Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

Racial tensions had long been simmering when, in 1863, Irish immigrants in Manhattan mounted one of the most violent anti-Black insurrections in American history. Angered by a law drafting them to fight in the Civil War—ostensibly to free slaves who might then take their jobs—rioters filled the streets, lynching Black people and burning down the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue as 233 children escaped out the back.

In 2014—one year after Dasani competed in a track competition at the Pratt Institute—Spike Lee stood onstage there during Black History Month, delivering a rant against gentrification. “Then comes motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” fumed Lee. “You can’t discover this! We been here.” He went on to compare Fort Greene Park to the Westminster Dog Show, “with twenty thousand dogs running around,” while lamenting how his father, a jazz musician who had purchased his home in 1968, was playing acoustic bass when his new neighbors, in 2013, called the police. “You just can’t come in where people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here?” The same forces are reshaping Bed-Stuy, the historic neighborhood where Dasani’s great-grandfather June first landed and where her teacher, Miss Hester, still lives. Around the corner from her basement rental, a trendy café now sells $4 espressos. Miss Hester resents the neighborhood’s white transplants, walking around “as if I am the outsider, and I’m like, ‘Excuse me I was born here!’ ”

A child like Dasani can get stuck in “fight or flight” mode, leading to an overproduction of cortisol and a surge in blood sugar. This can make her resistant to insulin, causing diabetes or obesity. It can accelerate atherosclerosis, the heart disease that killed Dasani’s grandmother at age fifty-four. And it can leave lasting “wear and tear” effects on a growing brain.

In 2013, Seth Pollak, a child psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, examined the brain scans of seventy-seven infants from a range of economic backgrounds, following them for three years. He focused on the parts of the brain that are less hereditary and more influenced by the child’s environment. At first, the scans were identical. But by age four, the poor children had developed less “gray matter,” the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional behavior, problem solving, memory, and other skills critical to learning. Chronic stress also produces higher amounts of cortisol, the hormone that promotes survival. To be “soaked in cortisol,” says Pollak, changes the brain’s architecture. The child becomes overly sensitive and hyperreactive. Small slights can seem like grave insults. Once the child escalates, it takes much longer to cool down.

Jason waits for Dasani to talk. He knows that “if she feels like she’s been heard, she’ll settle down.” He wants Dasani to exhaust her side of the story, which means hearing “how she saw it” and “the flavor” and as many “facts as I could get.” She needs to “use her words,” as her therapist keeps saying. Jason also wants Dasani to think about her role, and how she could have handled the conflict differently.

Dasani thinks about this. It sounds more like editing, which she is learning in film class. Some scenes get cut to make the movie better. She can do this with her thoughts, cutting some out so they never reach the audience. But inside her, they will stay.

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.

It is now July 2015, the midpoint of a summer that feels like no other in Supreme’s memory. Two weeks earlier, a white supremacist had gunned down nine Black worshippers at a historic church in Charleston. The country seems ripe for another civil war, with a cohort of white Americans defending their Confederate flags while Black activists mount a movement that has enshrined Eric Garner’s name. In Texas public schools, new social studies textbooks have minimized the role of slavery in the Civil War, while a geography book depicts slaves as “workers” who came by way of “immigration” from Africa.

“Those who anger you…” and she finishes the sentence: “…control you.”

Man’s Search for Meaning, the 1946 memoir by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. “And in the book,” Mr. Akers tells the girls, “it talked about how you can watch your whole family die and still have a reason for living.”

Each girl must write the word “why” on her card. Dasani writes, in all caps, WHY. On the other side of her card, she must explain her “why”—her reason for being at Hershey. That way, on the “rough days,” Mr. Akers says, she can reach for her “why” card and be reminded. To endure almost any how.