Category Archives: Poverty in Action

More on class warfare

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It’s just sheer dumb luck that I read this article after writing my post below.

This is to give you a taste of what I meant by “I know that poor people aren’t lazy (and because I know the other side- I know that despite their nice words the upper class thinks we are).”

So this article at Salon is about the greenwashing of a super lux, environmentally friendly (put air quotes on that) development in Montana. When the locals decided that there was something wrong in Denmark, Wade Dokken, the super wealthy DEMOCRAT who started the project threw a bit of a hissy fit about the lower class

For Dokken, this proved too much. When you cracked on the ultra-wealthy, you were cracking on his people, and he couldn’t let such a remark go unchallenged. He fired off a letter to Park County planner Mike Inman in which, among other things, he berated his critics for “class envy,” claiming remarks like Feigley’s were directed “at people who have had more success in life than the letter writers and blog writers … Perhaps they were smarter. Perhaps they worked harder. Perhaps they managed their money better …”

Really, the elites of our own party think we are poor because we are dumb and lazy. How does that make them Democrats exactly?

Class Warfare

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First, go read Anglachel’s incredible post on class divide that is splitting the Democratic party.

Anglachel brings up something that has been twisting in my head for a while. I am a horrible hybrid of the two halves of the Democratic party. On one side is my father’s family, who my mother called “San Francisco intellectuals”. They have always had money. They have always been part of the thinking class. They were abolitionists. They are the western version of the WASP, or what happens to white Anglo Saxon protestants when they get some sunshine and a shitload of wealth from good real estate investments.

Then there is my mother’s side. Sure, 500 years ago they were minor aristocracy, but they have become the embodiment of southern, working class whites. My mom grew up as a “Detroit street rat”, Detroit being a place where many poor southerners (both black and white) went to get decent jobs in the auto industry. My mother’s family fought on the side of the North in the civil war, but not for the esoteric idea of equality. They were too poor to own slaves to begin with. They fought for the North because many remembered the Revolutionary war and could not bring themselves to fight against a union that had cost them so much. They are hillfolk in North Carolina and Tennessee.My great uncles all live in trailers circling each other like wagons.

So I grew up with the intellectual values of my father’s family coupled with a sure knowledge of the poverty of my mother’s (especially since my father’s intellectual values didn’t extend to him paying child support). I know and treasure things that the working class isn’t supposed to, like travel and languages and grand theories of how people should think and act. I know which silverware to use in fancy restaurants and how to conduct myself with people who have a lot more money than I do. I know about the weird foods rich people eat with gusto and how to pretend to like them.

I also know how to pull together with my fellow poor neighbors and share burdens. I know how to navigate the horrible red tape of social services (if anything I could be considered a super-power, my understanding of bureaucrat-ese is it). I know how to juggle bill payments with an “oh but I mailed that check last week, didn’t you get it?” I know that you can work you ass off and never make it out of poverty. I know that poor people aren’t lazy (and because I know the other side- I know that despite their nice words the upper class thinks we are). I know that we are not dumb, but luckless.

And there, did you notice that. That I started saying “we”. I think it is only recently that I picked my side. I still cringe over the trappings of poor white culture. I will never be a lover of Nascar or football or cheap beer. I will still love art and literature and most gourmet foods. But in the basics, I am working class.

Someone once told me that I was a “good representative for poor people” (and then asked me to do an interview in order to get their organization donations). What they meant is that though I am poor, I speak like a member of the educated elite. I was grouchy about that at first. But if I can claim my class and use my vocabulary to better our lot, then so be it. Well spoken poor people have a long history of advancing society. Even Socrates was the son of a midwife and a stonemason.

In the ghetto

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So right across from my lab, about 10 minutes ago, there was a shooting. According to the 911 logs, it was an assault with a weapon. We all heard the gun shot then heard (and saw, cause my lab door is open) a bunch of girls go running into the bank for cover.

This is the 3rd shooting in 2 years. This neighborhood hasn’t always been quite so violent (despite it’s reputation). But the worse the economy gets, the more stressed out people get and the more trigger happy they become. And since this is a poor neighborhood, we are always close to the violence tipping point.

