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January 1 - April 8, 2024
Still only eleven, Dasani has little interest in boys. But her teacher has seen it time and again—how girls like Dasani get pregnant just to free themselves. It is easier to care for one baby than seven. “It’s like an escape,” Miss Hester says.
Supreme hands her $11, a dollar for each year of her life. The next day, he asks for $5 back. She waits for a cake that never comes.
“To plan is to fail,”
If I could grant you three wishes, what would they be? her counselor, Roxanne, had asked. A house of our own, a lot of money, and three more wishes was Dasani’s answer.
In theory, they are heading to the thing they most need: psychotherapy. Chanel signed them up after learning that she can reap $10 per child in carfare through Medicaid, from a clinic in the Kensington section of Brooklyn.
Guided by the English poor laws of the 1600s, America’s colonists divided the downtrodden into two classes: the “worthy” and the “unworthy.” The worthy included widows, the blind, the elderly—none of whom could be blamed for their plight and thus deserved public aid. The unworthy poor, on the other hand, were seen to have chosen their condition—among them, beggars, drunks, and other undesirables who were banished to the poorhouse.
America’s first welfare mothers were overwhelmingly white. In 1931, of the 93,000 families who received these cash stipends, only 3 percent were Black.
By 1975, 11 million Americans were receiving welfare cash, most of them children and single mothers. Black families made up 44 percent of this group while representing less than 10 percent of the nation’s population.
“You care about your life,” she continues. “There are people out there who are so hurt they don’t care about leaving here….They are looking for an opportunity to do something crazy and ridiculous. They have nothing to live for.”
On television, the newly elected public advocate, Letitia James, announces that she played a key role in the series, putting “the face of poverty” on the “front page of The New York Times.” I had never spoken to James—nor had Dasani until after the series ran, when James called to make an offer: Would Dasani participate in the mayoral inauguration?
Over the years, Eric Garner had sold Supreme the untaxed cigarettes known as “loosies” because they are pulled loose from the pack. This underground trade, ironically, had been fueled by Mayor Bloomberg’s antismoking campaign, which raised the minimum price of a pack of cigarettes to $10.50. Few of Supreme’s peers could pay that much to smoke, so they began buying individual cigarettes, smuggled from Virginia. This had given Garner, the father of five children and two stepchildren, his livelihood. On a noisy stretch of Staten Island’s North Shore, Supreme would pay Garner a dollar for two
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“In sobriety, you have to want it,” Chanel tells me. “Mad people can come to you and talk to you, but if you don’t want it, it ain’t gonna happen. You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired.” —
Maslow’s hierarchy is often taught as a pyramid. At its base are the things needed for survival: air, food, water, shelter, clothing, and sleep. Without these things, a person struggles to rise to the next level: “physical safety.” After that comes “belongingness and love,” satisfied by friends and family. Then comes “esteem,” which allows for self-respect and the respect of others.
Finally, at the top of the pyramid is “self-actualization”—the ability to reach one’s full potential, to be moral, to lead a life of purpose. One cannot reach the top of the pyramid without possessing the things at its base.
Almost nothing has the power of language.
Over half of all Black children in America are subjected to at least one child protection probe before turning eighteen. They are 2.4 times more likely than whites to be permanently separated from their parents, entering a foster care population of more than 427,000 children nationally. So prevalent is the view that Black parents are being criminalized—many of them mothers like Chanel—that advocates have nicknamed this practice Jane Crow.
Put another way: More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark conference concluded that America’s homes “should not be broken up for reasons of poverty,” the federal government is giving ten times as much money to programs that separate families (most of them poor) as to programs that might preserve them.
The words of the reckless pierce like swords But the tongue of the wise brings healing.
There is no right answer. Such is the paradox of “social work,” two words that merge awkwardly at best.
“Weird how things are so personal and suddenly all impersonal and nobody blinks,” Linda writes me in a text. “I can’t get shit out of my head. I think of all those guys daily.”
“When we do that it’s graffiti,” Chanel says. “And when you all do it, it’s a mural.”
When Chanel thinks about the breakup of her own family, she sees eight children trying to survive—not only “the system,” as the public knows it, but the private rupture of a sacred bond. She sees the lines of her own sorrow in the faces of other mothers. “I see a lot of Black families like me.” It is her boys, Chanel says, who carry the deepest scars. A few months from now, in September 2020, a surveillance video will show a young man approaching a white Mercedes Benz on Staten Island’s North Shore. The assailant—his face obscured by a hoodie—will point a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol
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Khaliq’s future would have been different—there is no question in his father’s mind—had ACS kept the family together.
Although Nana’s eye disease has worsened, her life is pressing forward. She will soon graduate from high school and plans to enroll as a psychology major at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She wants to work with children of trauma. “Unfortunately, I was a kid who had no one to advocate for me,” says Nana, who has come to regard her childhood as dysfunctional. “I want to help children and teens who are a product of their environment. Why should other kids have to start way behind in the race of life because of things they couldn’t control or never learned how to control?”
