Hundreds are dead from that storm — the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — hundreds more are missing, and hundreds of thousands of residences are still without power or clean water. And in addition to the staggering human loss and physical damage, a hurricane of misinformation and division has continued to pummel the region.

There’s Elon Musk’s politicized deployment of Starlink satellite internet access, which he’s used to credit Donald Trump less than one month before the November election, while undermining the legitimacy of federal recovery efforts. Indeed, listen to Fox News or read Musk’s claims on his social media platform X, and there’s no mention of the pre-arrangements the federal government made with Starlink through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide internet access — for local governments and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump falsely claiming that the federal government’s response to Helene was delayed and insufficient because the funds that might have gone to hurricane victims are instead being used to house undocumented immigrants. (FEMA does spend some money on migrant housing, but through an entirely different program.) With this outrageous fearmongering, he’s fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate that are already raging during this election season. His racist and xenophobic rhetoric has also forced FEMA and the White House to spend precious time and energy trying to counter his lies, rather than focusing their full attention on saving lives and rebuilding broken communities.

And don’t forget Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who insisted that the government actually controls the weather. This ludicrous claim is taken from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (notorious for arguing that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax), who suggested that the government directed Helene towards North Carolina “to force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy.”

Such hateful lies and conspiracy theories (and there are more like them!) conveniently ignore the fact that conservative Republican lawmakers passed a funding bill that failed to allocate additional money to FEMA just days before Helene hit, even though the country was entering peak hurricane season in a time when the weather is growing ever more extreme. And it’s no surprise that these lawmakers are backed by billionaires who own some of the very companies most responsible for climate change. Through their scare tactics and anti-government misdirection, they have also provided rhetorical cover for the Christian nationalists and other extremists who were some of the first responders after the hurricane. The Southern Poverty Law Center confirms reports I’ve heard from local sources that “far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance — and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.”

Those Who Are Hit First and Worst

Hurricane Helene (like Hurricane Milton that followed it in a devastating fashion) should be a brutal reminder that none of us are truly safe from the worsening effects of the climate crisis. For years, local officials and real estate developers marketed Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven.” With its temperate weather and mountain vistas 300 miles from the ocean, many falsely believed the area would be shielded from storms like Helene. No such luck.

Meanwhile, the last few weeks have also served as a stark reminder that the climate devastation increasingly coming for all of us is experienced most intensely by poor and low-income communities. Just look at the (lack of) full-scale evacuation plans for Hurricane Milton in Florida and it’s clear that those who cannot afford a $2,400 flight or have access to a car and enough gas money to wait out the massive traffic jams of those fleeing such storms may just be out of luck.

In western North Carolina, as rising waters from Helene consumed entire communities, many had nowhere to evacuate. Poor people living in rural areas, often with pre-existing health conditions and without health insurance, skipped hospital visits in the chaotic days immediately after the storm. Thankfully, some hospitals opened up beds for patients whose homes were destroyed. But those who don’t have flood insurance — and the residents of the areas hit hardest by Helene were the least likely to have such insurance — and can’t afford to rebuild may soon find themselves joining the many others who have been displaced and made homeless by the storm.

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Truly, as the experiences of Hurricane Helene — and now Hurricane Milton, Nadine, and potentially others, too — have proven, the economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. In fact, it was Vance who called the study and analysis of climate change “weird science” during the vice-presidential debate. He has also praised the lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which proposes gutting FEMA, making it harder for states to get disaster relief, and blocking federal agencies from fighting climate change (not to mention 400 pages of other suggested cuts to this country’s social safety net).

And although they claim that the Harris-Walz ticket is looking after the interests and profits of the wealthy, it’s Vance and Trump who have regularly belittled the poor and cozied up to venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and others among the nation’s corporate elite. In fact, the decades-old abandonment of rural Appalachian communities destroyed by Helene has long been justified by the patronizing and classist “culture of poverty” arguments that Vance himself helped keep alive with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

Storms like Hurricane Helene are a force amplifier of deep societal inequities that will worsen if Trump and Vance are elected in November, but in truth the issue runs deeper than just one political party. Indeed, over the last few years, extreme weather events, pandemics, and other public emergencies have exposed a deep societal disease that has only grown worse after decades of neoliberal policies. Worsening poverty and widening economic inequality should be considered pre-existing conditions that are only magnified during moments of crisis. Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech, recently put it this way: “The tragic flood event in the southeast U.S. is a poignant example of the confluence of multiple factors, including development in floodplains, inadequate infrastructure maintenance and management, and the specter of climate change, whose compounding effect can amplify the disaster.”

From Mutual Aid to Community Power

In the face of so much loss and destruction, the heroism of impacted communities, which have joined together in extraordinary acts of solidarity, has been tragically underreported in mainstream media outlets. Much of the mutual aid and community support for those affected by the hurricane has come from community members themselves, who are working tirelessly to ensure that everyone in need is cared for. The streets of Asheville and neighboring towns have been filled with cars with out-of-state license plates, as everyday people with various skills have driven in from all over the country to lend a hand. On social media, it’s been heartening to see all of the love and support that has poured into these communities.

In Asheville, the stories of this local solidarity are many. There is the Asheville Tool Library, which, while officially closed, is supporting repair projects, including the fixing of generators and chainsaws. There are medics and doctors running free clinics. There are local breweries that are using their equipment to make sure desperate communities still have clean and safe water. There are young people passing out free gasoline to anyone who needs it and others who are writing out instructions in English and Spanish on how to make dry toilets.

These examples of grassroots leadership offer hope in hard times. After all, this is how bottom-up movements have so often begun throughout American history. In pre-Civil War America, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery and igniting a movement to end it. In the 1930s, the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions even before President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal. In the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, Black communities organized themselves to oppose lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence. And no one can deny the powerful example of the carpools and other community projects of the Montgomery, Alabama, freedom struggle during the 1950s.

Indeed, contrary to media narratives that often paint hard-pressed communities as dangerous and their members as only looking out for themselves, the truth is that people in crisis usually do whatever they can to provide for their communities and protect those around them. Dispossessed people care for one another, share what they have, and lend a hand through mutual-aid networks. Such survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate American communities that, through the experience of increasingly common mass crisis events, are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.

