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But I began to realize I hadn’t ended up much different at all. I had done pretty much what successful Americans do, regardless of their politics. I had removed myself from the realities of the majority of Americans. I was a member of an exclusive club, one requiring an elite education to enter. I was sitting in my expensive home, in my exclusive neighborhood, forming opinions and casting judgments about what was best for others largely just from what I read.
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.
Despite their differences—black, white, Hispanic, rural, urban—they were all similar to Hunts Point in one important way: despite being stigmatized, ignored, and made fun of, most of the people I met were fighting to maintain dignity.
Rather, it’s a book about reconsidering what is valuable, about honoring aspects of life that cannot be measured, and about an attempt to listen and look with humility.
Yet we didn’t get just how deep and pervasive our privilege was. We were well intended, but we had removed ourselves from the lived experiences of most of the country, including the places and people we wanted to help. The
Our similar path to success, our education, and our isolation from the bulk of the country, left us with a narrow view of the world. 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. In the front row, growing the economy
These job losses were the result of policies put in place during the preceding decades, policies that focused on boosting economic growth, profits, and efficiency, policies supported by me and others in the front row. In the name of greater economic growth, more efficiency, and higher profits, we opened our borders to a flood of cheaper products coming in and a flood of factories and jobs moving away. We empowered distant shareholders at the expense of local employees. We gave my old world, Wall Street, whatever it wanted, and what it really wanted was to lower labor costs no matter how.
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in the center of town. It was the other losses, the ones that followed the job losses—the crumbling town centers, the broken families, the isolation, the pain, the desperation, the drugs, the humiliation and anger—that we in the front row didn’t fully see or understand. The devastating impact of the breakdown of community didn’t show up in our spreadsheets.
Their belief that life isn’t worth living has turned into recklessness, their addiction into a form of suicide.
When someone ODs, the second question asked after who, is “On what?” What brand, what red label was the bag stamped with? Was it “Total Control,” or “Obama Care,” or “Ice Cream”? Then they search for it, because it is especially good shit, potent, and they can do enough to push themselves right to the limit.
Like suicide, addiction is often a desperate reaction to rejection, often rejection experienced in childhood trauma like Bernice’s.
It is about the big things and the small. It is about the type of music that surrounds you, the clothes available to you, the food your friends like, how you cut your hair, how you wear your pants. It is about how you see yourself in the world. It is about being physically strong when everyone now values being smart. It is about caring about place and family when everyone now values caring more about career. It is about caring about faith when everyone now values science or liking McDonald’s when everyone says it is bad.
It is also a stigma that is considered your fault. We claim our educational system is a meritocracy that anyone can excel in with enough dedication and smarts. We loudly celebrate those who rise above their surroundings, study hard, get a scholarship, get the big job, and move to the nice neighborhood.
See, we say, anyone can do it if they are smart and apply themselves. The moral being, if you fail, it is your fault, because you are lazy, or dumb, or slow. Rarely mentioned is the vast difference in the quality of our schools, the vast difference in how much help students get, and the vast differences in how many personal problems students face.
I didn’t notice her faith until I drove her from the Bronx to upstate New York to see her mother. By then I had known her for well over a year, and I should have noticed. She always carried a rosary, no matter how difficult her position was. She had once given it to me to keep before she was arrested for lifting from the dollar store. “It is my symbol of peace and tranquility. Safety and protection. Reminds me that there is something greater out there, greater than this earth and its people. Something better than this.” She wore that rosary as we sat in
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
There are rules to follow if you join, but they don’t require having your paperwork in order, having proper ID. They don’t require getting grilled about this and that. They say, “Enter as you are,” letting forgiveness wash away a past that many want gone. You are welcome as long as you try.
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.
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.
Orbin says he’s still religious because “church is about human relationships, and it is our moral foundation. You can’t have none of that, but you also can have too much of it like I did growing up.”
“We used to be very religious as a community. Now fewer people are in the church because for us church was partly entertainment, and now with TV and internet, that is entertainment. Church was also about family. Parents and grandparents took their kids and grandkids; they don’t do that anymore. We used to be self-sufficient here. People wouldn’t take gifts. We had pride. Self-respect. Then we were flooded with gifts from the government; it took people’s pride and self-respect away. The government and internet hurt our churches, and Walmart coming to town closed every mom-and-pop business. Now
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Yet after attending hundreds of different services I was beginning to realize there was more to it than that. My biases, my years steeped in rationality and privilege, was limiting a deeper understanding. That perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be. Getting there requires a level of intellectual humility that I am not sure I have.
The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility.
It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that “we don’t and never will have this under control.” It is far easier to see religion not just as useful but as true.
“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.
“Being able to see people I was born with every day and staying close to my family. I live on land where my two grown boys and their families live just nine hundred feet from me. My grandkids are only nine hundred feet away. I can see them every day, and do. What more could you ask for?” In an Amarillo, Texas, McDonald’s, Frank, eighty, sits
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.
“Not particularly,” he says. “It was just as bad here as there. I don’t miss those times. If you black in Mississippi, you are gonna be poor. But can’t say it was better here, though. There are no more racists in Mississippi than there was here in Milwaukee. Just under the table here. But just as bad. Here they lie to you about the racism. Down south they didn’t bother with the lying.”
