It was a gift of a day. Wrapped in sunshine and high 70s, its contents waiting to be discovered and delighted in. Birdsong and tree buds and the occasional daffodil signaled something new on the horizon.
On Chicago’s South Side, inside the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, hundreds of students, faculty and other interested parties gathered to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond discuss his new book, “Poverty, by America.”
“I do think there’s a hunger for something different in America,” Desmond told the crowd.
Hope springs eternal. (Especially in April.)
Desmond was in conversation with MacArthur Fellow and University of Chicago associate professor Reuben Jonathan Miller, a scholar whose research examines race, justice and poverty. (Full disclosure: I am also employed by the University of Chicago.)
Early in their dialogue, Miller handed Desmond a dog-eared copy of “Poverty, by America” and asked him to read aloud a passage Miller had selected.
“Poverty is embarrassing, shame-inducing,” Desmond read. “You feel it in the degradation rituals of the welfare office, where you are made to wait half a day for a 10-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, an infestation the landlord blames on you. You feel it in how effortlessly poor people are omitted from movies and television shows and popular music and children’s books, erasures reminding you of your own irrelevance to wider society. You may believe, in the quieter moments, the lies told about you.
“You avoid public places — parks, beaches, shopping districts, sporting arenas — knowing they weren’t built for you.”
He asked Miller if he should keep going.
A little more, Miller nudged.
“Poverty might consume your life, but it’s rarely embraced as an identity. It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke. When politicians propose antipoverty legislation, they say it will help ‘the middle class.’ When social movement organizers mobilize for higher wages or housing justice, they announce that they are fighting on behalf of ‘working people’ or ‘families’ or ‘tenants’ or ‘the many.’
“When the poor take to the streets, it’s usually not under the banner of poverty,” Desmond continued. “There is no flag for poor rights, after all.”
Desmond grew up poor. His family lost their home when he was a child, and when he made it to graduate school, he immersed himself in research around the housing crisis. He moved to a mobile home park in Milwaukee, then a rooming house.
“In the years since,” he writes, “I have met poor Americans around the country striving for dignity and justice — or just plain survival, which can be hard enough.”
The United States is the richest country on Earth, but almost 1 in 9 Americans live in poverty — a higher rate than any other advanced democracy, he writes. More than 1 million public school children are homeless.
“Poverty, by America” asks why.
“We’ll often hear, ‘In a world of scarce resources, what do we do with those resources?’” he told the crowd. “But we’re not in a world of scarce resources.”
His book examines how our tax policies, the mortgage industry, worker exploitation, predatory lending, declines in union membership and other factors exacerbate — and benefit from — poverty.
“Are we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky — connected to all this needless suffering?” he writes. “This book is my attempt to answer that question. Which makes this a book about poverty that is not just about the poor. Instead, it’s a book about how the other half lives, and how some lives are made small so that others may grow.”
It’s also an invitation to conjure our better angels. To care enough to interrogate the easy narratives about poverty, to devote a slice of our hearts and a pocket of our minds to understanding how it got this way and, importantly, how we fix it.
It’s possible, Desmond argues. Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty cut the poverty rate in half within a decade.
“We used to have real ambitions to abolish poverty in this country, and we lost that moral urgency,” he said to his audience. “And I’d like to ask us to rekindle that.”
He urged the audience to visit endpovertyusa.org, a site that provides state-by-state facts about poverty, as well as how to get involved in abolishing it.
And the final chapter of his book is devoted to potential solutions: Congress could compel the IRS to crack down on tax avoidance by multinational corporations and wealthy families. The corporate tax rate, the lowest it's been in 80 years, could be bumped up. We could all urge our representatives to support deep antipoverty investments.
The book ends with a wallop, and if you don’t want the ending spoiled, stop reading here. But it also reads to me like a beginning — maybe the start of that something different in America Desmond referenced during his talk.
“The end of poverty is something to stand for, to march for, to sacrifice for,” he writes. “Because poverty is a dream killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential. It is a misery and a national disgrace, one that belies any claim to our greatness. The citizens of the richest nation in the world can and should finally put an end to it.
“We don’t need to outsmart this problem,” he concludes. “We need to outhate it.”
