Messing With The Poor

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       A   L   B   E   R  T

1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to change a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

_____

*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Comments

[c.e.o.]

Nice essay. Whats your view of the role of people in the advocacy community?

[Phil Cubeta]

Albert, what an eloquent, moving essay. Montaigne, Rosseau, you could have gotten that Doctorate in literature rather than philosophy. I am glad to see you back in mix here at White Courtesy Telephone. Such a personal essay, but such public and important points. Blogged it here. http://www.gifthub.org/2009/10/messing-with-the-poor-efficiently-and-effectively-in-accordance-with-a-plan.html

Hope the essay is widely read and often republished.

[Albert]

c.e.o.: People in the advocacy community face impossible odds. We give them bent lances, pasteboard visors, and broken down horses. The windmills, by contrast, are quite solid. I wish we were more honest about our failures in advocacy and community organizing.

Thanks, Phil. As a mentor of many years, your words mean a lot to me.

[Pete]

Albert, very powerful and extremely well written (as always) truths. Thanks!

[Caroline]

I'm gonna chew on this one, Albert. If only because despite the odds (and I also have some firsthand experience of the odds), there ARE nonetheless leaders emerging from these communities, and they ARE consistently saying, 'Don't make my decisions for me, please.' My colleague always reminds me that despite conditions, farmworkers have managed to organize and redress some things; and a community leader at a recent symposium called out the entire assembled group to respect and honor the leadership of Trans and Gender Non-Conforming folks of color, saying that there were easily 300 such leaders in the U.S. alone, and that what they need is not for folks to speak for them, but to be better supported in their leadership.

On the other hand, who has not been relieved by the assistance of a more powerful or better-placed ally, right? I certainly have. So what is the role of folks who are trying to be true allies like you? and I?

So.. chewin'...

[Albert]

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Caroline. I've also witnessed many examples of effective leadership in marginalized communities by members of those communities. Each of us has a role to play. Leader, strategist, spokesperson, prayerful onlooker, funder. I hope we choose roles for ourselves--and nominate others--not on the basis of ideology or sentimentality but on the basis of what will get the job done.

My partner and I have a personal stake in the national (and international) discussion regarding LGBT people and their rights. Here is our personal message to non-LGBT people who care about our issues: For God's sake speak for us and with us. Do you have access to power that we don't? Feel free to use it on our behalf. Ours is a human rights issue: we therefore expect all humans to have a stake in it. Do you want to lead a pro-LGBT effort in your church or other faith community? You have our blessing. And don’t worry about using the wrong terms to describe queer people: we trust you’re on our side and are trying as best you can. One Roman Catholic cardinal who has a change of heart is worth more to us than a thousand Joe Solmoneses.

Other LGBT folks might disagree. That’s fine. We don’t all speak with one voice.

So I ask myself, who speaks for the poor? Do the poor need to give me license to speak for them? How do we rise above careerism, pride, distrust, and fear to join in a common cause?

[Jenny]

Additionally, more and more of the "middle class" are finding ourselves slipping. I'm not sure if it's the economy or the new high-deductible healthcare plans pushed out by companies that used to provide real insurance, but I realized with horror as I read this essay that my own family is now only one paycheck away from disaster... our cushion of former years has been whittled away. In the event of a medical crisis we would have to choose between the medical bills or the house note. My husband and I are both college-educated professionals with full time jobs, yet we, like the "working poor" described in this essay, are just one breath away from total disaster. Believe me, it's a lot scarier to go through those doorways backwards.

[WCT Editor]

[We're posting a comment received by e-mail here at White Courtesy Telephone Interplanetary Headquarters ...]

I tried to post a comment on the web site but to no avail. So, below please find my comment:

Albert, what a great post. I found it while researching for a volunteer job. I left the working class back in the early 80's to find it again in the mid 90's after my partner died of AIDS and the bills were paid. I struggled through a system that would not let me get my head above water, despite all of my knowledge of the system, because of my status of poverty. I now have embraced my status of poor and dedicate my time to help others in a one man, non-recognized (not register) nonprofit entity. The chronically poor, I have observed, remain in their cell for lack of knowledge. It is my humble opinion that if anyone wants to help, the first step should be education. I am often asked why I do what I do by those that I help because they cannot understand my altruistic stance after they learn of my higher education. To tell the truth, I do not understand myself either sometimes. Except that the joy to know that I was able to help another human being in an impossible situation, I never experienced it climbing the class ladder.

Today I count my coffers with coins of smiles, kisses, thank yous and tears of joy. I have never been happier in my life. This is an odd comment, especially coming from a queen with an extreme good taste for the luxuries of life. Oh well...C'est la vie...

Your post reminded me of my own journey and background. Thank you.

[Melinda Lewis]

I am always thrilled when I see a new post here. I always read them twice. I love the phrase, "practiced sociology without a license". Haven't we all?

I think the key, for me, is to value and honor and amplify the voices and rights of those in poverty without, for even a second, using the idea of "don't speak for me" as an excuse to be silent. We can too easily slip into this idea that people in poverty/those with disabilities/LGBT communities (fill in the blank) are the only ones with important perspectives on their struggles, which is really just our way of trying to dodge the fight.

[derek]

Great post thanks for sharing that. I recall the first time I spent five dollars without that pang of guilt you described. Not having experience with money before I got some, I made some mistakes with it. Not sure that having money developed such great attitudes in me either, false sense of security, false sense of pride, false sense of independence. There are things people without money value and understand that many people with money have forgotten, suppressed, or never learned from experience. Sharing, empathy, caring, giving, can all be tossed aside when one is too busy collecting and protecting all their stuff.