“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable� - Adam Smith
the invisibility of poverty in the united states: studies & explorations genevieve poist masters of city planning candidate 2015 university of california, berkeley
CONTENTS
3
[ poverty: a definition ]
9
[ typologies of poverty ]
11
[ the invisibility of poverty ]
12
[ invisibility via isolation ]
15
[ invisibility via individualized blame]
18
[ photographic narrative proposal ]
22 23
[ conclusion ] [ works cited ]
“To really reckon with something, it has to be named, called out, described—as the President has done with the plague of gun violence or obstacles to gay marriage. This is not to suggest that Obama, in his upcoming State of the Union address, should ask Congress for a renewal of hostilities with poverty, fifty years after Lyndon Johnson declared war. But it might be time for him to summon a little of Johnson’s indignation.” - The New Yorker, 2014
INTRODUCTION In a nation of wealth, poverty has become invisible. The United States’ first-place position in global GDP rankings1 and high per-capita wealth measures2 may suggest that poverty, while an urgently relevant issue in nations of the Global South, is a foreign and preposterous condition when considered at home. However, as of 2012, the bottom 90% of US earners are earning less than 50% of all pretax income in the nation,3 hinting that those deceivingly “successful” measures of US economic performance are grossly inaccurate when applied to the population writ large, or that they are at least applied in drastically unequal fashion. Thus, because of the nation’s overall prosperity, the conditions of poverty that exist as a result of and in relation to those gaps in income remain quite hidden, rendered invisible and dismissed as somehow anomalous to the overall “success” of the country. This project seeks to dissect that invisibility in order to find a means by which poverty in the US can be re-framed and rendered visible in hopes for a change in our approach to conceptualizing and dealing with American poverty. It is essentially a storytelling project, seeking to disrupt and analyze an existing narrative of poverty with the addition of a critical counter-tale. In this project, I will first examine the historical definition of the poverty line and its development over time, including what it tells us about the current landscape of US poverty. However, I argue that this definition is an insufficient measure of poverty and fails to account for a full understanding of what the given numbers actually mean—an understanding that would prove incredibly useful in changing the grossly inaccurate rhetoric of US poverty and the accompanying approaches to ameliorate its conditions. Thus, this project aims to move beyond the anemic definition of poverty as a simple number threshold and to instead provide a more comprehensive understanding of what these numbers actually mean--essentially, an understanding of what a life of poverty looks like within its many different manifestations in the US.
To do this, I will discuss various conditions of poverty within the US as they manifest themselves in different typologies, defined here to be urban and rural, but also acknowledging the existence of sub-categories within these types that result from both geographical and individual factors, including migrant poverty, Native American reservation-based poverty, homelessness, and working versus nonworking poverty. Within this discussion, I will suggest evidence for the invisibility of poverty in the US and analyze how the aforementioned classifications of poverty are rendered invisible through two processes: physical isolation and individual responsibility. Within cities, physical isolation will be defined as a form of entrapment, and in rural communities, it will be framed as a type of disconnection. The rhetoric of individual responsibility within the narrative of US poverty and its explanations and responses will be examined through both urban and rural classifications of poverty. These processes of rendering invisible cause barriers—geographical and social—that prevent a full and encompassing notion of what poverty truly means in the US from being realized. Because we tend to obscure poverty with national prosperity, its domestic magnitude is misunderstood, and the systems perpetuating it are allowed to continue. By understanding the forces rendering invisible this poverty, we can make collective action towards undoing and reversing these mechanisms so that an accurate conception of domestic poverty can be achieved. The final part of this project—photographic documentation of certain conditions of poverty in the US—seeks to deconstruct these barriers of invisibility by connecting people geographically and socially to worlds they would otherwise not see, or would potentially misperceive, giving a more robust understanding of what it means to be poor in the world’s richest nation.
2
POVERTY: A DEFINITION To begin, I will examine current measures of poverty in the US to establish a baseline definition for the conditions this project examines. However, I will also discuss how these numbers prove problematic when conceptualizing a full understanding of American poverty—whether in their failure to deconstruct the colloquial stereotypes of poverty that continue to prevail in American discourse, their lack of relativity when compared globally, or their problematic historical origination that does not account for the various barriers poverty places upon its victims outside of the “breadbasket” basis from which it was initially sourced. The Social Security Administration first defined the US poverty line in 1963 based on the “economy food plan,” the least expensive of four food plans established by the US Department of Agriculture, intended to provide guidelines for nutritionally adequate diets for the American people. This particular food plan was “designed for temporary or emergency use” and not meant for any sort of long-term nutritional goals; the SSA actually constructed an additional measure based on the third-least-expensive plan—a much safer, less temporary option—but it was never put to use. The dollar-cost of the selected food plan (when applied to a family of three) was then combined with data concerning how much income families devoted to food (1/3 for families of three or more in 1955). These numbers were then compared to the US Census Bureau’s data on household income. Since the former is a pre-tax measure, and the food plan calculations were made based on post-tax income, the resulting threshold was intended to be a “conservative underestimate” of poverty rather than an acceptable, normalized standard.