The Black Panthers’ Projects of Survival

Consider the free breakfast program organized by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. For many Americans, the enduring image of the Black Panther Party is of Black men in berets and leather jackets carrying guns. The self-defense tactics of the Panthers were an emphatic rebuttal to a society that regularly dehumanized and exacted violence on Black Americans. But in truth, most of their time was spent then meeting the needs of their communities and building a movement that could transform the lives of poor Black people. The Panthers bravely stepped into a void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for the poor. But their survival programs weren’t just aimed at meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used such programs to highlight the failures of government policymaking to deal with American poverty. By feeding tens of thousands of people, they also forged community-wide relationships and developed widespread trust among the poor, not just in Black communities but in poor white and Latino communities as well. The Panthers’ survival programs were always meant to be launchpads for a wider movement to end poverty and systemic racism.

Indeed, the Panthers consciously called out the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, while it spent billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (This paradox continues today, as the U.S. has been funding Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza, one of the poorest places on earth, and now its invasion of Lebanon). Their survival programs gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human rights movement, interweaving all of their community work with political education and highly visible protest.

At the time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Government officials feared that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In that context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.

Solidarity Among the Poor

The experience of the Black Panthers features prominently in the anti-poverty organizing tradition that I come from. In fact, the National Union of the Homeless and the National Welfare Rights Union, sibling poor people’s movements that I was part of in the 1990s, used to teach new organizers the “Six Panther Ps” of poor people’s organizing: 1) Program, 2) Protest, 3) Projects of survival, 4) Publicity work, 5) Political education, and 6) Plans, not personalities. When combined, these six principles form a model for the poor organizing the poor that has been responsible for creative nonviolent action that has called America to conscience and for anti-poverty 
policies that have impacted millions.

Much like recent beautiful acts of local solidarity in the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee and in low-income communities across Florida reeling from Hurricane Milton, the significance of the historic work of the Black Panther Party or of unhoused leaders and welfare-rights activists across the decades begins within poor communities themselves, where people are already engaging in life-saving actions. Out of such depths, grassroots leaders find new and creative ways to connect survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement focused on building and wielding political power. From such local struggles come the very policy solutions to a community’s (and even this country’s) varied problems. This is what it means to work bottom up, not top down!

In a world whose weather is growing grimmer by the year, such examples of mutual solidarity and mutual aid are perhaps the most concrete and material form of hope in these hard times. Such scrappy and life-giving action needs more than acknowledgment and appreciation. Those facing injustice, violence, and displacement need more than thoughts and prayers. Rather, to turn the tide on division and lies, as well as deeper impoverishment and pain, heroic and creative community-building — or what I like to call “lifting from the bottom so that everyone can rise” — must be spread, scaled up, and significantly supported by the larger society. Our politicians, news agencies, and larger population must stop paying homage to billionaires who will profit off our predicaments or politicians who will try to capitalize on any crisis. It’s time to see that projects of survival and solidarity among those struggling the most are our only true hope for a future that will otherwise be ever more perilous.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

Officially, France operates under the rule of a colorblind identity, There are no Black, white, or brown French, just a French citizen. However, the shooting of Nahel has reignited a debate over systematic racism that many French politicians refuse to acknowledge exists. Yet, in reality, the problem runs deeper in the country and is more complicated.

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Protesters hold placards reading “Justice for Adama, Nahel, Alhoussein and all the others” (R) and “Free our comrades” as they attend a demonstration against “State racism” in front of the court of Nanterre, western Paris, on July 10, 2023, following the shooting of a teenage driver by French police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on June 27. More than 3,700 people were taken into police custody in connection with the protests since Nahel’s death, including at least 1,160 minors, according to official figures. (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP) (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP via Getty Images)

While many police officers reject the idea that minority groups are being discriminated against because of their skin color, a lot of incidents throughout the years prove otherwise. Solely in 2023, Nahel’s death has been the third police fatal shooting at a traffic stop. In most of the shootings throughout the years, the victims had been either black or of North African origin.  Furthermore, in 2021, Amnesty International along with other rights groups filed a lawsuit against the French state accusing it of police profiling on a racial basis.  

Another point that hints at police racism could be seen from the last French election. In that election, more than half of the police officers in France admitted that they would be voting for Marine Le Pen. The far-right candidate whose campaign focused mainly on anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric.

Nonetheless, this issue is not merely a police issue, it goes deep into French society.

A recent survey by the French representative council of Black Associations discovered that most black people in France have suffered from racial discrimination at one point or another.

Perhaps a better indicator of these sentiments can be seen in the fundraiser started for the 38-year-old police officer Florian M, who shot and killed Nahel. This fundraiser which was started by Jean Messiha, a former spokesperson for the far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, had collected over €1m while a similar fundraiser for the family of the victim had amassed less than €200,000.

These sentiments attributed to French society have also, in more than one instance, been encouraged by French media. In more than one example, the French media frequently relied heavily on police sources without verifying them, but have also vilified and criminalized Nahel, as an individual who deserved to be shot dead, rather than a victim of police brutality.

So this issue is not only a police problem but it also has strings all over the French population. But one cannot turn a blind eye to this problem within the French politics itself.  

As we just mentioned earlier,  In the last France election, A rhetoric spread by the right-wing candidate Le Pen showcases the existence of these racist sentiments within French politics. However, these sentiments are not something new. Since the start of immigration waves toward France, it has been the strategy of French governments to designate specific suburbs away from city centers to host immigrant communities. In theory, to provide support for these communities, but in practice, it left these communities isolated and in dire need of opportunities.

That in itself explains how the recent riots are not something new for the French capital as it echoes the same tragedy of the 2005 riots. It was a riot instigated by the accidental electrocution and death of two teenagers who were hiding from police.

Many individuals believe that both the 2005 and 2023 riots have these deeply-seated concerns from these communities as a catalyst for the riots. Concerning the 2005 riots, Eric Favreau, a French social commentator, claimed that people living in these communities don’t seek violence “The inhabitants don’t want it. The Muslims don’t want it. Even the drug dealers don’t want it. But the problems in these suburbs have been left to stagnate for 30 years, and somehow they’re right. The more they burn cars, the more we pay attention to them (NPR) “.

