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

by Andrea Elliott

Beyond the shelter’s walls, in the fall of 2012, Dasani belongs to an invisible tribe of more than twenty-two thousand homeless children—the highest number ever recorded, in the most unequal metropolis in America. Almost half of New York’s 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line.

Less than 2 percent of homeless families receive survivors benefits. Depending on the audience, Dasani’s parents are either “working the system” or “making ends meet.” Either way, they are living in a city where no poor family with eight children, supported by parents lacking college degrees, could easily get by.

Supreme and Chanel have been scolded about their lack of financial discipline in countless meetings with city agencies. But when that money arrives, they do not think about abstractions like “personal responsibility” and “self-reliance.” They lose themselves in the delirium that a round of ice creams brings. They feel the sudden, exquisite rush born of wearing gold teeth again—of appearing like a person who has, rather than a person who lacks.

It is a less-known fact that Brooklyn was built on the backs of slaves, brought here by the Dutch in 1626 to clear land, build roads, and work the tobacco plantations. When the British took the colony nearly four decades later, renaming it for the Duke of York, the importation of slaves began in earnest. The colony’s enslaved population swelled to 13,500, making it the largest slaveholding territory in the North. And nowhere in New York was the concentration of slaves higher than in Brooklyn—one-third of the population.

The largest of these is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which can bring a cash subsidy of thousands of dollars to a family like Dasani’s. Administered by the Internal Revenue Service, this is one of the largest antipoverty programs in the country, helping more than 27 million families.

Right now, in the fall of 2012, more than 3 million New Yorkers (roughly 38 percent of the city’s population) are getting Medicaid, 1.8 million people are on food stamps, and 357,000 are receiving cash welfare.

Over half a million New Yorkers live in the city’s 334 public housing developments—including the Whitman and Ingersoll projects by Auburn—or rent private apartments with federal subsidies. The demand for cheap housing far exceeds the supply. More than 80,000 schoolchildren have been homeless at some point this year (a number that will surpass 100,000 by 2016). Many are doubled up with relatives; others, like Dasani, are living in shelters.

With a budget of nearly $1 billion, the Department of Homeless Services—the agency Dasani knows as DHS—manages nine city-run shelters, including Auburn, and more than two hundred nonprofit shelters, providing 43,000 beds to homeless people every night. Thousands more sleep on the street or stay ...

And finally, there is child protection—better known as ACS—the weightiest acronym in Dasani’s life. This agency investigates about 55,000 reports of child abuse or neglect every year. In 2012 alone, ACS will remove 4,072 children from their homes, placing them in a foster care system with more than 13,000 children—the vast majority of them Black or Latino. Almost half of New York City’s residents ...

She is among the 83 percent of students who qualify for free lunch at her school, the 16 million children growing up poor nationwide, and the 47 million Americans on food stamps.

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.

Brooklyn, by comparison, was a haven. Fleeing the draft riots, thousands of Black families left Manhattan for Brooklyn, finding an anchor in the Fort Greene school. This prominent tide included African American scholars, entrepreneurs, doctors, and an inventor. They launched businesses, started newspapers, formed literary clubs, and organized politically, transforming the area into the so-called Black Belt. “WEALTHY NEGRO CITIZENS,” announced The New York Times in 1895, noting that “most of the wealthy negroes” live in Brooklyn—some with white servants and horse-drawn carriages. As many as seventy-one African Americans bought homes, forming the base of Fort Greene’s Black intelligentsia, spiritual leadership, and civil rights vanguard. These currents combined to spectacular effect on November 23, 1883, when the “Colored School” moved into a new building on North Elliott Place.

Like Dorsey, Dasani’s new school is known by the name of another local legend: Dr. Susan S. McKinney, who in 1870 became the first female African American doctor in New York State, and the third in the nation. To understand the magnitude of this achievement, consider that Dr. McKinney went to medical school four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as the only Black student in her all-female school. She then graduated as valedictorian. When Dr. McKinney died in 1918, W.E.B. Du Bois gave the eulogy at her funeral.

Since Bloomberg took office, the number of homeless families has risen by 80 percent. They are now staying in shelters for the longest period on record. When asked about this in August 2012, Bloomberg replied that the city’s shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”

Over the last decade, city and state inspectors have cited the Auburn shelter for more than four hundred violations, among them broken elevators, nonfunctioning bathrooms, faulty fire alarms, insufficient heat, spoiled food, sexual misconduct by staff, inadequate childcare, and the presence of mice, roaches, mold, bedbugs, lead, and asbestos. In interviews, the mayor’s staff told me that Auburn’s aging infrastructure was mostly to blame, and that the city had spent nearly $10 million on repairs and renovations at the shelter. They declined to comment on the reports of sexual abuse.