In 1965, it was decided that this metric would be updated yearly as the cost of the food plan changed, but in 1969, the measure was again modified so that food costs would instead be determined via the Consumer Price Index and not through the per capita cost of the original economy food plan. With these revisions, and a decision to update the threshold based on changes in price but not living standards, the measure became the federal government’s official numeric measure of poverty.4 Five years later, a “Poverty Studies Task Force” was set up to review the newly created indicator. Although a report of extensive findings was submitted, no specific changes were made to the poverty measure. In 1981, distinctions between “farm” and “non-farm” and “female-headed” and “male-headed” households were eliminated, and definitions of household size were modified, simplifying the potential categories of poverty households from 124 to 48. Further into the 1980s, more debate ensued regarding the effects of non-cash benefits (governmental assistance) on income, but no changes were made. Additional committees, studies, and reports have since followed, all making suggestions but none actually producing a different or improved means of measuring poverty.5 A reoccurring criticism of this poverty metric is that, even though it is adjusted each year for changes in the cost-of-living, it does not reflect what may actually be needed for a “decent standard of living”; in 2012, for instance, $23,492 was deemed the adequate threshold for a family of four,6 a number that would seem staggeringly low to most when considering our own personal expenses and the per-capita $53,750 income of US individuals.7
3
Yet, even using this incredibly low threshold, 2012 saw 46.5 million people, or 15% of the total US population, living in poverty, the largest number in 54 years of Census poverty measurements.8 As for deep poverty, an additional measure of incomes falling 50% or more below the existing poverty line, the 2012 data shows that 1 out of 16 families—20.4 million people or 6.6% of the population—fell into this category.9 Further, while sheer numbers alone show that whites make up the majority of those in poverty, Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately affected, with more than 25% of Hispanics and 27.2% of Blacks living in poverty, while only 9.7% of non-Hispanic whites found themselves in such circumstances.10 Compared to whites, Hispanics were twice as likely to live in deep poverty, and Blacks were three times as likely to do so. The poverty threshold also shows women and children shouldering a relatively heavier impact of the poverty burden; while children make up only 23.7% of the overall population, they make up 34.6% of the population of those under the poverty line, and five million more women than men fell below the poverty line, with 31% of households headed by a single women falling under, compared to 16.4% of male-headed households and 6.3% of married-couple households.11
If every person in poverty in the US were given 1 dollar, you could stack the bills 38 miles into the atmosphere, over halfway to the official entry to space
the number of people in poverty in the us is twelve times the population of Los angeles ,five-and -a-half times the population of new york, and equal to the entire population of Spain
4
These numbers are problematic in two regards; first, as the historical construction of the poverty line indicates, the standards of the poverty threshold are quite low, based off of emergency numbers and constructed in reference to pre-tax incomes. Further, they fail to account for additional expenses that individuals and families must take on and do not measure how poverty can manifest itself outside of the food system—in regards to shelter, education, healthcare, safety, or disaster readiness. The traditional US poverty measures are thus too one-dimensional, intended to be conservative under-estimates and instead taken now to be acceptable standards of living.
Further still, the measures also do little to address the employment status of impoverished individuals or the geographical manifestation of poverty. Although one may think all impoverished individuals are unemployed, 10.4 million of the 46.5 million under the poverty line— nearly 25% of that total—are considered “working poor,” meaning many individuals represented by these metrics are actually working to maintain their compromised position in society13—a fact that the poverty threshold numbers alone fail to indicate.
Further, this data does not carry much weight when it comes to Additionally, although poverty is often thought to manifest itself dismantling preconceived, prevailing notions of who is in poverty and within urban ghettos, from the threshold’s inception to present, non-metwhat poverty looks like. For instance, the collective, popular discourse ro areas have retained higher percentages of individuals falling below the assumes that poverty in the US appears in urban settings, among mipoverty line, with the most recent data showing 18.4% of the non-metnority (non-white) populations, is ridden with crime, and means that ro population in poverty compared to 15.4% of the metro population.14 families lack luxury items like televisions as opposed to real needs such Thus, the false, yet common, assumptions about domestic poverty (that as food. However, what the poverty threshold data indicates is the oppoit occurs in dense urban areas and affects “lazy” people who refuse to site; although poverty disproportionately affects minorities (meaning a work) are not made right by the existing poverty metrics. These measures greater percentage of those populations is in poverty), poverty affects a do not carry enough weight to inform and reform our incorrect percepfar greater number of white individuals than it does minority individuals tions of poverty and do not provide appropriate data to counter the exist(18.9 million whites were living in poverty in 2012, compared to 13.6 ing stereotypes. million Hispanics and 10.9 million Blacks).12 Further, as these measures are based on an incriminatingly low food budget (resulting in the equally PERCENT OF POPULATION IN POVERTY low acceptable income standard of $23,492 for a family of four), one may conclude that those in poverty are truly suffering from hunger rathMETRO 15.4% er than a lack of entertainment and luxury. Regardless, the measures WORKING POOR do little to indicate on what families need to and choose to spend their income and do not account for the myriad of other existing expenses beyond the dangerously low food budget. TOTAL POPULATION IN NONMETRO 18.4% POVERTY 0.0%
5.0%
10.0%
15.0%
20.0%
25.0%
5
the assumptions of POVERTY
the realities of POVERTY
BLACK URBAN NONWORKING lack of luxury items like tvs
white rural working lack of basic needs like food and shelter
baltimore, md
balmorhea, tx 6
Examining US poverty on a global scale, the resulting conceptions of poverty render themselves still differently—and inadequately. One Brookings Institute study sets the US poverty line at $16 per person per day.15 In comparison to global measures of poverty—those from which the US would consider itself distant—these numbers are indeed significantly above the global standard of $2 per person per day.16 However, it is the existence of conditions of poverty—closely or distantly comparable to the lowest of global standards—within a nation that is consistently at the top of global GDP rankings that makes the numbers more unsettling. Further, as the Brookings Institute articulates, “poverty is manifested in different ways in the US and developing countries, and focusing narrowly on material needs means missing other critical components of welfare, such as agency, which may be especially lacking among America’s poorest people.”17 Thus, although the poorest in the US may have theoretical access to better collective goods, they still lack security and are often trapped in their plighted conditions. Those in poverty in the US and dependent upon governmental aid or charity “have limited discretion as to which goods and services are consumed,” and although perhaps able to meet “basic needs” more sufficiently than those in the Global South, find themselves in “a state of purgatory where . . . the absence of a reliable source of income or equivalently liquid assets makes it extremely difficult or impossible to cope with unexpected needs, such as to replace broken or stolen assets or emergency travel.”18 Even when those in poverty in the US have better access to resources like clean water, for instance (though this itself is a huge assumption), their impoverished condition leaves them in a precarious position when it comes to other survival needs, especially those that are unexpected and require expendable resources. This conception of poverty falls short just as does the US poverty line; both metrics fail to take a full account of survival needs and provide an encompassing depiction of domestic poverty.
