Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

It is an old liberal tradition: ignoring the nastier, more embarrassing aspects of poverty. And because, to paraphrase Carol Stack (All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community [New York: Basic Books, 1974], 24), liberal commentators and researchers do not take a hard look at these aspects of poverty, they can only apologize for them. But as William Julius Wilson argued in The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), 6, 12, “to avoid describing any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing” to poor people is to “render liberal arguments ineffective” because the American public wants answers to questions about that behavior. There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of all sin.