It’s not endemic to a certain race. Look at our oil wars. When resources get scarce, people fight and kill. It’s part of the anthropological idea of collapse (Jarred Diamond readers will be familiar with the term, so will anyone who has taken a class in anthropology or sociology or looked at the carrying capacity lately).Poor people are war fodder because it is easy to push us into reacting violently over scarce resources. In the shopping center where the shooting just happened is a recruitment office for the army, navy and marines. That is no accident.

UPDATE: The guy who got shot just got grazed (he’s the son of a friend of the school janitor) and the shooter got caught. But for the 2 hours of fuel for 5 helicopters and the costs of the 7 police cars, 3 fire engines and 2 ambulances that showed up, we could probably pay for an officer to patrol this neighborhood after school (when most of the trouble happens) and during the summer.

How Barak Fails the Working Class

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The media would like us all to think that the working class isn’t voting for Obama because he’s an arugala eating, latte drinking, non-bitter elitist.

Note to the media- we working class people know about Starbucks. We drink lattes too. We don’t think Hillary spends her days shopping at Walmart and eating at MacDonalds. We don’t care if our next president is someone we can have a beer with.

And note to Obamabots- it’s not just the white working class that doesn’t trust Obama. It’s the Latinos and the Asians. It’s pretty much everyone but the African Americans (and we can’t fault them for voting for someone who looks like them).

Obama cannot win the working class because Obama has NO FRICKEN IDEA what we need. His ideas all center on making things easier for business. We know that benefits to businesses usually involve less protection for us. Less job protection, less retirement protection, less wage protection, fewer benefits, more hours, etc.

We, the working class, need wages that will pay our housing, gas, and food costs. We need health insurance that doesn’t cripple us. We need a country with a future. We need another industry boom that creates living wage jobs. We need education that is affordable for ourselves and our children. We need a real way to save for retirement. We need options for our young people above and beyond becoming fodder for the war machine. We need schools in our neighborhoods that prepare kids, not warehouse them.

Yes, there is part of us that remembers Bill Clinton. But what so many people fail to realize is that the working class has been in a recession since Bush took office in 2001. We have never had an upward swing under Bush. But under Clinton we got raises. When Clinton was president, my income doubled every year that I worked full time. I actually made it to the middle class. I had a house and a car that was paid for and ran. I could pay for childcare and rent and utilities.

Since Bush took office, my income has decreased by 30% every year until it hit half the poverty level. And I’ve been stuck there since. That is 7.5 years of poverty. That more than half my kid’s life.

We trust Hillary not just because we remember Bill, but because we know she actually thinks about our plight. We know that she has the big wonkish brain to find solutions that actually help us.

Hope and change are lovely ideas, but we can’t feed our kids hope and change. We can’t pay for college with hope and change. We can’t by food on hope and change credit. We want solutions. We want to count. We want our kids to have a shot at the American dream, though for the last 8 years it’s become obvious that we are the new feudal class. Our Lord and Employer may change, but there is no way for us to improve our lot anymore.

We don’t care if the person with the right ideas drinks lattes or coffee regular. We don’t care if that person drinks Bud or Burgundy. And we want someone who understands that we aren’t just bitter, we are angry. We got promised the American dream only to have our homes foreclosed on. We know we’ve been fed a load of shit. We want someone to make the promise reachable again. We know Hillary has the not only the chops to do it, but the desire to. Barak is just feeding us another load of hopeful shit, but we know the taste already.

Dis.gus.ting

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From How the World Works

The key figure is 2.3 million — the total number of homes that are empty and for sale. That adds up to a vacancy rate of 2.9 percent, which is the highest, reports Bloomberg, “since the bureau started keeping count in 1956.” 2.2 million homes were vacant and for sale one year ago

.According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Second Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, released in March 2008, “the total number of homeless persons reported on a single night in January 2006 was 759,101.”

Assuming that number bears some reasonable relation to reality, that would mean there are 24 unoccupied homes for every homeless person in the United States.