Additionally, as indicated in the introduction to this project, the impetus for assigning shock value to the alarming statistics of US poverty is the massive inequality of the US—that in a nation of such wealth, such dire conditions of lack and resource deprivation can occur in such high numbers. When compared globally, measures of inequality in the US rank comparably with countries whose poverty levels are more in line with the $2 Global South numbers to which the US, at first glance, appears far better off. According to a study by The Atlantic CITYLAB comparing inequality of US metropolitan areas to the inequality of other nations as a whole (measured via the Gini coefficient, a numeric quantification of poverty scaling from 0—fully equal—to 1.00—most unequal), the overall Gini coefficient for the US is .450, the same as Iran and the Philippines, while that of Sweden, for instance, is .230.19 When compared in this way, inequality in the US is measurable to the inequality found in much of what we would call the Global South, the part of the world thought to be less developed, economically inferior, and thus, understandably impoverished.20 The high inequality of the US makes its high poverty rates—perhaps relatively “better” compared to those in the direst of straits globally—arguably more concerning, as the nation has the overall economic capacity to fully address and ameliorate its situations of poverty if only inequality were to be balanced.
7
Ignoring the obvious flaws in the construction of these metrics of poverty and the repeated fruitless attempts and recommendations to provide more accurate measures (all things that need be addressed, just not in the scope of this particular project), the breadbasket threshold does not capture the actual quotidian conditions of poverty, or what it means to have an “adequate” set of resources fit for procuring food, living in safe and stable conditions, accessing necessary health and medical provisions, and meeting numerous other tangible and intangible needs. When comparing the US to conditions abroad, these measures a) do not represent the US conditions as something worth concern or investment, lacking an account for the position of someone in poverty in the US relative to the country’s wealth writ large and b) do not tell the story of inequality in the US, which is precisely why these poverty statistics should seem both equally alarming and fixable, and a measure which places the otherwise-seemingly-well-off nation on par with other countries whose poverty measures and indicators are far below US metrics. .6
This project claims that we more urgently need to understand the meaning of poverty—to understand the condition of poverty itself, not to change the measurement. Poverty looks different depending upon the conditions in which it manifests itself—poverty can be seen in higher crime rates and a lack of safety, in increasing risks of various health problems, be it obesity or respiratory diseases, in a lack of adequate housing, infrastructure, and education, and in a myriad of other hardships and living conditions.21 Given these differing manifestations of poverty, this project aims to organize and capture what the poverty “numbers” translate to in their varying conditions and contexts, hoping to illuminate a better understanding of the conditions of poverty, since these measures in their own right, regardless of whether they are revised to be less stringent or more accurate, are not enough to invoke widespread change towards amelioration of the problem.
inequality of US metros and nations in the global south .537 .536
gini coefficient
.5
.504 .504
.485 .484
.468 .469 .457 .458 .475 .475 .463 .462 .455 .455
.439 .437
.4
.3
.2
.1 0 Bridgeport New York Los Angeles Chicago Detroit San Francisco Dallas Stamford v. v. v. v. v. v. Norwalk Swaziland Dominican El Salvador Philippines Madagascar Malaysia v. Thailand Republic
us metro / comparable nation
Denver v. Jamaica
Seattle v. Nigeria
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URBAN POVERTY TYPOLOGIES OF POVERTY To expand upon these definitions, this project will deconstruct poverty into a few of the many ways in which it can manifest itself and explore the conditions of those different manifestations. The goal is to develop a more refined lens through which to examine potential conditions of poverty. These distinctions will also aid in understanding the ways in which poverty is rendered invisible and the different solutions required or available to ameliorate it. I classify poverty as urban or rural, and within the latter category, I place potential sub-categories of migrant poverty and reservation-based poverty, as well as homelessness, which manifests itself in both urban and rural conditions. As may be expected, urban poverty is that which occurs within a city or metropolis, while rural poverty occurs in small towns or communities that are not considered to be part of a greater metropolitan area. The histories and present conditions of these types of poverty are vast and varied, and the forces provoking them complex. As such, the ways in which the forces of isolation and individual blame interact with these poverty typologies to render those at the bottom invisible are quite different.
baltimore, md
RURAL POVERTY
9 balmorhea, tx
RESERVATION-BASED POVERTY I also distinguish between working and nonworking poverty. In 2014, 10.4 million of the 46.5 million people in poverty in the US were defined as “working poor.”22 Of those in the remaining 36.1 million, “not-working” translates to a myriad of conditions, including temporary employment loss, disabled status, or permanent unemployment.
houck,az
HOMELESSNESS
Economist Howard M. Wachtel divides the poor into three classes: those who are working, those who are attached to the labor force but only part time, and those unattached to the labor market. Regarding the first, “there are enormous numbers of working poor-individuals who earn their poverty by working full-time, full-year, enabling us to purchase commodities and services at lower prices, thereby raising the real standard of living for the nonpoor.”23 These people are often poor because of a lack of wealth and low wages. This second category of poor consists of those likely to be unemployed at different points over time: “some of these individuals suffer intermittent periods of short-term employment and short-term unemployment, while others work for substantial periods of time and then suffer severe periods of long-term unemployment.”24 The third category involves those imprisoned, in the military, or disabled and otherwise absent entirely from the workforce.