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PARIS, FRANCE – JULY 8:Despite the ban on the annual march in tribute to Adama Traore, several hundred people gathered at Place de la Republique against police violence and the current climate of repression, at the call of Assa Traore, the Truth and Justice for Adama committee and NUPES-LFI deputies, in Paris on July 8, 2023,France. The memorial commemorated Adama Traoré, a black French man who died in custody in 2016 after he was arrested and restrained by police. The memorial comes the week after the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, who was killed by police in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, an incident which sparked protests across the country. (Photo by Antoine Gyori – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Similarly, Amine Kessaci, the brother of another victim of a police shooting, in an interview for BBC denounced the violence but argued that “There are no other options. There are no companies coming here and saying we’ll pay you more than minimum wage… here people are supermarket cashiers or cleaners or security guards. We can’t be judges, lawyers or accountants.” (BBC).

While the issue of systemic racism in France is not something new or something that can easily be sorted out, the way the French government has been dealing with it will only deepen the issue. Ignoring this issue will not make it go away. When France was called out by the UN for the shooting of Nahel, the French Foreign Ministry blatantly claimed “Any accusation of racism or systemic discrimination in the police force in France is totally unfounded (LeMonde)”.

Also, the way that Macron and the French government have been dealing with the riots depicts a misunderstanding of the roots of the issue. Macron tried to paint the recent riots as an issue of moral crumbling and youth rebellion on one hand and even showcased some signs of authoritarianism by threatening to cut off social media to stop street violence.

All in all, the steps taken by the French government at the moment seem to mostly deflect the rooted issues that not only caused this riot but also the 2005 riots. A self-reflection by the government and the French people is quite necessary before even thinking about starting a conversation about Racism within the colorblind country.

““Do we think this has to do with the fact that there’s record unemployment in the United States right now? The fact that people are at a level of economic desperation that we have not seen since the Great Recession? Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent, and so they go out, and they need to feed their child, and they don’t have money so … they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry.”

The correlation between poverty and infant mortality on the one hand, and high rates of crime on the other, is well established in the sociological literature (e.g. Paul‐Philippe Pare and Richard Felson, “Income inequality, poverty and crime across nations,” The British Journal of Sociology Volume 65, Issue 3 [2014]).

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s remark, which seems to me just common sense (though a multivariate analysis of 64 countries supports it scientifically), drove Rep. Theodore Yoho (R-Fl.) into an absolute rage. He accosted Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the capitol, telling her that she is “disgusting” and “out of her freaking mind”. She says she told him he was being rude, and alleged that he responded, “I am being rude?” Then he walked off arm in arm with Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), and said within earshot of a reporter, “Fucking bitch!”

Rep. Williams has a rare and little understood hearing disability that prevented him from hearing the exchange, since he was, he said, concentrating at that moment on the needs of his constituents.

Yoho has a doctorate in veterinary science and practiced as a veterinarian before becoming a politician. I guess he did not treat his female dog patients very well.

Yoho came into Congress as a Tea Partier, as part of the astroturfed wave paid for by the billionaire Kochs and the DeVoss’s aimed at hobbling President Obama from any economic and social justice legislation, in which they succeeded. He voted against debt relief for Puerto Rico, says carrying a gun is a God-given right, and opposes a woman’s right to choose. I think we are beginning to get the picture here.

In his “I’m sorry you’re fat” non-apology, Yoho claimed to have a wife and two daughters, and said he was so outraged because he came from poverty, implying that crime is purely a matter of morals and as a formerly poor person he found it insulting for someone to demean his own achievements in climbing out of poverty by his sheer ethical will.

Often white people who tell themselves rags to riches stories about themselves vastly exaggerate their disadvantages and fail to appreciate the systemic disabilities racism lays on minorities. Yoho clearly has an architectonic complex about his success in life, such that if he recognized the advantages he had (including his race and gender), it would destroy his self-image as a boot-strapper and endanger the wholeness of his personality. At the same time, he clearly uses his masculinity and white privilege in an attempt to impose his views on and marginalize uppity women and persons of color who challenge his self-satisfied narrative.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez says that it was not the original encounter with Yoho on the steps of the Capitol that determined her to speak out, but his invocation of his wife and daughters. He seemed to feel just having female relatives made him a swell guy.

She spent 10 minutes pointing out that Yoho in his obscene remarks had authorized other men to treat his daughters (who are older than AOC) as he had treated her. She reminded him that she is also someone’s daughter, and that her mother had had to endure hearing about his abuse of her. She said she had, as a bartender, directed that men be thrown out of the establishment for behaving as he had. She recalled Trump having told her to go back to her country. She was born in the Bronx, as was her father, who was of Puerto Rican heritage; her mother was born in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are American citizens.

Although AOC had worked in the service industry, she holds a BA. As an undergraduate, Wikipedia tells us, she “came in second in the Microbiology category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a microbiology research project on the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of the nematode C. elegans.” She interned for Sen. Ted Kennedy. She graduated from Boston University cum laude with a degree in International Relations and a minor in economics.

So she actually is much better placed than Yoho to come to conclusions about matters such as the relationship of poverty to crime rates. Yoho’s narrow doctorate and his own ideological blinkers are no match for her.

Jeremy Stahl at Slate transcribes a key passage of the speech.

“Dehumanizing language is not new, and what we are seeing is that incidents like these are happening in a pattern. This is a pattern of an attitude towards women and dehumanization of others. So while I was not deeply hurt or offended by little comments that are made—when I was reflecting on this, I honestly thought that I was just going to pack it up and go home. It’s just another day, right? But then yesterday Rep. Yoho decided to come to the floor of the House of Representatives and make excuses for his behavior, and that I could not let go. I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse and worse to see that, to see that excuse and to see our Congress accept it as legitimate, and to accept it as an apology, and to accept silence as a form of acceptance. I could not allow that to stand, which is why I’m rising today to raise this point of personal privilege. And I do not need Rep. Yoho to apologize to me. Clearly, he does not want to. Clearly, when given the opportunity, he will not. And I will not stay up late at night waiting for an apology from a man who has no remorse over calling women and using abusive language towards women. But what I do have issue with is using women, “our wives and daughters,” as shields and excuses for poor behavior. Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television. And I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men. Now, what I am here to say is that this harm that Mr. Yoho levied, tried to levy against me, was not just an incident directed at me. But when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters. In using that language in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community, and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable.”

As Ahmaud Arbery fell to the ground, the sound of the gunshot that took his life echoed loudly throughout his Georgia neighborhood.

I rewound the video of his killing. Each time I viewed it, I was drawn first to the young black jogger’s seemingly carefree stride, which was halted by two white men in a white pickup truck.

Then I peered at Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Trevor, 34, who confronted Arbery in their suburban community.