“Racism is the same as it was then. Awful. But then they needed us for jobs. Now they don’t. So black kids now got nothing to do. Nothing. So people call them lazy. You ain’t lazy if nobody will hire you. You just frustrated. Kids need work. It keeps the mind occupied.”
“Selma ain’t like that movie. There everyone is shown working together and putting the past behind them. But the reality is Selma has been left behind, and folks are certainly not working together.”
They share a frustration you hear across so much of the city, one of resignation and cynicism but little anger. They know their anger will bring only more ugly stereotyping and more problems. They are also cautious of me and my camera, pointing out, “No picture in Alabama ever did a black man a favor.” They all point to the same issue—“no jobs”—and if pushed further, they say why: “Racism.” Some elaborate, including Jay: “Everyone always saying we don’t have jobs because of things we lack, but it ain’t what we lack; it’s what we have: black skin.
Some don’t need to elaborate because to them it is obvious: “Alabama the most racist state, and Selma the most black city. So you get it.” Or, “When we got a black mayor all the factories moved away. Ain’t no secret why.”
I still tried to say, “Well, I don’t support the old explicitly racist system, so I can’t be racist.” Yet the system that replaced it, the one we supported and thrived in, was racist. It is a system that ranks people by how much you learn and much you earn, and it is rigged against the back row, and minorities disproportionally start and are confined there. As educator Vivian Wilson Henderson said, “Racism put blacks in their economic place, but changes in the modern economy make the place in which they find themselves more and more precarious.”
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.
Instead they tell minorities, like they tell the entire back row, that they need to readjust their values, readjust their worldview, and try to join the front row. They do this by offering a few of them help via an accelerated pathway to the credentials they have. Like anyone from the back row, many minorities don’t necessarily want to buy into the front row world. They don’t want to leave their family and change where they live, who they are, what they believe, what they like, how they act, what they care for, what they value.
This is especially dangerous because the back row has been left with little to take pride in that doesn’t need credentials. For those who don’t have the resources, personality, or desire to get an education, there is little left that values them. There are fewer and fewer jobs to take pride in, the religious life is viewed as illogical, and local pride is said to be provincial. There is another option: racial identity. That option is the most dangerous.
“Our young people are tired of being humiliated by police. Tired of being researched and overanalyzed by journalists and nonprofits. This behavior, the clothing, the music, and sometimes the drugs and violence, this is the only toolbox these kids have. It is one filled with a need for pride and protection.”
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.
Everyone wants to feel like a valued member of something larger than themselves. The current status quo doesn’t do that for most of America, because it only understands value in economic forms of meaning. In that world it is all about getting credentials, primarily those gained by education.
with the right families born into the right communities have. For those born into well-connected communities, there is plenty of support and a long history to draw from to navigate the path. For those born outside these communities, there is little guidance. It’s about not just money but having the time and access to needed information. Many children have no idea about the rules, language, and expectations of education (something needed to navigate the path) because they don’t know anyone who went to college. Other children are overwhelmed early with caring for older family members or dealing
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People respond to humiliation in different ways, but the most common response is to find a source of pride wherever possible, even if that means in places the status quo doesn’t approve of. It means trying to find a community or activity that values them. For those in the back row, that means a place that doesn’t demand credentials.
Living in the place you grew up doesn’t require credentials. It’s a form of meaning that cannot be measured. Family doesn’t require credentials. Having a child is an action that provides meaning, immediate pride, and a role, especially for the mother, who can find value in raising a family.
Racial identity is one, providing a community that doesn’t require any credentials beyond being born. Like drugs, it is rightly stigmatized, but also like drugs, it can appeal to the desperate. 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
I ask Rick why he isn’t angry. He just smiles a tight smile and says, “You got to understand the projects. You got to understand what motivates people. Take drugs. Addiction is people who don’t have anything, looking for something, looking for a little happiness. Take the man who pulled a gun on me; take the others who engage in that behavior. You got to understand, when you don’t have anything, respect is all you have.”
“You know what I think about Trump? He is so racist he is past racism, into something we can’t even comprehend. He is dividing, by wealth, and by race. He doesn’t have any idea what it is like to be black, what it is like to grow up in the projects. Racism will always be there, but to be really dangerous it needs a leader. Trump is that leader.”
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
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Thirty years later, standing in that neighborhood, I look back and see Preacher Man and the others praying and see people striving for dignity in a harsh world. I see mothers working minimum-wage jobs, trying to raise three children alone. I see a teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman abused by a father addicted to whatever. I see Preacher Man living across the tracks in a beat-up shotgun shack or low-income housing or whatever, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.
Put simply, my hometown’s intolerance didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance, like many in the front row, was credential-based.
While this is partly a failure to have our vision implemented and partly due to the intolerance, racism, and rigidity in the back row, at a larger, deeper level, it is also our fault. Not necessarily out of bad intentions but because we have lost sight of our own privilege and our own worldview, which values only what we value and have. We have done this because we have removed ourselves from those we believe we are trying to help.
