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

by Andrea Elliott

Entitlement is born of self-worth. Some kids have it naturally. Others must develop it against the proof of their experience.

“A riot,” in King’s words, “is the language of the unheard.”

Yet for African Americans, the test presents a serious flaw: what the federal government’s researchers and other scientists call a “hair color bias.” Black people tend to have more melanin in their hair, which absorbs a higher concentration of metabolites—sometimes just from the atmosphere. This means that a Black person who is drug-free could test positive simply from being in the same room as someone smoking crack.

When families of means are in crisis, friends and relatives tend to offer material help. They drop off casseroles or make phone calls to doctors. They see their primary purpose as one of stress reduction, because no family can properly function—much less attend therapy—when the electricity has been cut or the fridge is empty. Yet when poor families enter the child protection system, the opposite tends to happen. Parents must attend therapy or parenting classes. This approach, writes the scholar Dorothy Roberts, “hides the systemic reasons for poor families’ hardships by primarily attributing them to parental deficits and pathologies that require therapeutic remedies rather than social change.”

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.

Chanel says this three more times, telling the caseworker to “back up off me.” She does this instinctively, knowing her words might be recorded on the cellphone of a bystander. This is, to Chanel, a Black person’s only protection.

Under the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the mandatory minimum sentence for distributing 5 grams of crack was five years in prison—the same sentence given for distributing 500 grams of powder cocaine, hence the so-called “100-to-1 disparity.” While most crack users were white, the vast majority of people incarcerated for crack have been African American.

A study by the Vera Institute of Justice looked at homeless families in 1998 who left shelters with long-term subsidized housing and tracked them over the next five years. Only 11.5 percent of the families returned to a shelter.