I knew that the McMichaels told authorities that they suspected Arbery of robbing a nearby home in the neighborhood. They were performing a citizen’s arrest, they said.

The video shows Arbery jogging down the street and the McMichaels blocking his path with their vehicle. First, a scuffle. Then, gunshots at point-blank range from Travis McMichael’s weapon.

My eyes traveled to the towering trees onscreen, which might have been the last things that Arbery saw. How many of those same trees, I wondered, had witnessed similar lynchings? And how many of those lynchings had been photographed, to offer a final blow of humiliation to the dying?

A series of modern lynchings

It may be jarring to see that word – lynching – used to describe Arbery’s Feb. 23, 2020, killing. But many black people have shared with me that his death – followed in rapid succession by Breonna Taylor’s and now George Floyd’s officer-involved murders – hearkens back to a long tradition of killing black people without repercussion.

Perhaps even more traumatizing is the ease with which some of these deaths can be viewed online. In my new book, “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism,” I call for Americans to stop viewing footage of black people dying so casually.

Instead, cellphone videos of vigilante violence and fatal police encounters should be viewed like lynching photographs – with solemn reserve and careful circulation. To understand this shift in viewing context, I believe it is useful to explore how people became so comfortable viewing black people’s dying moments in the first place.

Images of black people’s deaths pervasive

Every major era of domestic terror against African Americans – slavery, lynching and police brutality – has an accompanying iconic photograph.

The most familiar image of slavery is the 1863 picture of “Whipped Peter,” whose back bears an intricate cross-section of scars.

Famous images of lynchings include the 1930 photograph of the mob who murdered Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. A wild-eyed white man appears at the bottom of the frame, pointing upward to the black men’s hanged bodies. The image inspired Abel Meeropol to write the poem “Strange Fruit,” which was later turned into a song that blues singer Billie Holiday sang around the world.

Twenty-five years later, the 1955 photos of Emmett Till’s maimed body became a new generation’s cultural touchstone. The 14-year-old black boy was beaten, shot and thrown into a local river by white men after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. She later admitted that she lied.

Throughout the 1900s, and until today, police brutality against black people has been immortalized by the media too. Americans have watched government officials open firehoses on young civil rights protesters, unleash German shepherds and wield billy clubs against peaceful marchers, and shoot and tase today’s black men, women and children – first on the televised evening news, and, eventually, on cellphones that could distribute the footage online.

When I conducted the interviews for my book, many black people told me that they carry this historical reel of violence against their ancestors in their heads. That’s why, for them, watching modern versions of these hate crimes is too painful to bear.

Still, there are other groups of black people who believe that the videos do serve a purpose, to educate the masses about race relations in the U.S. I believe these tragic videos can serve both purposes, but it will take effort.

Reviving the ‘shadow archive’

In the early 1900s, when the news of a lynching was fresh, some of the nation’s first civil rights organizations circulated any available images of the lynching widely, to raise awareness of the atrocity. They did this by publishing the images in black magazines and newspapers.

After that image reached peak circulation, it was typically removed from public view and placed into a “shadow archive,” within a newsroom, library or museum. Reducing the circulation of the image was intended to make the public’s gaze more somber and respectful.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, known popularly as the NAACP, often used this technique. In 1916, for example, the group published a horrific photograph of Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old boy who was hanged and burned in Waco, Texas, in its flagship magazine, “The Crisis.”

Memberships in the civil rights organization skyrocketed as a result. Blacks and whites wanted to know how to help. The NAACP used the money to push for anti-lynching legislation. It purchased a series of costly full-page ads in The New York Times to lobby leading politicians.

Though the NAACP endures today, neither its website nor its Instagram page bears casual images of lynching victims. Even when the organization issued a statement about the Arbery killing, it refrained from reposting the chilling video within its missive. That restraint shows a degree of respect that not all news outlets and social media users have used.

A curious double standard

Critics of the shadow archive may argue that once a photograph reaches the internet, it is very difficult to pull back from future news reports.

This is, however, simply not true.

Images of white people’s deaths are removed from news coverage all the time.

It is difficult to find online, for example, imagery from any of the numerous mass shootings that have affected scores of white victims. Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012, or at the Las Vegas music festival of 2017, are most often remembered in endearing portraits instead.

In my view, cellphone videos of black people being killed should be given this same consideration. Just as past generations of activists used these images briefly – and only in the context of social justice efforts – so, too, should today’s imagery retreat from view quickly.

The suspects in Arbery’s killing have been arrested. The Minneapolis police officers involved in Floyd’s death have been fired and placed under investigation. The videos of their deaths have served the purpose of attracting public outrage.

To me, airing the tragic footage on TV, in auto-play videos on websites and social media is no longer serving its social justice purpose, and is now simply exploitative.

Likening the fatal footage of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd to lynching photographs invites us to treat them more thoughtfully. We can respect these images. We can handle them with care. In the quiet, final frames, we can share their last moments with them, if we choose to. We do not let them die alone. We do not let them disappear into the hush of knowing trees.

[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]

Allissa V. Richardson, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

NowThisNews: “Man Who Recorded Ahmaud Arbery Killing Arrested | NowThis”

In some ways, this horrible pandemic has brought out the best in humanity.

Where I live, neighbors are helping neighbors. A friend who cleans houses for a living says about half of her clients are no longer having their homes cleaned, but they are still paying her. I hate what’s happening right now, but I love that so many of us are helping each other.

And then there’s the Trump administration, which appears to be taking things the other way.

Before the pandemic, Trump wanted to cut people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — also known as SNAP, or food stamps. And during the pandemic, he still does.

In case you hadn’t noticed, 100,000 Americans are dead. More than 36 million lost their jobs. I’m spending an extra year in school because employers have hiring freezes, and I’m afraid that when I graduate with more than $100,000 in student loan debt, it won’t be much better.

People who argue against the social safety net complain about free riders. If everyone could just get freebies from the government, why would they work?

Having been on food stamps myself, that’s nonsense. As a single person, I’d have to make less than $1,276 per month in order to qualify. That’s an income of $15,312 per year. When I qualified, about seven years ago, I got $70 per month in benefits.

No rational person would choose to earn less than $15,312 a year to get $70 of free food each month. Nobody. You do the math.

Right now, especially, we are in an extraordinary time. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and millions more have to risk their health in order to work because they can’t afford not to.

Families still need to pay rent, pay mortgages and other loans, buy food, and so on. The choices the government makes now will not just affect who lives and who dies. They will also affect how quickly we are able to recover.