10 los angeles, ca
THE INVISIBILITY OF POVERTY With these classifications on the table, I move now to the invisibility of poverty, which occurs across all typologies. Just how invisible is poverty in the American consciousness? Although there exists potential for high individual-scale awareness, poverty is certainly invisible from the national discourse. After President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1964, the President proceeded to use words like “poverty” or the “poor” forty times during his five-year collection of annual addresses and speeches. Since then, the next five Presidents together took twenty-three years of speeches to match Johnson’s number--a change from 40 messages/President or 8/year, to 8 mentions/President or 1.7 mentions/year. Not all of those mentions have been made on productive terms, either (two of them came from a joke President Ronald Reagan made in regard to the US “losing” Johnson’s “War on Poverty”). President Bill Clinton managed 24 mentions, so 3/year for his total time in office, though close to half of those mentions were not made until his final State of the Union address. Removing these from consideration, Clinton’s rate remains at the 1.7/ year rate of the former quintet of leaders. President George W. Bush managed 8 total mentions, or 1/year for his time in office (though most of these concerned global poverty, not domestic). As of 2014, President Obama remained tied with Bush Jr. with 8 mentions.25
Presidential speeches typically do not leave unaccounted issues of importance or intention, and thus, they can be taken as a fairly accurate description of the directions in which a country is struggling or moving; “State of the Union addresses ought to tell us something, since they set out a President’s agenda for the year, and every word tends to be weighed.”26 Thus, poverty’s absence from mainstream federal dialect is a clear reflection of both a governmental neglect to addressing it and the lack of citizenry demand for such an address; “what’s clear is that in the half century since Johnson pledged ‘not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it,’ Presidents of both parties have shown a rare, bipartisan resolve to avoid the subject. Most of the references to poverty in State of the Unions are what speech-writers call ‘drive-bys’—passing, perfunctory references, as in, ‘Just do a drive-by on the immigration bill because reporters will notice if we don’t mention it.’”27
5 mentions
presidential mentions of poverty since 1964
1964
1969
1992
2000
2008
2014
11
Poverty, then, is missing from the forefront of our collective national mind. Whether it is misunderstood, thought not to concern us in relation to global conditions of much worst regards, or simply forgotten, the legitimate issue and its prevalence are invisible in prevailing social discourse. I argue that there are two mechanisms through which poverty is rendered invisible in the US and consequently neglected from not only Presidential speeches but also the collective moral consciousness. The first, physical isolation, produces a geographical barrier separating the real, existing circumstances of poverty from the mainstream consciousness and creating a distancing factor that makes the statistics of poverty seem weightless and inconsequential; if it’s not in my backyard, does it really exist? The second, a rhetoric of individualized blame, produces a social barrier that prevents the examination of poverty at a larger scale and instead restricts this examination and remediation of poverty to the individual level, suppressing it as an issue worthy of national, State-ofthe-Union attention.
INVISIBILITY VIA ISOLATION Isolation within urban and rural forms of poverty manifests itself differently in each context. In situations of urban poverty, isolation is expressed via what I define as entrapment, where those in poverty find themselves immobile yet in close proximity to those not in poverty and their associated resources and economies. Entrapped areas of isolation are located within cities and metropolises and in close proximity to areas of affluence. What isolates these areas is their disconnect from other parts of the city and their lack of resources and economies or connection to resources and economies located elsewhere. Thus, although individuals are not physically distant from areas of wealth, economic prosperity, and certain services (food, water, shelter, health care, education, transit), they are 1) located within an area severely bereft of such resources,
2) are unable to easily exit their area and connect to an area that does have such resources, and 3) are generationally trapped in their impoverished neighborhoods, unable to move elsewhere or forge connections between their neighborhood and another, not only in the present but as future generations attempt to climb the economic ladder.28 Rural poverty involves a different form of isolation, which I will call disconnection. Unlike the isolated poverty in cities, rural poverty is defined by its physical isolation from such wealth and resources. Areas of rural poverty are typically much smaller communities and neighborhoods geographically cut off from areas of wealth and resources both in their physical distance from and lack of available transit to these places. Although those in rural poverty may sometimes be in close proximity to a handful of affluent neighbors (the owners of a farm and its migrant laborers, for instance), those in affluence are often dependent upon external resources (procured at high cost) and the creation of personal, private access to amenities and needs that are not available in the otherwise-disconnected neighborhood. Rural poverty often develops from an initial lack of resources (due to geographical location) or from a discontinuation of an isolated or outdated industry and thus what was at one point isolated economic prosperity that beget the community in question and then left it with no remaining assets or transitional economies once that particular economic raison d’être ceased to exist (an example of this could be found in one of the many defunct coal mining towns in rural Appalachia or in the small railroad communities littered across the US). However, in some instances like the case of the affluent farmer and the migrant laborers, an economy does indeed exist and in many cases thrives in the rural community. This particular type of economy is simply dependent upon the exploitation of impoverished workers, and since it is the only source of capital in the area, employment opportunity elsewhere is limited or nonexistent.
