip. The sounds of living have been disrupted. Adults are out and about, conversing and cursing, foaming and fighting in the middle of the day, the time in which they should be hard at work, in an office or factory or somewhere else. The cries of children out with their mothers at all hours of the night. The constant beeping of cars, the sirens of ambulances and police cars, the screams of mothers, fathers and siblings at hours well past club-closing times. Poverty disables the need for a schedule, the need for a bedtime and a wake-up time, for a rhythm that requires sleep and renewal.

4. Taste & Touch — Though underappreciated, these senses can also be used to deduce poverty, or at least, the lack of things. Taste and smell go together, so many of the smells of poverty find their way to the taste buds on our tongues. The taste of bile, of acid reflux, even of blood usually come with the violent smells of being in an impoverished environment. The rough touch of clothes unwashed, or at least, washed in hard water and without fabric softener, is another indication.

But there’s also the lack of variety that’s typical of being poor that are told to us by taste and touch. Eating almost nothing but processed foods, fast food, or aid food, and the tongue becomes as a dull knife, unable to appreciate the subtle differences between onion and garlic, or the more distinctive flavors of paprika, nutmeg or cinnamon. Wearing nothing but hand-me-downs or hip-hop gear makes one’s sense of touch as rough as a jagged boulder, as unfeeling as stainless steel. Even a close hug in this kind of environment can be jolting and disconcerting.

Through our five senses, it becomes easier to understand why fighting our way out of poverty is so difficult, why being poor can disable and debilitate so many. That so many don’t have to breathe, taste, hear or touch it is the very reason why so many of us don’t understand it.