Out of nearly 71,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill in New York and northeastern New Jersey in 1950, less than 1 percent went to nonwhite veterans. Yet home ownership was key to accruing wealth. White American families would eventually amass a median net worth nearly ten times that of Black families. Put another way, the exclusion of African Americans from real estate—not to mention college, white-collar jobs, and the ability to vote—laid the foundations of a lasting poverty that Dasani would inherit.

In 1986—the same year that Chanel discovered her mother’s crack pipe—Congress approved a new law making punishment for crack possession (common among the poor) one hundred times more harsh than for powder cocaine (common among the wealthy). Even first-time crack offenders landed mandatory minimum sentences of five to ten years, contributing to the explosion of America’s prison population—a disproportionately Black and Latino group that came to include Chanel’s two brothers, an uncle, and four cousins. Within a decade, this population would surpass a million. The United States had claimed the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Crack had reordered the local economy, making fortunes and destroying lives. By the end of that year, in 1990, more than twenty-two hundred people had been killed, including 75 children—39 of them hit by bullets. It was the bloodiest year in modern New York history, unsurpassed until the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Back in the 1950s, when Joanie and Margo were still children, they had never heard of “foster care.” Poor families—Black, brown, and white—relied on kinship networks to help raise their children. The alternative was a child welfare system that segregated by skin color. This practice had its roots in the orphan train era, when charitable organizations became the primary caretakers of poor children. They had monopolized the system, using taxpayer funds while discriminating on religious grounds. Jewish and Catholic children, the majority of them white, went to faith-based agencies offering foster homes, while Black children—the majority of them Protestant—tended to land in the city’s reformatories, correctional facilities, and other decrepit institutions.

Poor families had yet to experience the surveillance of child protection workers. There was no family court, and the Administration for Children’s Services had yet to be created. “If there was an ACS case, we would have had one,” Margo later told me. The term “child abuse” had surfaced in the 1960s, after Dr. C. Henry Kempe, a Colorado-based pediatrician, launched a study of unexplained injuries among hospitalized children. The resulting paper he co-published, titled “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” sparked a national outcry, leading to mandatory child abuse reporting laws and federal funding for investigations.

Children were flooding the city’s foster care system, including thousands of babies born to mothers who used drugs. News outlets sounded the alarm of America’s “crack babies,” who were said to carry serious physical and behavioral defects. These reports stemmed from a single medical study, based on twenty-three babies, which has since been debunked. Long-term research shows that prenatal exposure to crack causes subtle—if any—differences in adult outcomes. But back in the 1980s, pregnant drug users became the target of law enforcement. As more mothers went to prison, the number of foster children in New York City reached a record high, in 1992, of nearly fifty thousand, overwhelming a child protection system that was already strained.

Vowing to reform the system, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani placed child protection under the control of a new, independent agency overseen by him, calling it the Administration for Children’s Services (the very agency that Joanie’s descendents would refer to as ACS). Children continued to stream into foster care, with 13,207 admissions in 1997 alone.

For decades, the city had helped homeless families jump the waitlist for public housing. Only a small fraction of those families returned to shelters. But from Bloomberg’s perspective, this policy gave families an incentive to enter the shelter system: They were becoming homeless to gain access to the projects or to Section-8 vouchers, the federal rent subsidy program. With the economy growing, Bloomberg adopted a new set of policies intended to make the homeless more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing. Instead, they would receive short-term help with the rent. Promising to make “chronic homelessness effectively extinct,” Bloomberg revamped the shelter system with a sophisticated database to track this population and a program offering job training, legal assistance, and other supports. He also created the Center for Economic Opportunity, a city-run “innovation lab” that would spend $662 million on poverty prevention programs emphasizing jobs and education. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor told his aides, and homelessness would decline.

This was a country, Supreme told Chanel, with an educational system, a government, a police force, and a job market that kept people of color trapped in “the false hope of an American Dream.” “It’s all a trick, not real,” he said. “It’s all been built up to destroy us systematically, on all levels….To empower others, at the expense of crushing the Black man, father, and husband—to render him totally ineffective and stagnant.”

To be an angel is to be incorruptible—to “think for herself” rather than being swayed by others. Dasani would grow up to be a leader, he predicted. And in the meantime, her parents “were going to break the chain of slavery,” Chanel said. “We were gonna change their food. We were gonna change the way they think. Cuz what you put in is what you get out.”