Trump has talked about prioritizing the economy from the beginning. The economy is made up of people. Our economy is the aggregate of all of us working, earning money, and paying for what we need to live. When consumers and businesses falter, it’s up to the government to do what’s needed to keep the economy from going off the rails.

Put another way: now is not the time to cut food stamps.

Helping out people at the bottom is good for two reasons: first, because they need help the most. And second, because they will spend the money they receive and put it right back into the economy.

Every five dollars spent on food stamps generates $9 in economic activity. When families buy food at grocery stores, their money is distributed throughout the entire supply chain — to farmers, processors, distributors, truckers, warehouses, marketers, and the grocery store itself.

Food stamps are not just a matter of compassion, though compassion is more important than ever right now. They’re also smart economic policy.

It’s not that the government is not spending. They’ve given massive handouts to large corporations and wealthy individuals. Why do we have enough money to give handouts to billionaires but we can’t help hungry people eat?

Via Otherwords.org

Featured Photo: Shutterstock.

(Tomdispatch.com ) – The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? After all, it has the world’s 10th highest per capita income at $62,795 and an unrivalled gross domestic product (GDP) of $21.3 trillion. Despite that, in 2020, an estimated 11.9 million American kids — 16.2% of the total — live below the official poverty line, which is a paltry $25,701 for a family of four with two kids. Put another way, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent — so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.

Yes, the proportion of kids living below the poverty line has zigzagged down from 22% when the country was being ravaged by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and was even higher in prior decades, but no one should crack open the champagne bottles just yet. The relevant standard ought to be how the United States compares to other wealthy countries. The answer: badly. It has the 11th highest child poverty rate of the 42 industrialized countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Winnow that list down to European Union states and Canada, omitting low and middle-income countries, and our child poverty rate ranks above only Spain’s. Use the poverty threshold of the OECD — 50% of a country’s median income ($63,178 for the United States) — and the American child poverty rate leaps to 20%.

The United States certainly doesn’t lack the means to drive child poverty down or perhaps even eliminate it. Many countries on that shorter OECD list have lower per-capita incomes and substantially smaller GDPs yet (as a UNICEF report makes clear) have done far better by their kids. Our high child-poverty rate stems from politics, not economics — government policies that, since the 1980s, have reduced public investment as a proportion of GDP in infrastructure, public education, and poverty reduction. These were, of course, the same years when a belief that “big government” was an obstacle to advancement took ever-deeper hold, especially in the Republican Party. Today, Washington allocates only 9% of its federal budget to children, poor or not. That compares to a third for Americans over 65, up from 22% in 1971. If you want a single fact that sums up where we are now, inflation-adjusted per-capita spending on kids living in the poorest families has barely budged compared to 30 years ago whereas the corresponding figure for the elderly has doubled.

The conservative response to all this remains predictable: you can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the actual successes of American social programs prove this claim to be flat-out false. Before getting to that, however, let’s take a snapshot of child poverty in America.

Sizing Up the Problem

Defining poverty may sound straightforward, but it’s not. The government’s annual Official Poverty Measure (OPM), developed in the 1960s, establishes poverty lines by taking into account family size, multiplying the 1963 cost for a minimum food budget by three while factoring in changes in the Consumer Price Index, and comparing the result to family income. In 2018, a family with a single adult and one child was considered poor with an income below $17,308 ($20,2012 for two adults and one child, $25,465 for two adults and two children, and so on). According to the OPM, 11.8% of all Americans were poor that year.

By contrast, the Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM), published yearly since 2011, builds on the OPM but provides a more nuanced calculus. It counts the post-tax income of families, but also cash flows from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), both of which help low-income households. It adds in government-provided assistance through, say, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), Medicaid, subsidies for housing and utilities, and unemployment and disability insurance. However, it deducts costs like child care, child-support payments, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. According to the SPM, the 2018 national poverty rate was 12.8%.

Of course, neither of these poverty calculations can tell us how children are actually faring. Put simply, they’re faring worse. In 2018, 16.2% of Americans under 18 lived in families with incomes below the SPM line. And that’s not the worst of it. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study commissioned by Congress found that 9% of poor children belong to families in “deep poverty” (incomes that are less than 50% of the SPM). But 36% of all American children live in poor or “near poor” families, those with incomes within 150% of the poverty line.

Child poverty also varies by race — a lot. The rate for black children is 17.8%; for Hispanic kids, 21.7%; for their white counterparts, 7.9%. Worse, more than half of all black and Hispanic kids live in “near poor” families compared to less than a quarter of white children. Combine age and race and you’ll see another difference, especially for children under five, a population with an overall 2017 poverty rate of 19.2%. Break those under-fives down by race, however, and here’s what you find: white kids at 15.9%, Hispanic kids at an eye-opening 25.8%, and their black peers at a staggering 32.9%.

Location matters, too. The child poverty rate shifts by state and the differences are stark. North Dakota and Utah are at 9%, for instance, while New Mexico and Mississippi are at 27% and 28%. Nineteen states have rates of 20% or more. Check out a color-coded map of geographic variations in child poverty and you’ll see that rates in the South, Southwest, and parts of the Midwest are above the national average, while rural areas tend to have higher proportions of poor families than cities. According to the Department of Agriculture, in rural America, 22% of all children and 26% of those under five were poor in 2017.

Why Child Poverty Matters

Imagine, for a moment, this scenario: a 200-meter footrace in which the starting blocks of some competitors are placed 75 meters behind the others. Barring an Olympic-caliber runner, those who started way in front will naturally win. Now, think of that as an analogy for the predicament that American kids born in poverty face through no fault of their own. They may be smart and diligent, their parents may do their best to care for them, but they begin life with a huge handicap.

As a start, the nutrition of poor children will generally be inferior to that of other kids. No surprise there, but here’s what’s not common knowledge: a childhood nutritional deficit matters for years afterwards, possibly for life. Scientific research shows that, by age three, the quality of childrens’ diets is already shaping the development of critical parts of young brains like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in ways that matter. That’s worth keeping in mind because four million American kids under age six were poor in 2018, as were close to half of those in families headed by single women.

Indeed, the process starts even earlier. Poor mothers may themselves have nutritional deficiencies that increase their risk of having babies with low birthweights. That, in turn, can have long-term effects on children’s health, what level of education they reach, and their future incomes since the quality of nutrition affects brain size, concentration, and cognitive capacity. It also increases the chances of having learning disabilities and experiencing mental health problems.

