Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

My focus changed during a rare quiet moment in the industrial part of Hunts Point on a Sunday afternoon. The truck traffic was light and most of the shops closed. Takeesha was standing alone by a trickling fire hydrant, washing her face. She was working, wearing thigh-high faux-leather red boots, leopard-print tights, waving at whatever car or truck passed by. I had seen her before, and she had always smiled at me or waved, but I had never stopped to talk to her. This time she looked over at me, and with a big smile she yelled, “Hey, take my picture!” When I asked why, she said, “Because I am a sexy, beautiful prostitute.” We talked, and over the next half hour she told me her life story. She told me how her mother’s pimp put her on the streets at twelve. How she had her first child at thirteen. How she was addicted to heroin. 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.”

It was three years of seeing just how messy life really is. How filled with pain, injustice, ambiguity, and problems too big for any one policy to address. It was also three years of seeing how resilient people can be, how community can thrive anywhere, even amid pain and poverty. Most of all I ended up finding what is often overlooked in stigmatized neighborhoods: dignity.

Religion and faith are essential for surviving the streets of the South Bronx. Everyone I met there who was living homeless or battling an addiction held a deep faith. Street walking is stunningly dangerous work, and everyone has stories of being cut, attacked, and threatened themselves or stories of others who were killed. Everyone has to deal with the danger. Sometimes through drugs. Sometimes through faith. Few work without a mix of heroin, Xanax, or crack. None without faith. “You know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.”

Mixed with faith in God is a strong belief in the reality of evil. Crossing the bridge into Hunts Point, Takeesha looks out the window of my van. “This place is so bad and evil. It’s, like, so simple to walk across the bridge, but it’s like you can’t go across, you understand? This place is evil. It’s possessed. It’s evil. I been here a long time. There are bad spirits here. I have seen good people, I have seen people that have family, jobs, and they come here and they get dug in, and two weeks later they living in a cardboard box.”

These are institutions that they have to navigate like mice working their way through a maze. Each hour waiting in the hospital, or the courthouse, or the intake center, is an hour that numbs them. An hour of forms to be filled and absurd rules to be followed.

They say, “Enter as you are,” letting forgiveness wash away a past that many want gone. You are welcome as long as you try. The churches understand the streets, understand everyone is a sinner and everyone fails. In their mind, the rest of the world—the courts, the hospitals, the rehab clinics, the welfare office, police stations, and even some of the nonprofits and schools (especially the universities that won’t even let you on campus without the police being called)—doesn’t understand that. That cold, secular world of the well-intentioned is a distant and judgmental thing. That world has given them seemingly nothing but pain.

“Religion has always had a major role in this community. It still does, but the people have changed. They depend more on the state and less on the community.

I was part of a global group of lawyers, bankers, business people, and professors who are their profession first and a New Yorker, Brit, or Southerner second. They are as comfortable in New York City as they are in London or Paris or São Paulo or Hong Kong. Well, in the right neighborhoods in each. In their minds, staying put is a mistake. If you stay, you limit your career, you limit your wealth, and you limit your intellectual growth. They also don’t fully understand the value of place because like religion, it is hard to measure. What is the value of staying near the family that raised you or in the valley where you were born?

The front row likes to say that the US is a country of migrants, where people have long moved for jobs. This has been done before—the dust bowl, the northern migration of African Americans. Yet those were a reaction to failure, not a sign of success.

Moving is expensive, physically and emotionally, requiring money and information many don’t have. It requires having knowledge of big things and small things. You have to know which schools to apply to, which scholarships are available, which internships to get, how to write the proper essay, how to navigate a new city, how to dress “properly,” how to speak “properly.” It requires years of learning a new culture that comes with wealth and education.

It is more than just the emotional and physical obligations of family that make it harder for children from back row towns to move. It is also about their sense of identity. Leaving for college or to live in another town means giving up a part of who you are. Going to college means becoming a different person, and many kids understand that and want that. Like I did, and like so many people I met at college and grad school and in my career did. We didn’t necessarily fit in with the community we were born into, and the community didn’t value our choices and our identity. For us, leaving, if we could do it, made sense.

Telling members of the back row that they should solve their own problems by moving is insulting no matter who you’re talking to. But it is particularly insulting to African Americans; their entire history in the United States is of forced and coerced movement. They were forced to come here as slaves, and when legally freed, they were confined to the worst land, worst jobs, worst education, in places they had no connections to. It was freedom in name only, and yet many formed strong communities despite the oppressive environment.