Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

Most people didn’t ask for money, even the most desperate. Most just wanted to sit and talk with someone who wasn’t trying to save them, didn’t scold them, and didn’t judge them.

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. 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 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 and increasing efficiency were goals most of us, whether Democrat or Republican, put first and agreed on. We believed in free trade, globalization, and deregulation. Our metrics for success became how high the stock market got, how large the profits were, how efficient the company was. If certain communities, towns, and people, suffered in this, it was all for the greater good in the name of progress.

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.

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. 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.

The self-perpetuating cycle of rejection, isolation, and drugs increasingly wears away at the fabric of the community, isolating it further and taking over more lives. With enough time even those who try to stay away from drugs start being pulled in by expectations.

“White-collar crime is the biggest crime, but nobody gets thrown in jail for that. Nobody gets prosecuted. Not only don’t they get any of that, they get a big check from the president. Barack Obama tells us he is one of us, says, ‘Look at my skin; I am one of you,’ but he doesn’t help anybody when they down except you bankers. Nobody helps us out here. We get thrown in jail. This here is a crooked society, and they wonder why we run from police. We ain’t blind. People we have in office are criminals and protect their big friends who are also criminals. We out on the streets, voters, we suffer. Nobody has a heart in this country. Step into a homeless shelter and see how the system doesn’t care about anybody hurting. Reality hurts. Nobody likes to face reality.”

We are the only people they have. Their church family. We may not have a million dollars, praise God, but we have each other.”

During my years on Wall Street I argued for policies born out of an obsession with data. I thought we should plan to maximize things that could be quantified—like higher profits and greater economic growth. I sought to maximize efficiency and measured success by how high the stock market was or whether we had maximized profits and minimized expenses, not by whether we had done the right thing.

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.

“Then I got saved at fifty. It changed me. I had never felt worthy before of being saved. I was too dumb. Now I understand I am worthy of the Lord. When you are told all your life you’re dumb, unworthy, you start believing it. God changed that for me.”

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. This isn’t confined to those in poverty or on the streets; it is true for almost everyone growing up in the back row. Their communities have been shattered, their sense of place and purpose ruptured, leaving them with no confidence in “worldly” institutions and with a clearer sense of the importance, value, and necessity of faith in something beyond the material.

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.”

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.

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.

The direct solution we offer for minorities is affirmative action, an accelerated boost to the front row for a lucky few, and although justifiable in the short term, it is a Band-Aid for a system needing surgery. For one thing, it still presumes that the main problem is a lack of education or credentialed achievement, implying that people who value less measurable forms of meaning get what’s coming to them. For another, affirmative action inflames racial tensions as it drives another wedge between the white and black members of the back row. 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.

Next to the skate park in the toddlers’ playground, a young white girl in a white summer dress is playing mother to two younger Somali girls. She is holding their hands, taking them around the playground. She lifts each up and puts them on the swings, then pushes them for fifteen minutes. The two smaller girls are dressed in traditional clothing, their red and pink colors standing out. On a bench I find the mother of the older white girl, and I ask her if I can take a picture of her daughter pushing the younger children. I explain how I love how they are getting along so well and the clash of dress colors. It is a picture I desperately want to take, one to leave me with a sense of hope after hearing and seeing so much misunderstanding, ignorance, and racism. She says no and explains that she doesn’t know who the other kids are and that her daughter always plays mother to younger children. I ask her if she is from around here, and she says, no, she had to move here from another town because of money troubles and what with no man in her life, at least no decent man, she is doing what she can to get by, and if that includes being in Lewiston, then Lewiston it is. Then she adds, “Lewiston is a dump.” While we are talking, her daughter runs up and hears me say how much I like the bright-colored dresses the Somali women wear. Her daughter agrees. “I want to wear those colors. I like them. They are so beautiful.” When she runs off to play, the mother looks at me and says, “Over m...

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.

It is a path that is supposed to be available to everyone regardless of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Yet the path is tightly rationed, with only a few allowed access each year. It is a path requiring information (how to apply, where to apply) and resources (economic and cultural) that few beyond those 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 with the problems of adults. Some children are tasked with parenting the parent—a responsibility that denies them the time to dedicate to their own education.

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. Drugs are one of them. Bars, drug traps, and crack houses offer communities that don’t care about your past, your failures, or the color of your skin. As long as you join in, shooting up or taking a hit or swallowing the pills, it is all OK. They also offer a numbing salve from the pain of humiliation. It is a reckless choice, but when your choices are limited, recklessness might be all you have.

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.

Affirmative action is the right short-term way to try to deal with the long history of structural racism, yet if everyone—black, white, Hispanic—is sinking, it can feel unfair. If it is more about getting a larger share of a shrinking pie than a larger share of a growing pie, then it can inflame hate.

Another man, sitting on the stoop of his apartment, getting ready to grill, is smoking. He sees me and asks why I am here. I explain, and he smiles. “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.”

My intolerance, like many in the front row, was credential-based.

After five years documenting addiction, poverty, and pain, after the election of Donald Trump, after the explosion of drug deaths, I get asked: What are the solutions? What are the policies we should put in place? What can we do differently, beyond yell at one another? All I can say is “I don’t know” or the almost equally wishy-washy “We all need to listen to each other more.” It is wishy-washy, but that is what I truly believe, because our nation’s problems and differences are just too big, too structural, and too deep to be solved by legislation and policy out of Washington. We need everyone—those in the back row, those in the front row—to listen to one another and try to understand one another and understand what they value and try to be less judgmental. While the back row is certainly judgmental, certainly intolerant (often cruelly), certainly guilty of excluding others and damning people based on differences, those of us in the front row have a special obligation to listen because we presently are the in-group. We are the ones who have spent our lives with the goal of making this country a better place. We are the ones who get paid well in money and status because we claim to know what is best. We are the ones who asked to be in control. We are the ones who moved from our hometown (sure, sometimes we were forced to leave by an intolerance) to have a larger voice in shaping our country. We have an outsize voice, and many of us have the noble goal of using that voice to...