Poor children are likely to be less healthy in other ways as well, for reasons that range from having a greater susceptibility to asthma to higher concentrations of lead in their blood. Moreover, poor families find it harder to get good health care. And add one more thing: in our zip-code-influenced public-school system, such children are likely to attend schools with far fewer resources than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

Our national opioid problem also affects the well-being of children in a striking fashion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 2008 and 2012, a third of women in their childbearing years filled opioid-based medication prescriptions in pharmacies and an estimated 14%-22% of them were pregnant. The result: an alarming increase in the number of babies exposed to opioids in utero and experiencing withdrawal symptoms at birth, which is also known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS, in medical lingo. Its effects, a Penn State study found, include future increased sensitivity to pain and susceptibility to fevers and seizures. Between 2000 and 2014, the incidence of NAS increased by a multiple of four. In 2014, 34,000 babies were born with NAS, which, as a CDC report put it, “is equivalent to one baby suffering from opioid withdrawal born approximately every 15 minutes.” (Given the ongoing opioid crisis, it’s unlikely that things have improved in recent years.)

And the complications attributable to NAS don’t stop with birth. Though the research remains at an early stage — the opioid crisis only began in the early 1990s — it suggests that the ill effects of NAS extend well beyond infancy and include impaired cognitive and motor skills, respiratory ailments, learning disabilities, difficulty maintaining intellectual focus, and behavioral traits that make productive interaction with others harder.

At this point, you won’t be surprised to learn that NAS and child poverty are connected. Prescription opioid use rates are much higher for women on Medicaid, who are more likely to be poor than those with private insurance. Moreover, the abuse of, and overdose deaths from, opioids (whether obtained through prescriptions or illegally) have been far more widespread among the poor.

Combine all of this and here’s the picture: from the months before birth on, poverty diminishes opportunity, capacity, and agency and its consequences reach into adulthood. While that rigged footrace of mine was imaginary, child poverty certainly does ensure a future-rigged society. The good news (though not in Donald Trump’s America): the race to a half-decent life (or better) doesn’t have to be rigged.

It Needn’t Be this Way (But Will Be as Long as Trump Is President)

Can children born into poverty defy the odds, realize their potential, and lead fulfilling lives? Conservatives will point to stories of people who cleared all the obstacles created by child poverty as proof that the real solution is hard work. But let’s be clear: poor children shouldn’t have to find themselves on a tilted playing field from the first moments of their lives. Individual success stories aside, Americans raised in poor families do markedly less well compared to those from middle class or affluent homes — and it doesn’t matter whether you choose college attendance, employment rates, or future household income as your measure. And the longer they live in poverty the worse the odds that they’ll escape it in adulthood; for one thing, they’re far less likely to finish high school or attend college than their more fortunate peers.

Conversely, as Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown, kids’ life prospects improve when parents with low incomes are given the financial wherewithal to move to neighborhoods with higher social-mobility rates (thanks to better schools and services, including health care). As in that imaginary footrace, the starting point matters. But here the news is grim. The Social Progress Index places the United States 75th out of 149 countries in “access to quality education” and 70th in “access to quality health care” and poor kids are, of course, at a particular disadvantage.

Yet childhood circumstances can be (and have been) changed — and the sorts of government programs that conservatives love to savage have helped enormously in that process. Child poverty plunged from 28% in 1967 to 15.6% in 2016 in significant part due to programs like Medicaid and the Food Stamp Act started in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Such programs helped poor families pay for housing, food, child care, and medical expenses, as did later tax legislation like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. Our own history and that of other wealthy countries show that child poverty is anything but an unalterable reality. The record also shows that changing it requires mobilizing funds of the sort now being wasted on ventures like America’s multitrillion-dollar forever wars.

Certainly, an increase in jobs and earnings can reduce child poverty. Wall Street Journal odes to Donald Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation policies highlight the present 3.5% unemployment rate (the lowest in 60 years), a surge in new jobs, and wage growth at all levels, notably for workers with low incomes who lack college degrees. This storyline, however, omits important realities. Programs that reduce child poverty help even in years when poor or near-poor parents gain and, of course, are critical in bad times, since sooner or later booming job markets also bust. Furthermore, the magic that Trump fans tout occurred at a moment when many state and city governments were mandating increases in the minimum wage. Employers who hired, especially in heavily populated states like California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan, had to pay more.

As for cutting child poverty, it hasn’t exactly been a presidential priority in the Trump years — not like the drive to pass a $1.5 trillion corporate and individual income tax cut whose gains flowed mainly to the richest Americans, while inflating the budget deficit to $1 trillion in 2019, according to the Treasury Department. Then there’s that “impenetrable, powerful, beautiful wall.” Its estimated price ranges from $21 billion to $70 billion, excluding maintenance. And don’t forget the proposed extra $33 billion in military spending for this fiscal year alone, part of President Trump’s plan to boost such spending by $683 billion over the next decade.

As for poor kids and their parents, the president and congressional Republicans are beginning to slash an array of programs ranging from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program to Medicaid — $1.2 trillion worth over the next 10 years — that have long helped struggling families and children in particular get by. The Trump administration has, for good measure, rewritten the eligibility rules for such programs in order to lower the number of people who qualify.

The supposed goal: to cut costs by reducing dependence on government. (Never mind the subsidies and tax loopholes Trump’s crew has created for corporations and the super wealthy, which add up to many billions of dollars in spending and lost revenue.) These supposedly work-ethic-driven austerity policies batter working families with young kids that, for example, desperately need childcare, which can take a big bite out of paychecks: 10% or more for all households with kids, but half in the case of poor families. Add to that the cost of unsubsidized housing. Median monthly rent increased by nearly a third between 2001 and 2015. Put another way, rents consume more than half the income of the bottom 20% of Americans, according to the Federal Reserve. The advent of Trump has also made the struggle of low-income families with healthcare bills even harder. The number of kids without health insurance jumped by 425,000 between 2017 and 2018 when, according to the Census Bureau, 4.3 million children lacked coverage.

Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any Trump Towers for them.

Whatever “Make America Great Again” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line.

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Rajan Menon

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty

Trump has been throwing shade on Baltimore. But he constantly praises himself at his rallies in the Red States for the great job he’s done in bringing people prosperity.

Open Data Network says GDP per capita in the Baltimore metro area in 2017 was about $59,000/ yr.