The Kid and I, just after Georgie stole the White House in 2000, wound up homeless. For two years we couch surfed with various friends and family and occasionally (but thankfully not often) slept in our car. The only reason we have housing now is that I lucked into a program that fast tracked me into a Section 8 voucher. Those types of programs have been massively cut now. If we were homeless now we would be staying at the tent city (Hooverville) that temporarily set up in a vacant lot down the street. Families live there. Women with children live there. And we have 24 unoccupied homes for every single person in those camps.

I am so ashamed of our country.

The Practical Side of Privilege

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I have a deep dark secret to confess. I use my privilege to my advantage and to the advantage of my child. And I have no idea how to fix that without causing harm to one or both of us.

Maybe this would be better explained with examples.

Example One

I live in a poor, working class, mostly black neighborhood. We are not here as part of some early gentrification scouting project. We’re here cause we are just as poor as our neighbors. But even though we are equals in poverty, I know that my voice will carry more weight than the voices of my neighbors.

I get harassed on the street a lot. (See here, and here, and here for starters). Some might say that I am getting harassed cause I am a white woman in a black neighborhood, but I think it’s more that men use whatever means they can to assert privilege. Wealthy men can do that through economic threats. Poor men do it through violent threats (I am not saying wealthy men aren’t also violent, but they generally have better ways of threatening women than with cat calls). I don’t think street harassment is a racial problem, in other words. I think it is a class problem. I do know that the black men who harass me in my neighborhood are PISSED cause I’m not afraid of them (more than a few have yelled that I am supposed to be afraid of the big black man when I have gone off on them for their sexist acts).

So back to my own practical bits of privilege. I always feel much better when I confront harassers than when I let it go. And during my tenure in this neighborhood I have gotten much more assertive. Part of that is because I know that as an educated sounding, white, middle class looking (though dirt poor) soccer mom type- the police will always believe me over a black man. Always. If it comes down to violence I know that in those situations I will win. Period. So I get to be a strong angry feminist with an entire racist police force to back me up. But only here. If I were to go north a few miles, my class status and gender would render me as the unbelievable one.

So, how do I give up that little bit of privilege in a world full of violence and anger directed at me? I know it’s there like a loaded handgun waiting for the time I need to fire it.

Example Two

And then there is my child. My brilliant but poor white male child. Because of the neighborhood we are in and because my child is so white he makes paper jealous, he’s nearly been robbed on at least 3 occasions by neighborhood kids. They think (mistakenly) that cause he’s white he must have money. On one occasion the Kid was pushed around pretty brutally and I called the police. The kids that did it were my kid’s age and because they were trying to rob him while threatening him with violence, these three 10 year old black kids could have been charged with felony assault. Because we are white, our complaints would have been taken seriously. But these were kids being brats, not felons. I told the officer we didn’t want to press charges but we did want to scare the shit out of these kids and their parents. He went to their house and did just that. It was sobering, to say the least, to think that these kids who did something thoughtless and stupid and bullying, could have their lives ruined for it at 10. (None of this means to diminish my own kid’s pain- bullying is wrong regardless of skin color).

In that case, had I let anger and vengeance overtake me instead of reason, those kids would have been seriously harmed by my privilege. And I know that the officer took a case of extreme child bullying more seriously because it was reported by an educated sounding, middle class looking white mom. If I had been black and the bullies were white, that wouldn’t happen. If I had been any shade of brown that wouldn’t have happened.

But how can I give up that privilege when it works towards protecting my child?

Example Three

I’ve written about the problems of race and class divide at my son’s school before. The Kid has a mild motor skills problem that has made him eligible for special education assistance at school. Last year he started middle school and was supposed to have one hour a day of a special study skills class as part of our IEP (individual education plan, basically a contract between the school and I saying what services they will provide). He didn’t get study skills class until May, and then only because I threatened to sue. Last year he faltered hard in his classes. When they did put him into a study skills class , he was ignored because he is quiet and will hide in a corner reading a book. The things that were supposed to happen like homework help and time management planning were ignored. It was more a free hour of nothing time for him.

This year, he is in a different study skills class, one created especially for the gifted (mostly white) kids. He has a teacher who actually pays attention to him and he is improving this year. His counselor has apologized over and over because they just didn’t have the Advanced Placement Study Skills class last year.