12
Within these isolated neighborhoods, whether urban or rural, poverty is reproduced and inescapable. William Julius Wilson’s work on urban poverty reveals that, “we cannot explain young people’s behavior simply by understanding their individual disadvantage but must account for their neighborhood influences as well.”29 Further, “neighborhood influences are even more destructive when exposure takes place over multiple generations.”30 The more isolated and inescapable the poverty, the more likely it is to remain unchanged and continue to spread to future generations. Studies indicate that even when a non-impoverished individual is simply exposed to poverty (i.e. living in an impoverished neighborhood but not necessarily in an impoverished household), poverty is reproduced in that individual at the same rate as it would have been if he or she been living in poverty him or herself.31 Multi-generational exposure to concentrated poverty can be just as damaging and inescapable as poverty itself. If an isolated area is impoverished, its inability to connect to other areas that may be harboring more prosperous resources or opportunities will insure that those residing within it are trapped in and subject to the plights of that particular geographical condition. The physical isolation of America’s poor also contributes to their isolation from the labor market, as the very existence of a market system begets areas of destitution; within capitalism, “extreme wage and income inequality is necessary to induce workers to perform alienating work for external rather than internal rewards under job conditions they do not control.”32 The physical isolation and place-based effects of poverty work in tandem with these ails of capitalism to exclude the poor from the labor pool. Success in the education system, ultimately leading to success in the job market, requires and is geared toward certain “affective” traits that are environmentally dependent; “schools have developed an intricate set of mechanisms to influence personality development which, in turn, have interacted with affective traits acquired through the family and the individual’s social network.”33 If people are isolated in neighborhoods that do not produce or encourage these traits, their likelihood of achieving them and the resultant economic success is slim.
Finally, this isolation contributes to poverty’s invisibility on the national scale and in the discourse of those not trapped within these aforementioned conditions. When those who are experiencing poverty are isolated, either trapped within a certain area of a city without access to resources, or forgotten in regions far distant from those resources, these forms of isolated poverty remain unknown and unseen by those outside of them. Thus, the conditions of poverty that do indeed exist are physically separate from the conditions they contrast, likely producing an inaccurate view of the true extents of poverty if those judging it cannot see it in their immediate vicinity. An example of this form of “rendering invisible” was made obvious in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The disaster exposed areas of preexisting poverty within the city that had previously been forgotten about and ignored. As Mike Brown, the then-director of FEMA, is famous for articulating during the immediate crisis, “we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist that suddenly are showing up on bridges or parts of the interstate that aren’t inundated.”34 The isolated urban ghettos of New Orleans emerged once they were flooded out of their precarious neighborhoods and into the spotlight, exposing what had until that point been invisible and forgotten. In the case of rural poverty, Rich Hill, Missouri, is a small town of just over 1,000 people in which the majority of residents live in the depressed conditions common of most small, Midwestern coal-mining communities.35 Until the 2014 release and Sundance success of the similarly-named documentary Rich Hill, this particular community, in its isolation and ubiquity, and the poverty therein, remained invisible to those not relationally attached to the area. Still, there remain countless similarly fated towns across the US receding into like-obscurity.
13
Not all poverty is invisible, however. In San Francisco, California, and many cities in the surrounding Bay Area, generous homeless laws and provisions (compared to elsewhere in the US) and a decent climate result in large numbers of homeless persons living visibly on busy downtown streets. Although the territory of the city’s homeless, as well as their visibility, is continually threatened by impending legal action (anti-loitering laws, for instance), the situation presents an interesting condition in which the poverty of homelessness is rendered visible. However, legislation could be passed to further render these people, representative of conditions of urban and mobile poverty within the US, invisible by confining them to spaces not frequented by and isolated from others.
Thus, geographical isolation not only contributes to poverty and replicates and worsens its conditions, but it can also keep these conditions hidden from those outside of them, affecting the understanding of poverty in the US. In order for the true magnitude of these conditions to be realized outside of these constraints, connections between geographically disparate areas must be facilitated.
Such legal moves have already been made in several instances, dissolving the homeless encampments that serve as one obvious visual symbol to the public of the existence of this particular type of poverty (and are also, of course, a functional place of residence for individuals). For example, homeless “residents” of the Albany Bulb, a homeless and artist community just north of Berkeley, California, were recently evicted from the property, and, although displaced persons were awarded a slight ($3,000) compensation after push-back from the community, this small “penance” is not nearly enough to re-situate many of these individuals into another equally-stable residential condition.36 The high volume of visible homeless persons is also not always a positive for poverty “awareness.” The presence of a perceived abundance of homeless persons and street panhandlers can often lose its significance and become a quotidian aspect of the landscape, blinding those within it to the conditions that these persons represent and live. Further, “forced” interactions with the homeless can make many people upset and uncomfortable, leading to negative and incorrect perceptions of these individuals. A recent PSA hoping to end stereotypes about homelessness cites negative Twitter comments of this sort, such as, “[I] never understand why homeless people smell of piss when you can literally piss anywhere” and “maybe if homeless people took care of themselves, looked pretty, we would want to help them. I don’t help yellow teeth.”37 14
INVISIBILITY VIA INDIVIDUALIZED BLAME In addition to physical isolation, the other force by which poverty is rendered invisible in the US is the individualization of blame. This blame rhetoric dictates that the individual is at fault for his or her circumstances of poverty, neglecting the structural forces that also contribute, and in many cases, are mostly to blame. Individualized blame manifests itself similarly in both urban and rural conditions of poverty and is the most common framework through which working/nonworking discussions of poverty are skewed. (For example, the rhetoric that those not working must be lazy, and those working are either making unwise choices with their money or are held up as rare exceptions deserving of help.) Although individualized blame in the context of poverty is often associated with the dismantling of the welfare state, the belief that individuals are responsible for their own circumstances has existed since the rise of capitalism, even at times when external and structural conditions were present that could easily account for any forms of large-scale destitution. In the US, during as early as the colonial period, individual responsibility, and its manifested fears of laziness in the relief-seeking poor, were already largely present in the nation’s conceptions of welfare and poverty, and “despite significant adverse structural conditions— wars, depression, accidents, disease, sickness—the poor were judged as morally blameworthy.”38 Thus, the responsibility of poverty, even prior to state suppression in the late twentieth century, was assigned to the individual. “Blaming the individual has a long history in the United States. During the Colonial period, women of color were demonized. During the nineteenth century, first the Irish, and then the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were condemned for their lower class, deviant behaviors. During the Depression, with poverty and hardship clearly caused by major economic dislocations, sympathy was primarily reserved for the ‘submerged middle class’—the hard-working people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. For those at the bottom, the emphasis was primarily on individual behaviors.”39
In both urban and rural forms of contemporary poverty, individualized blame points the fingers at each singular human experiencing poverty, demanding he or she bear the full weight of his or her position at or below the poverty line. As Wachtel puts it, “the orthodox analysis . . . views poverty as the result of some individual failure which can be corrected by an individual adaptation. The roots of this view lie deep in the ideology of capitalism…its modern variant is the application of human capital theory to poverty where low incomes are seen as resulting from an inadequacy in the individual’s human capital which can be corrected simply by augmenting the stock of human capital through more formal education, manpower training, and the like.”40 Given this orthodoxy, if something were inherently different about an individual, namely, if he or she had more human capital (the skills and abilities a person can offer on the market), he or she would fare better. Individualized blame focuses on the particular symbols of poverty—lack of a job, single motherhood, violence—and blames each person experiencing these things for lacking the effort and skill required to be securely employed, for practicing immorality and putting themselves into precarious parenthood in order to collect welfare, and for being naturally disposed to act violently. This personal blame contrasts a potential collective blame, which would instead frame these individuals as unfortunate victims of a greater evil force, under whose power joblessness, broken families, and dangerous environments are inevitable for the people exploited for capitalism’s gain. The former calls for poverty solutions that discipline individuals to become more marketable selves; the latter calls for dismantling an economic system that relies on human exploitation and inequality to function.