This is the per capita GDP of the poorest 10 states to have voted for Trump (in 2018 current dollars):

39 Florida 48,318
40 Arizona 48,055
43 Kentucky 46,898
44 Montana 46,609
45 South Carolina 45,280
46 Alabama 45,219
47 Idaho 43,430
48 West Virginia 43,053
49 Arkansas 42,454
50 Mississippi 37,948

For state GDP per capita see also World Population Review

h/t .

Unlike Trump, however, I object to characterizing these states and their people, based on their poverty, as in any way lesser.

These states, and Baltimore, are full of hard workers who are not being paid enough for their work, hence their relative poverty.

Trump has actually worsened income inequality enormously with his 2018 tax scam, ensuring that the people of these states who put their trust in him to improve their lives will in fact over time have a smaller and smaller share of the national wealth. It has been shown that the benefits of the tax cut will go disproportionately to the wealthy, increasing inequality.

Too few people (people like Trump and his cronies) are taking too much of the national income, causing wage stagnation for everyone else. In 1970, the top 1% took 10% of the national income annually. Now it is 20%.

People are poor because of inequality and wage stagnation, which Trump is making worse. If there are communities no human being would want to live in, it is his sort of policies that produces them.

——

Bonus video:

Robert Reich: “The Truth About Trump’s Economy”

( Inequality.org) – It’s not individual behavior that drives the racial wealth divide — it’s a system that many folks pretend doesn’t exist.

I don’t get that much hate mail — except when I write about race.

This spring I coauthored a report called “Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide.” My coauthors and I found that the median white family today owns 41 times more wealth than the median black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latinx family.

To fix it, we proposed new public programs, changes to the tax code, and a commission to study reparations for slavery, among other things.

The floodgates opened. My inbox, along with many comment sections at news outlets and on social media, overflowed with angry objections. Most of these blamed the wealth divide on poor individual decision making by people of color.

Are black families 41 times worse at decision making than white families? No — that’s a racist falsehood.

In fact, here are the three most common racist falsehoods I heard about the wealth divide — with data to explain why they’re wrong. Feel free to bust this out at your next family get-together.

Falsehood No. 1: Black and Latinx families have less money because they’re led by single parents.

Nope. A 2017 study from Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy showed that single-parent white families have twice as much wealth as two-parent black and Latinx families.

In other words, raising kids in a two-parent household doesn’t close the racial wealth divide.

Falsehood No. 2: Black people are poor because they’re less educated.

Hard no. A 2015 study titled “Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain” found that black families led by college graduates “have about 33 percent less wealth than white families whose heads dropped out of high school.”

In fact, according to that 2017 Demos study, “The median white adult who attended college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black adult who attended college and 3.9 times more wealth than the median Latino adult who attended college.”

In other words, higher education doesn’t close the racial wealth divide.

Falsehood No.3: Black people don’t work or are bad with money.

Definitely not. Demos found that white families actually spend more and save less than black families with the same income. Yet white families have way more wealth than black families with the same income.

The Umbrellas adds that “white families with a head that is unemployed have nearly twice the median wealth of black families with a head that is working full-time.”

In other words, not even income alone can close the racial wealth divide.

So if these arguments are all false, what’s really going on here?

The simplest answer is a history of oppression and inherited advantage. The impacts of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, white capping, red lining, mass incarceration, and predatory subprime lending, among many other things, are still very much with us.

Many white children, by contrast, start life with a more robust safety net of family wealth. It may be as small as getting a few hundred bucks from their parents when they really need it, or as big as a few hundred thousand for things like college, weddings, or their first home.

Addressing these problems is a lot harder than blaming oppressed people for their hardship. But if we’re going to address racial disparities in this country, we must heed James Baldwin’s challenge that “nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

It’s not individual behavior that drives the racial wealth divide — it’s a system that many folks pretend doesn’t exist.

Inequality.org

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

The Real News Network: “How Bridging the Racial Wealth Divide Will Help All Americans”

No, I wasn’t foreclosed upon. But my past never leaves me and so, in those years, the questions kept piling up. What, I wondered daily, was happening to all those people? Where were they going? What would they do? Could families really stay together in the midst of so much loss?

I was haunted by such questions and others like them in the same way that I remain haunted by my own working-class childhood, my deep experience of poverty, of want, of worry. I wondered: How were working class families surviving the never-ending disasters in what was quickly becoming a new gilded age in which poverty is again on the rise?

As a writer and novelist, I found myself returning to the childhood and adolescence I had left behind in my South Bronx neighborhood in New York City. I thought about those who, like me once upon a time, had barely made it out of the difficulties of their daily lives only to find themselves once again squeezed back into a world of poverty by the Great Recession. How that felt and how they felt raised lingering questions that would become the heart and soul of my new novel, Every Body Has a Story. The book is finished, printed, and in stores and the Great Recession officially over, or so it’s said, but tell that to the increasing numbers of poor families scrabbling to hang on in a world that refuses to see or hear them.

What Does Poverty Feel Like to a Child?

President Trump, a man who never knew a moment of need in his life, and the politicians in his thrall regularly use the term “working class” to mean only those who are white, only those who, they believe, will support their acts. Let me be clear: the working class consists of people who are multi-racial and multi-ethnic, immigrant and native born. If you grew up where I did, you would know the truth of that fact.

And here’s a question that’s never asked: What does poverty actually feel like, especially to a child? I can attest to the fact that it sinks deep into your bones, into the very sinews of your life and never leaves you. Poverty is more than the numbers that prove it, not at all the way the pundits who write about it describe it. And for those Americans who are just one paycheck, one sick child, one broken-down car away from falling into its abyss, poverty lasts forever.

I was a serious child in an impoverished home, in a poor, working-class, diverse neighborhood in a society that valued women less than it did men. I was born to an immigrant father who worked in a leather factory and a mother who took care of children, her own and those of others. I was brought up in the South Bronx, the third of the four children who survived the six born to my mother. With the arrival of each new child, something of material and emotional value was subtracted from the other children’s wellbeing in order to support the new arrival.

Dreams were seen as a waste of the mental energy needed to seek out and acquire the basics: food, rent, clothing, whatever was essential to get through a day, a week, or at most a month. To plan long range would be as useless as dreaming and could only court disappointment. The result of such suppression was anger, depression, and dissatisfaction, which is just to start down an endless list.

