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

by Andrea Elliott

She can use it in most bodegas to buy groceries (but not cigarettes, alcohol, hot food, or diapers, though cashiers often make exceptions).

To say that an area has been “gentrified” is to invoke the racially coded language of an “urban” neighborhood where muggings are down and espresso beans are roasted—a

It is Dasani’s belief that she and her siblings are the cause of her mother’s ruin. It never occurs to her that for Chanel, the children represent her only accomplishment.

For Black veterans like June, a different life awaited. They were largely denied the GI Bill supports that lifted their white comrades into the middle class. Job training programs catered overwhelmingly to whites, as did universities and financial institutions. There was little that a scholarship or a mortgage could do for an African American veteran when colleges and banks turned down his applications. The GI Bill, like the military, answered to a Jim Crow South.

The laughter comes in spurts, as if they are watching a stand-up comic that no one else can hear. Melodramatic laughter, in the principal’s experience, is “camouflage for tears, for neglect.”