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The difference in the manifestations of this blame rhetoric within the geographical typologies of poverty is subtle. Within urban conditions of poverty, individual blame often means chastising the poor for immoral behavior and the accompanying “bad decisions” that prevent them from accessing the resources and opportunities that are in such close proximity (never mind the actual process and practicality of accessing those supposed sources of wealth and promise). Within the conditions of rural poverty, however, the individual is blamed more for his or her poor choice to remain in an economically unsuccessful and hopeless geography; unlike the urban impoverished who are making unintelligent and unethical choices that keep them from reaping the benefits of nearby economic opportunity, rural persons of poverty are blamed for sitting still, making a likewise ill-informed choice to remain located in an area bereft of jobs and opportunities (never mind again, of course, the difficulties and costs, physically, financially, and emotionally, involved in relocating). The blame rhetoric applied to the working/nonworking poor distinction is more explicit. Wachtel emphasizes the importance of acquiring certain traits from familial conditions and scholastic environments in order to expand the potential opportunities one has in the labor market.41 In other words, an individual’s economic opportunity is severely limited and influenced by the environmental conditions of his or her youth. Since parental class and social status, family structure, and schooling environments are not determined by the individual, and since they have such a large impact on eventual labor opportunities, lack of sufficient employment should in turn not be something blamed on the irresponsibility of an individual. As Wachtel articulates, “one observation is immediately apparent: there are very few elements of labor market status that lie within the individual’s control, even though virtually all public policy and social research take as their premise that low income can be corrected by manipulating some personal attribute of the individual.”42
Despite this logic, nonworking poor are almost immediately dismissed as lazy or unwilling to hold a job and support themselves. The mainstream discourse of “freeloaders” and “Welfare Queens” is evidence of this stereotype. Within this paradigm, the working poor can be framed in one of two ways; either again, like the nonworking poor, blamed for not trying hard enough, pursuing an appropriate education, or making the “correct” set of life choices to adequately set them up for employment and financial success. Or, on the contrary, these working poor may be used to the disadvantage of their nonworking brethren, held up as rare examples of American bootstrap logic. Although this may garner help for the particular individual, it isolates them from the epidemic of which they are a part and incorrectly frames the problem of poverty as an individual affair that should be addressed on an individual basis and does not demand broader, national attention. This barrier of individualization, as I will call it, prevents policy changes and relies on charity and individual affect instead of collective or societal responses to what could be seen as a collective/societal ill.
An example of this dynamic occurred recently in the case of the “Detroit Walking Man,” the story of James Robertson, a Detroit man who walked a daily, twenty-mile commute, never missing a day of work, but never making enough money at his factory job to afford a car to get him there. When this story went viral, people flocked to provide Robertson with cash and resources (including Ford Motors, which donated a new car).43 People saw Robertson as an individual example of a hardworking man, someone who did not “deserve” to be in poverty given his effort but somehow still managed to find himself there.
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Ignoring the problematic results of the donations and Robertson’s sudden acquisition of wealth (including the fact that he had to move out of his new neighborhood because it was unsafe to park his flashy car in his driveway),44 the tendency to take one individual story and hold it up as an example of someone the system is failing damages the competing rhetoric that the system itself is damaged, and that Robertson is simply one of many like-human-beings who find themselves in this condition. (Not to mention that those who are not trying as hard as Robertson should not also be included as victims of poverty.) There is a tension between the affect, or emotional response, created through these individual stories—an affect that is clearly effective at garnering attention and producing action in the hearts and wallets of otherwise ignorant persons who remain geographically and cognitively distant from the event—and the truth of these stories: that they are not rare, individual cases, but rather, a quite common example of a much larger narrative that applies to millions of humans. Concentrating on the individual in this way may help elicit affective response, but it renders poverty invisible as a social, collectively addressable problem and makes it instead into the anomalous plight of one particular narrative. Blaming instances of poverty on each individual experiencing them also makes specific those conditions and eliminates the ability to find patterns among other like-conditions. However, if poverty is not rendered invisible through individualization but is instead presented as a collective problem affecting many different types of innocent people who cannot reverse their circumstances simply by changing “immoral” behavior or improving their decision-making, then the conceptualization of poverty in the US and the possible (and necessary) solutions available for response are broadened and their potential effectiveness improved.