I know that he is actually getting help this year because he is in the mostly white class with children from wealthy families. I know that the black and brown kids in his study skills class from last year deserve just as much help and attention as my kid does but they aren’t getting it. And I am afraid to complain about it. I am afraid that if I call them out on this that my kid will go back to being warehoused instead of taught.

So how do I give up that bit of privilege when it will ruin my child’s education?

This is what is meant by systemic ___ism. We can work in bits and pieces to make changes, but until you break the entire privilege system it won’t do any good. Practical necessity will interrupt. Now with those cat callers on the street, if we did away with sexism and racism and classism, then they wouldn’t be yelling to begin with. And those kids picking on my Kid, well they wouldn’t have singled him out for his skin color (this is not a reverse racism rant- it’s the reality of being a minority in your neighborhood) and that police officer would have taken our complaint seriously because it deserved serious treatment and not because of my race and class. And the Kid’s school, well all the kids would have access to all the help they need regardless of whether they are gifted and white or poor and brown.

In the mean time, I can acknowledge my privilege. I can try to give up any non-necessary ways my privilege is used. But it’s always there, like a magic security blanket, keeping me from the worst of it.

For Jovial- The Seesaw Power Structure Myth

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Here’s why your “But what about the menzzzzzzzzzzzz!” whine don’t fly.

Imagine our current power structure is a seesaw. On one side you have those with power, on the other side you have those without power. There are fewer people with power than without, so that side is always up. And what the powerful fear most is that enough of the other people will make their way over to the other side, and tip the balance in the opposite direction.

This idea can be applied to all sorts of isms- sexism, racism, classism, ageism, ableism, etc.

In regards to sexism, on one side are men, the other women. The fear from the men is that feminists want to swing the seesaw in their favor. That they want to create a matriarchal society to replace the patriarchy. If they didn’t have some idea of how crappy they treat women in this scenario, then they wouldn’t be so afraid of being on the receiving end of that treatment.

The same thing is true with blacks and whites, hence fear of the angry black man.

But that is not what we want. What we want is to do away with the fulcrum, the structure that keeps the seesaw seesawing. Once that fulcrum comes down, guess what? We are all on a level playing ground. That is what we want. We want the lines between groups dissolved so that what matters is the individual, not the sex or race or whatever of the person.

Now Jovial, I know you are just chomping at the bit (crossed arms comment- puh -lease! You do know that kind of stance is a position of weakness right? It’s a way to mimic aggression while protecting your heart. ) for me to say “OMG- you’re right, I’m a total misandrist and I have been all wrong this whole time. Not all men are part of the patriarchy.”

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

You think that by calling out sexist behavior I am stereotyping men. Nope, society stereotypes you for me. I am just telling you that it’s just as stupid for you all to fall into those stereotypes as it is for us. I am also trying to tell you that what you think is a set in stone biological difference between the sexes is a giant crock of shit. But you are so busy holding on to your man-power and crossing your arms like an angry frat boy that you can’t see YOU’RE FALLING INTO THOSE STUPID STEREOTYPES.

You say recession while we say depression

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What does it mean when the Fed and the bankers work over the weekend to lower interest rates and to keep a major investment back from going under?

That we are up shit creek my friends, without a paddle. We are just a few Bush idiocies from Hoovervilles my friends. Hang on to your hats, it’s going to be a bumpy ride into poverty for a lot of folks. Those of us who are frequent poverty fliers will say that this is the worst we’ve ever seen it. And there is no help on the way us, for banks yes, but for us, no.

So my little chickadees, since this is becoming the all Hillary all the time blog, do we really want a president with little experience in handling a major crisis? Who likes to use Republican economic ideas (cause yeah- they got us this far RIGHT?)

Nope, I want Hillary. And I want her to come out swinging for social programs like the second coming of Roosevelt. She already has a long history of working to improve the lives of women and children, the people hit hardest and most often with poverty. And we’re all familiar with what the economy was like under the other Clinton (Your’s truly was actually a member of the middle class AND could afford dental work. Shocking I know).