Whenever I read about crime rates and addiction levels, including the spread of the opioid epidemic in poor urban or rural areas, I know it’s the result of anger, depression, and dissatisfaction, of unmet needs, big and small, that breed frustration and, perhaps most importantly, despair.

How could I forget our family apartment in the basement of an old six-story building? Through its windows I could daily watch the feet of people passing by on the street outside. In the summers, that apartment was too hot; in the winters, too cold. My mother scoured it regularly, but there was no way to keep out the rodents that competed for ownership in the night. To deal with this infestation, and fearing ever being alone in the apartment, she brought home an alley cat. However, that cat made my asthma worse. It was my mother’s savior and my enemy.

Because the clinic where I received my medications and injections was free, we had to accept home visits from a social worker sent to investigate the “environment” in which I lived. Ahead of her arrival, my brother would remove the cat from the apartment for the duration of the visit. My siblings and I colluded in this ploy in order to keep the “outsider” from telling us how to live our lives — and to protect me from the possibility of being removed from my home.

Passing a Life Sentence on the Poor

In that world of poverty, each event, each change resonated through our lives in ways too grim to recall. And nothing that happened in the world of adults was kept hidden from the children. Nothing could be. When, for instance, my father was laid off and could no longer support his family, each of us was affected. My siblings and I worried about our parents in ways that, in middle or upper class families, parents are supposed to worry about their kids.

My older brother, then 18 or 19, who might have gone to community college ended up in the Army instead, after which, without any special training, his work-life consisted of one dead-end job after another. My eldest sister, saddened by our brother’s lost chance, considered the possibility of college, always knowing how improbable getting there would be.For the youngest of us, my sister and I, the key thing was to get jobs as soon as we could. And we did. I wasn’t quite 13 when I lied myself into a job at a juice store under the Third Avenue El in the Bronx.

Poverty meant buying yesterday’s — or even sometimes last week’s — bread. In such a world, you shopped by the piece, not the pound. Even time is a different commodity in the world of the poor. Joblessness creates unbearable amounts of time to kill, while working three jobs just to get by leaves no time even for sleep. The free time needed to train for, prepare for, or develop a career, or even to relax and develop a life, isn’t readily available with a family to feed. Where there are few or no options for mobility — and in these years of the new Gilded Age, cross-class mobility has, in fact, been on the decline — escape fantasies are a necessity of daily life. How else to get through the drudgery of it all?

In such a world, so lacking in the possibility of either movement or escape, drugs tend to play a big role in the lives of the young and the middle-aged. Recently, doctors have received much of the blame for providing too many opioid prescriptions too easily, while poverty is hardly blamed at all. One of the cruelest results of poverty is that people often fault themselves for their predicaments instead of a system that devalues their worth.

There was a curse, which was also a kind of wish, repeated in the hallways of my neighborhood’s rundown buildings. It went something like this: May the landlord stay healthy and have to live in this building for the rest of his life! Behind such a wish is the deep knowledge that the people most responsible for one’s everyday misery have never had to scrabble for their livings and don’t have a clue what poverty feels like. On television or at the movies, crises are often depicted as drawing people closer. In the world of the poor, however, it’s often the very opposite: poverty and unemployment break up homes, tear families apart, send some into substance abuse and others to one miserable job after another.

Need in America Today

And yet… and yet… what’s most troubling is not what’s changed but what hasn’t, which includes what poverty feels like in the body, the psyche, and the soul. In the body, it mostly results in the development of chronic or untreated ailments in a world in which nutrition is poor and, even if available, unbalanced. Asthma is one example that can be found now, as then, in nearly every family living in poor rural areas and inner cities such as the one in which I grew up.

In the psyche, poverty begets fear, anxiety, tension, and worry, constant worry. In the soul, poverty, which feels like the loss of you know not what, is always there like a cold fist to remind you that tomorrow will be the same as today. Such effects are not outgrown like a child’s dress but linger for a lifetime in a country where the severest kinds of poverty are again on the rise (and was just scathingly denounced by the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights), where each tax bill, each favor to the 1%, passes a kind of life sentence on the poor. And that is the definition of hopelessness.

Americans who barely made it through the recent recession now find themselves in conditions (in supposed good times) that seem to be worsening. In poor neighborhoods and rural areas, even when people listen to the pundits of cable TV chatter on about economic inequality, the words bleed together, because without the means to make real change, the present is forever. At best, such discussions feel like ateardrop in an ocean of words. Among professionals, pundits, and academics barely hidden contempt for those defined as lower or working class often tinges such discussions.

If media talk shows were ever to invite the real experts on, those who actually live in neighborhoods of need, so they could tell us what their daily lives are actually like, perhaps impoverishment would be understood more concretely and provoke action.It’s often said that poverty’s always been with us and so is here to stay. However, there have been better safety nets in the relatively recent American past. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s, though failing in many ways, still succeeded in lifting people out of impoverished lives. Union jobs paid fairly decent wages before they began to be undermined during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Better wages and union jobs aided people in finding better places to live.

During the past few decades, however, with huge sums being poured into this country’s never-ending wars, unions weakening or collapsing, wages being pushed down, and workers losing jobs, then homes, so much of that safety net is gone. If Donald Trump and his crew of millionaires and billionaires continue with their evisceration of the rest of the safety net, then food stamps, welfare aid directed at children’s health, and women’s reproductive rights, among other things, will disappear as well. Add to that the utter disregard the Trump administration has shown for people of color and its special mean-spiritedness toward immigrants, whether Mexican or Muslim — and for growing numbers of non-millionaires and non-billionaires the future is already starting to look like the worst, not the best, of times.

It seems that those who foster ideologies that deny decent lives to millions believe that people will take it forever. History, however, suggests another possibility and in it perhaps lies some consolation. Namely, that when misery reaches its nadir, it seeks change. Enough is enough was the implicit cry that helped form unions, spur the civil rights movement, launch the migrant grape boycotts, and inspire the drive for women’s liberation.

In the meantime, the poor remain missing in action in our American world, but not in my mind. Not in me.

Beverly Gologorsky is the author of the just-published novel Every Body Has a Story (Dispatch/Haymarket Books), as well as the novels The Things We Do To Make It Home (a New York Times notable book), and Stop Here (an Indie Next pick). Her work has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including the New YorkTimes and the Los Angeles Times.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.

Copyright 2018 Beverly Gologorsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

PBS NewsHour: “Poor People’s Campaign asks America to face the injustices keeping millions in poverty”