While the geographical barrier can be addressed by bridging a fairly literal gap in place—by connecting the realities of poverty to those outside of those conditions—this barrier of individualized blame rhetoric is much trickier. In one sense, making stories specific is what works to elicit response; on the other hand, this is exactly what does not work when trying to illustrate the sheer size or extent of the problem. One potential way to deconstruct this complicated dynamic is to expand the definition of poverty and the presentation of it to include the scale of its victims, while also addressing them in a specific, individualized nature. Representing this scale, as well as including the myriad of possible conditions of poverty—dispelling the belief that there exists one particular narrative of the story—could help to counter the individualized rhetoric and present potential realities of blame for poverty, redirecting discourse and potential aid. This representation—as well as the need to connect disparate geographies and conditions of poverty—brings us to the concluding aspect of this project: expanding the conceptualization of domestic poverty through photographic representation of its manifold conditions and manifestations.
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PROPOSAL FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION AND CONTINUATION In the concluding aspect of this project, I will address these barriers by presenting an additional narrative of poverty through the medium of photography. I will map poverty and the varying experiences of that poverty by making use of place-specific images. A photographic record of US poverty conditions can help deconstruct the geographical barrier by connecting people external to these conditions of poverty that are often isolated—via the aforementioned processes of entrapment or disconnection—from both our social conscious and physical reality. Secondly, I aim to represent the high volume of those living in these conditions, yet not make specific and singular their stories, to counter the barrier of individualization by displaying these conditions as a reoccurring theme. These representations will utilize the emotional affect displayed in individual stories like the Detroit Walking Man, but do so on a broader level, making stories specific to places and conditions (which are made up of many humans) rather than singular individuals. To begin, I will collect and display these photographic narratives on an Internet platform, accessible by web and social media users, and to which viewers will eventually be able to contribute; persons will be able to submit photographs from their own neighborhoods and experiences in the off-line world. The initial sites of representation for this project include the cities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Los Angeles, California, as well as the rural communities of Balmorhea, Texas, and the Houck County Reservation in Houck, Arizona. With each set of photographs, I will give a brief history of the place and information as to its specific classifications and typology. (Specifically, this information will include the population, percent of the population under the poverty line, typological classifications {urban/rural}, and summarization of poverty impetus {economic decline, lack of resources, post-disaster, homelessness}.) In the second round, I will include images from Kearneysville, West Virginia, and Fresno, California. More long-term case studies will include Detroit, Michigan, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Cuba, Kansas. Symbolic parallels and motifs amongst the many typologies and conditions of poverty in these places will be highlighted.
Finally, although at present these photographs remain journalistic, intended as realistic captures of these particular conditions of poverty, I may explore additional photography projects in the future to expand the communicative nature of the project and make the narrative richer and more compelling. Some of these plans include: photographs highlighting the inequality of the US by comparing conditions of poverty and wealth through their proximities, excess, or illustrations of individuals and their possessions and/or meals; photographs comparing conditions of poverty in the US and abroad, drawing parallels in the two with regard to homes and buildings, street maintenance, children and education, family structure, symbols of unemployment, and the presence of “ethnic” retail; and photographs recreating popular social media-photo schematics to call attention to certain conditions or manifestations of poverty via irony and the absurd. CLASSIFICATIONS OF POVERTY IMPETUS
ECONOMIC DECLINE
POST-DISASTER
LACK OF RESOURCES
HOMELESSNESS 18
CONNECTING REOCCURRING CONDITIONS ACROSS TYPOLOGIES
balmorhea, tx
baltimore, md
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houck, az
balmorhea, tx
baltimore, md
baltimore, md
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CONCLUSION While US citizens may have a collective understanding of what poverty looks like globally, we are largely reluctant and ignorant to realize what poverty looks like in the US and how it may compare to conditions in the Global South. There, poverty is typically conceived of in relation to impoverished infrastructure and nation-scale problems (i.e. development issues); poverty in the US, however, is not depicted as a large-scale problem, as the nation as a whole has provisions and infrastructure in place to theoretically provide a certain sort of non-impoverished lifestyle for all residents. US poverty is instead faulted to its individual victims; if someone experiences poverty within the US, it is his or her individual responsibility for being in poverty and failing to operate successfully in the capitalist market, and it is also his or her individual responsibility to escape those conditions. In this sense, large-scale poverty is obscured and rendered invisible within the US by our individualization of it. The physical and economic isolation at the root of US poverty also contributes to its invisibility.
The purpose of this project is to disrupt both this predominant capitalist logic and the pattern of responding to a singular individual with charitable aid but remaining unwilling to disrupt an entire system or care for those who have yet to “prove themselves” worthy of such aid. If poverty is not rendered invisible through individualization but is instead presented as a collective problem affecting many different types of innocent people who cannot reverse their circumstances simply by changing immoral behavior or improving their decision-making, then perhaps others will be compelled to help, to take action, and to rise against a system that allows these conditions to proliferate. The photography and storytelling in this project hopes to do just this—to bridge the geographical gaps that separate poverty from the mainstream consciousness and to dismantle the notion of individualized responsibility that prevents a collective response to the problem.