Dasani continues to see her counselor at school, Roxanne. They meet to play Mancala and to talk about “anger management”—a concept that Dasani finds odd. She does not consider her anger a thing to be “managed”—especially if this interferes with her ability to fight. Anger is critical to winning a fight. And only if Dasani wins does she keep her reputation—and her body—safe. By this equation, anger + fighting = triumph = survival. No adult at McKinney is going to tell Dasani to stop surviving. The trick is to nudge her toward another form of self-preservation: avoiding the fight altogether. Roxanne asks Dasani to recount a typical fight, describing each move in slow motion. This is easy: The fight always begins with a taunt. This makes Dasani’s heart beat faster and her breath come shorter. She stops hearing her thoughts. “It’s like my body just get hyped. And my body ends up hitting.” Roxanne offers a strategy: As soon as Dasani hears the first taunt, she must breathe in for ten seconds through her nose and then breathe out for ten seconds through her mouth. Dasani gives it a try. For the next week, she keeps practicing. “First, you close your eyes. And then you breathe in, and then you breathe out,” she tells me while demonstrating. “You breathe in through your nose, and you breathe out through your mouth.” This gives her unseen power. “Like when I want to hurt somebody, like when I want to fight, or when I feel really sad, I just breathe in and out,” she tells me. “It wo...

Dasani reasons that wealth belongs to “the whites” because “they save their money and don’t spend it on drinking and smoking.” Fort Greene’s demography may feed such perceptions: The top 5 percent of residents earn 76 times the income of the bottom quintile, making this one of the most unequal pockets in the city.

Exposure to the moneyed classes has its upsides. A growing tax base can improve public schools and parks while beefing up services like garbage collection. Ideally, gentrification also changes what scholars call “the geography of opportunity,” by expanding the social networks of the poor and making some children more likely to attend college.

The early pioneers of Fort Greene’s gentrification were, in fact, African American. In the 1960s—long after the neighborhood was redlined, allowing banks to disinvest—Black middle-class families took ownership of Fort Greene’s brownstones. The 1980s and 1990s brought a cultural revival that is likened to the Harlem Renaissance, with Black writers, musicians, and actors planting roots in Fort Greene—among them Chris Rock, Erykah Badu, and Branford Marsalis. Their de facto mayor was Spike Lee, whose homegrown 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It takes place in the neighborhood. By the time Dasani was born here, in 2001, Fort Greene was the beating heart of what Essence magazine called Brooklyn’s “Black Mecca,” a neighborhood that Black families had dominated for half a century. It was on a bench in Fort Greene Park that Richard Wright had written passages of his landmark 1940 novel, Native Son. Then came a seismic change. Much of it began in 2003, with Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to remake downtown Brooklyn. Through aggressive rezoning and generous subsidies, developers broke ground on nineteen luxury buildings in Fort Greene, all in the span of three years. Within a decade, the neighborhood’s real estate prices had doubled and its portion of white residents had jumped by 80 percent—while an estimated three-quarters of Fort Greene’s Black-owned businesses closed. Brooklyn was seeing the opposite of white flight—a white landing of sorts. This was coded in the language of class: the arriv...

Whether Chanel is a “victim” or a “queen” depends on the observer. To conservatives, welfare harms the work ethic, making people dependent on the government. To progressives, welfare marginalizes the poor while failing to meet their needs. Lost in the vernacular of “welfare” is the word itself. It was enshrined in the 1787 preamble to the Constitution, commanding “the People of the United States” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is no accident that the Constitution connects welfare to posterity, which means all future generations. For posterity relies on the existence of children, and it was children who gave rise to America’s modern welfare program. They were not just any children. They were an early version of Dasani—homeless, in New York City more than 130 years ago, at the height of the first Gilded Age.

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. Children in America migrated between these classes. Some landed in the draconian confines of the poorhouse, trading their labor for shelter and food. Others were placed with strangers, indentured as servants or apprenticed to tradesmen. Their fates, however grim, hardly compared with the horrors inflicted upon enslaved Black children. By the nineteenth century, a new system emerged to rescue the children of whites, and eventually of Blacks, placing them in orphanages, reformatories, and other institutions.

By 1870, as many as thirty thousand homeless children wandered the city—a wayward tribe of “street Arabs,” “waifs,” and “gutter snipes” who belonged to the so-called “dangerous classes.”

New York’s street children had drawn the notice of Charles Loring Brace, a twenty-six-year-old Protestant minister, educated at Yale, who came to be known as the father of American foster care. Brace believed that even a temporary home, in a rural setting, was better than the street. In Manhattan, he founded the Children’s Aid Society, launching a movement to “place out” New York’s street children by sending them on “orphan trains” to live with families in the Midwest. As many as two hundred thousand children boarded these trains for a new life. America’s first foster children were leaving white “ignorant Roman-Catholic” families, in Brace’s words, to live with Protestant farmers who could offer “a good home in the West.” Yet many of these children worked in arrangements reeking of indentured servitude. By Brace’s lights, the orphan train movement was “emigration as a cure for pauperism.” Most of these children were not even orphans. They had been taken from, or handed over by, parents too poor to feed them. Society’s answer to poverty, time and again, was to separate children from their families. By the early twentieth century, about 93,000 children were living in orphanages and as many as 75,000 more in foster homes or facilities for juvenile delinquents. Considering this a crisis, President Theodore Roosevelt called a meeting that would lay the foundations of America’s modern welfare system. On January 25, 1909, some two hundred charity workers, academics, juvenile cour...

