Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

In the days of slavery and sharecropping, black mothers and fathers often disciplined their children harshly “to prepare them for life in a white-dominated world where all blacks had to act cautiously.” Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrows: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 96. Later, during Jim Crow, black parents sometimes trained their children to be subservient and docile. “In low-class [black] families,” wrote one observer, “a child is taught that he is a ‘nigger’ and that he must be subservient to white people, since he must work for them.” A saying emerged among black families at the time: “It’s a white man’s world and you just happen to be here, nigger.” See Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 98. Today, poor mothers are less supportive, less emotionally invested, and less solicitous of their children’s needs, desires, and dreams. They give fewer hugs and tender fewer compliments. Mothers experiencing severe levels of economic deprivation hit and scold their children more frequently. The sociologist Orlando Patterson has gone so far as to say that “the parenting of boys and girls by the Afro-American lower classes has become increasingly abusive.” The standard explanation for these troubling patterns goes like this: poverty diminishes a person’s capacity for affirming and...