How poverty is depicted and who is to blame for it influences social and political responses to the problem. Thus, it is important for poverty and its relationship to capitalism to be conceived of in such a way that truthfully elicits the most affective and effective action if its problems are to be rightly addressed. As Wachtel states in the conclusion of his work, “poverty and inequality are . . . a logical consequence of the proper functioning of the capitalist institutions of class, labor markets, and the state. Beyond any marginal adjustments, these system-defining institutions of capitalism must be challenged to make any fundamental changes in the life of the low income populations in America.”45
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WORKS CITED The World Bank, GDP (current US$), http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD (April 10, 2015). The World Bank, GNI per capita, PPP, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD (April 10, 2015). 3 Drew Desilver, “US income inequality, on rise for decades, is now highest since 1928,” PewResearchCenter, Dec. 5 2013 (http://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/). 4 Gordon M. Fisher, “The Development and History of the Poverty Thresholds,” Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 3-14 (http:// www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/publications/orshansky.html). 5 Gordon M. Fisher, “The Development and History of the Poverty Thresholds,” Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 3-14 (http:// www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/publications/orshansky). html). 6 National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Poverty in the United States: A Snapshot, http://www.nclej.org/poverty-in-the-us.php (April 10, 2015). 7 The World Bank, GNI per capita, PPP, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD (April 10, 2015). 8 The World Bank, GNI per capita, PPP, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD (April 10, 2015). 9 The World Bank, GNI per capita, PPP, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD (April 10, 2015). 10 The World Bank, GNI per capita, PPP, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD (April 10, 2015). 11 National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Poverty in the United States: A Snapshot, http://www.nclej.org/poverty-in-the-us.php (April 10, 2015). 12 National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Poverty in the United States: A Snapshot, http://www.nclej.org/poverty-in-the-us.php (April 10, 2015). 13 Brad Plumer, “Here’s why 10.4 million American workers are still in poverty,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2013 (http://www.washingtonpost. com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/12/heres-why-10-4-million-american-workers-are-still-in-poverty/). 14 USDA, Rural Poverty & Well-being: Poverty Overview, http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being/pover ty-overview.aspx (April 9, 2015). 15 Laurence Chandy and Cory Smith, “How Poor Are America’s Poorest? US $2 a Day Poverty in a Global Context,” Global Economy and Development at Brookings (http://www.jstor.org/). 16 Laurence Chandy and Cory Smith, “How Poor Are America’s Poorest? US $2 a Day Poverty in a Global Context,” Global Economy and Development at Brookings (http://www.jstor.org/). 17 Laurence Chandy and Cory Smith, “How Poor Are America’s Poorest? US $2 a Day Poverty in a Global Context,” Global Economy and Development at Brookings (http://www.jstor.org/). 18 Laurence Chandy and Cory Smith, “How Poor Are America’s Poorest? US $2 a Day Poverty in a Global Context,” Global Economy and Development at Brookings (http://www.jstor.org/). 19 Richard Florida, “The High Inequality of US Metros Areas Compared to Countries,” The Atlantic CityLab. Oct. 9, 2012 (http://www.citylab.com/ work/2012/10/high-inequality-us-metro-areas-compared-countries/3079/). 20 Richard Florida, “The High Inequality of US Metros Areas Compared to Countries,” The Atlantic CityLab. Oct. 9, 2012 (http://www.citylab.com/ work/2012/10/high-inequality-us-metro-areas-compared-countries/3079/). 21 Sean McElwee, “Six Ways America is Like a Third-World Country,” Rolling Stone, March 5, 2014 (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/six ways-america-is-like-a-third-world-country-20140305). 22 Brad Plumer, “Here’s why 10.4 million American workers are still in poverty,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2013 (http://www.washingtonpost. com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/12/heres-why-10-4-million-american-workers-are-still-in-poverty/). 23 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 1 2
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Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 25 Jeff Shesol, “The ‘P’ Word: Why Presidents Stopped Talking About Poverty,” The New Yorker, January 9, 2014 (http://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/the-p-word-why-presidents-stopped-talking-about-poverty). 26 Jeff Shesol, “The ‘P’ Word: Why Presidents Stopped Talking About Poverty,” The New Yorker, January 9, 2014 (http://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/the-p-word-why-presidents-stopped-talking-about-poverty). 27 Jeff Shesol, “The ‘P’ Word: Why Presidents Stopped Talking About Poverty,” The New Yorker, January 9, 2014 (http://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/the-p-word-why-presidents-stopped-talking-about-poverty). 28 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 29 Richard Rothstein, “The Urban Poor Shall Inherit Poverty,” The American Prospect, Jan. 7, 2014 (http://prospect.org/article/urban-poor-shall-in herit-poverty). 30 Richard Rothstein, “The Urban Poor Shall Inherit Poverty,” The American Prospect, Jan. 7, 2014 (http://prospect.org/article/urban-poor-shall-in herit-poverty). 31 Richard Rothstein, “The Urban Poor Shall Inherit Poverty,” The American Prospect, Jan. 7, 2014 (http://prospect.org/article/urban-poor-shall-in herit-poverty). 32 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 33 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 34 Eric Ishiwata, The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis, MN: University of Min nesota Press, 2011), 32-59. 35 Rich Hill, Dir. Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo, 2014, Film. 36 Sam Levin, “Albany Bulb Eviction Lawsuit Settled, Homeless Residents to Receive Cash Payments,” East Bay Express, April 23, 2014 (http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Seven Days/archives/2014/04/23/albany-bulb-eviction-lawsuit-settled-homeless-residents-to-receive-cash-payments). 37 Robbie Couch, “Homeless People Read Mean Tweets About Themselves To End Stereotypes,” The Huffington Post, March 31, 2015 (http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2015/03/31/homeless-mean-tweets_n_6976920.html). 38 Joel F. Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 39 Joel F. Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 40 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 41 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 42 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 43 Charlie Le Duff, “Detroit’s ‘Walking Man’ Walks On,” Vice Magazine, February 17, 2015 (https://news.vice.com/article/detroits-walking-man walks-on). 44 Charlie Le Duff, “Detroit’s ‘Walking Man’ Walks On,” Vice Magazine, February 17, 2015 (https://news.vice.com/article/detroits-walking-man walks-on). 45 Howard M. Wachtel, “Capitalism and Poverty in America: Paradox or Contradiction?,” The American Economic Review V. 62, 1972, pp. 187-194 (http://www.jstor.org/). 24
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