Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

Most of all it wasn’t fair to those caught up in the drugs and sex work, who were portrayed simply as cartoonish losers and not as members of the community.

I ended by asking her the question I asked everyone I photographed: How do you want to be described? She replied without a pause, “As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.”

They feel disrespected—and with good reason. My circles, the bankers, business people, and the politicians they supported had created a world where McDonald’s was often one of the only restaurant options—and we make fun of them for going there. We pretend that the addicted take drugs because of bad character, not because it’s one of the few ways they have to dull the pain of not being able to live good lives in the economy we’ve created for them. We tell them that their religion is foolish and that they shouldn’t expect to be able to earn a living unless they leave their hometowns. We say the white working class is racist while the policies we endorse hurt the bulk of minorities. It is not surprising some have responded with cynicism or apathy, or rebel in anger.

We primarily valued what we could measure, and that meant material wealth. The things that couldn’t be easily measured—community, dignity, faith, happiness—were largely ignored because they were hard to see—especially from so far away.

We had compassion for those left behind but thought that our job was to provide them an opportunity (no matter how small) to get where we were. We didn’t think about changing our definition of success. It didn’t occur to us that what we valued—getting more education and owning more stuff—wasn’t what everyone else wanted.

“They left Gary with nothing. They took everything worth keeping, like the good jobs. The whites even stole our music, like they stole everything else. The black kids today ain’t much better, though. That rap music has ruined what the whites didn’t steal.”

They also bond over a belief that life is bleak. So bleak that the ultimate downside of their situation—death—isn’t terrifying. Nobody in Bakersfield comes right out and says, “I want to die,” but it is the subtext behind statements like “What do I got to lose, because I have already lost so much,” or “I served eighteen months for vehicular manslaughter when I killed my nine-year-old daughter driving drunk. How do you get over that?” Their belief that life isn’t worth living has turned into recklessness, their addiction into a form of suicide.

Growing up black or Latino in Hunts Point, East New York, or the Bronx; or Buffalo’s East Side; or Milwaukee’s North Side; or Selma, Alabama, means being confined. It means being forced to live in a certain neighborhood, one with fewer legal opportunities—fewer jobs, fewer schools, less money, less everything. It can be isolating and depressing. It isn’t just about money. These entire communities are stigmatized socially and culturally. The feeling of being excluded, of being different, is more than about what things you own; it is also about what you know, what you learn, how you approach issues. The tools you have available to solve those issues are all different, and they can be isolating.

While trauma and racism have long been sources of rejection, a lack of education is becoming a larger source as those at the bottom of our school system are falling further behind economically and socially. To get a steady job that you can be proud of and build a life around, you need more than high school; you need a college degree, and not just from any college, but from one of the better schools. This has made a lack of education all the more isolating.

Often the only places open, welcoming, and busy in back row neighborhoods were churches or McDonald’s. Often the people using the McDonald’s were the same people using the churches, people who sat for hours reading or studying the Bible at a table or booth.

When you’re up against evil, whether the mysterious efforts of demons or all-too-explainable effects of drugs, the front row’s world of science, education, and smart arguments doesn’t do much for you. All that the front row offers to those living shattered lives in broken buildings is sterile institutions that chew them up and then spit them right back out. In the view of many on the streets, the Bronx Criminal Court, the NYPD’s 41st Precinct, Rikers, the welfare office, Lincoln Memorial Hospital, rehab clinics and detox centers, law offices, and the nonprofits have no soul.

This is how it is on the streets. Faith is the reality and a source of hope. Science is the distant thing that doesn’t necessarily do much for you.

Had I asked those in my hometown when I visited why they stayed, why they were still there, I would have gotten the answer I heard from Cairo, to Amarillo, to rural Ohio. They would have looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “Because it is my home.” It is an answer that is obvious, because there is value in home, but it isn’t just the value of the house or the yard. It is the connections, networks, friends, family, congregation, the Little League team, the usuals at the hairdresser, regulars at the bar, the union hall, the crew at the vape store, the regulars at the half-price movie night, the guys for Tuesday night basketball.

For others, who feel at home where they are born, it is harder. Moving for college or work means becoming detached from their old identity. It is an especially hard choice for those living in towns struggling and labeled failures. Part of their identity has become intertwined with failure, adding another level of stigma for staying. Even though corrupted and stigmatized, that identity is all some have.

Tonyo isn’t ashamed of any of this. He doesn’t try to hide, doesn’t try to explain away his actions as a result of a bad family, racism, or any other reason. He doesn’t think what he does is wrong. This life is all he knows, and to the degree he has any concerns, it is a worry that he will end up shot before he can shoot.

That system isn’t just legally rigged against them; it is rigged against their entire worldview. It is rigged against people who find meaning from place and from faith. It is a system that says you cannot reject anyone based on the color of their skin, but you can and should reject those without the proper credentials, and minorities rarely start with the proper credentials.

Much of the back row of America, both white and black, is humiliated. The good jobs they could get straight out of high school and gave the stability of a lifelong career have left. The churches providing them a place in the world have been cast as irrational, backward, and lacking. The communities that provided pride are dying, and into this vacuum have come drugs. Their entire worldview is collapsing, and then they are told this is their own fault: they suck at school and are dumb, not focused enough, not disciplined enough. It is a wholesale rejection that cuts to the core. It isn’t just about them; it is about their friends, family, congregation, union, and all they know. Whole towns and neighborhoods have been forgotten and destroyed, and when they point this out, they are told they should just get up and move (as if anyone can do that) and if they don’t, then they are clearly lazy, weak, and unmotivated.

Finding pride in racial identity is dangerously easy because it doesn’t demand anything beyond pride in your own group and the capacity to hate. For frustrated whites, it is especially easy because it offers a community with a long (and ugly) historical legacy, boosting its sense of importance. It also offers plenty of scapegoats to punch down at.

Donald Trump, in 2016, exploited the dangerous and easy appeal of racial identity. He offered frustrated and angry whites a community wrapped in a political movement that didn’t require credentials and claimed to value and, most of all, respect them. Trump talked their language—rough, crude, and blunt. He addressed their concerns, built around frustration, humiliation, and anger. He acknowledged their pain, offering up easy-sounding solutions. He took their anger and leveraged it by blaming minorities and mocking the front row. He built a community steeped in racism that celebrated being uneducated and white, twisting the need for respect into a demand for revenge.

I ask him if Trump is a racist, and he turns pained. “I want to choose my words carefully. He isn’t a racist but a realist. It is easy for folks who live in wealthy neighborhoods to say they will accept any neighbor of any color. Who wouldn’t want to have a doctor or lawyer move next door, regardless of if they are black or white? But that isn’t who is moving into our neighborhood. It is mostly people without jobs, on assistance, and mostly African Americans from the projects, and it is sending our crime higher and our house prices lower. I think folks in rich neighborhoods wouldn’t want that either.”

Put simply, my hometown’s intolerance didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance, like many in the front row, was credential-based.

We have removed ourselves physically and in spirit, and when we do look back, it is through papers and books filled with data. We study poverty and those we left behind with spreadsheets and statistics, believing we are well intentioned, believing we are really valuing them. Instead, we are diminishing them by seeing them as simply numbers to be manipulated.

We have implemented policies that focus narrowly on one value of meaning: the material. We emphasize GDP and efficiency, those things that we can measure, leaving behind the value of those that are harder to quantify—like community, happiness, friendships, pride, and integration.