Most of the nation’s Black children still lived in the South—a fact cited by Booker T. Washington, one of only two African Americans included at the conference. Black families, he told the white audience, had long practiced the ideals being touted at Roosevelt’s meeting. “The negro, in some way, has inherited and has had trained into him the idea that he must take care of his own dependents, and he does it to a greater degree than is true perhaps of any other race,” said Washington, who hoped that Black Americans would stay in the rural South, where strong family ties kept children safe and where placing a child in an institution was seen as “a disgrace.”

Across the lines of race, Americans shared the problem of child labor. For centuries, children had been treated like miniature adults, expected to earn their keep. But a new idea was making the rounds, advanced by G. Stanley Hall, a pioneer in the budding field of child psychology. Hall argued that childhood was a distinct phase of human development, which meant that children needed to act like children in order to become healthy adults. Rather than being forced to work, a child required nourishment and education. The “work” of young children was to play.

The homes of these children, President Roosevelt’s conferees concluded, “should not be broken up for reasons of poverty.” Roosevelt’s meeting spurred a national movement to create “mother’s pensions,” distributed state by state to women deemed “worthy” or “deserving.” 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.

Black women had to fight to join welfare’s rolls. Drawn north by the Great Migration, millions of African Americans had resettled in New York City, which became the base for a national welfare rights movement. 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.

The words “welfare queen” caught fire the following year, in 1976, when presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan took the stage at a campaign rally. “In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Reagan declared. “She used eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veterans husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year.”

Children were no longer at the center of the national discourse. Instead, the public’s gaze was fixed on their mothers, whose poverty had deepened with the epidemics of crack and AIDS. By 1991, New York’s welfare rolls were approaching one million, a number that now included Dasani’s mother,

Fewer women worked, including her grandmother Joanie, who was still on welfare in 1996 when President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Out went the old system—the one originating with the child advocates of the early twentieth century. In came a new program centered on the adults. The goal was to move them off welfare and into the workforce. If you needed money, you now applied for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, facing time limits on cash and a mandate to look for work.

When it comes to being poor, there are less generous places than New York, one of the nation’s archetypal “safety net” states. New Yorkers have greater access to public healthcare, food stamps, and state-administered welfare cash, which comes with fewer restrictions than federal welfare and no time limits. New York City is the only American metropolis that guarantees the legal right to shelter, year-round, for both families and single adults, including non-pregnant women. But in practice, shelter gets denied and food stamps cut off with the vagaries of each city administration.

“Not everybody has something to lose,” Miss Hester says. “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.” Dasani ponders this. “I am telling you to listen to your internal barometer,” Miss Hester says. “Think about your next move before you make your next move.”

Milton’s original deed of trust provides for food and shelter before any mention of studies. The same logic came to inform the groundbreaking work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, who in 1943 created the “Hierarchy of Needs.” 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.

To be poor is to be stressed—a condition that all children experience, to some degree. A young girl might dread getting a shot at the doctor’s office. She sees the needle, and her stress response system is activated: Her heart beats faster, her adrenaline surges, and her body is energized for “fight or flight.” Once the threat passes, she returns to her physiological baseline, ideally with the help of a nurturing adult. But what if the threat continues, day after day? Poor children tend to live with chronic stress. They have greater exposure to violence, hunger, sleep deprivation, and illness. 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. When poor children fall behind in school, with low test scores or behavioral setbacks, they are presumed to lack character, or to suffer from “bad genes.” A new frontier of research, known as the “neuroscience of poverty,” tells another story. 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 in...

She is, in the parlance of experts (including her former teacher, Miss Hester), the “parentified” child. In chaotic, trauma-prone families—rich or poor—firstborn children tend to take on parental duties. This can make them self-sufficient, quick on their feet, and adept at survival. But once they assume a parental role, they have trouble transitioning back to childlike behavior. They are more resistant to authority and less trusting of people. They often struggle to develop lasting emotional bonds, having learned to care for themselves rather than leaving the task to anyone else.

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.

In the vernacular of ACS, the “targeted” child is the scapegoat, the focus of parental wrath. Sometimes a child is singled out for being hyperactive or disabled. In other cases, he or she reminds the parent of a past trauma.

Easy victories are the enemy of growth. A child must learn to reach beyond her comfort zone, ignoring immediate urges (to stop running when it hurts) in service of a long-term goal (to become a professional sprinter). This kind of exchange comes with “grit,” another buzzword making the rounds at Hershey. Grit, at its essence, is perseverance.

But among educators, the word has taken on a new meaning. This largely began in 2013, when Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a TED Talk originally titled “The Key to Success? Grit.” It drew more than 22 million views, spurring a movement among education reformers. Success, according to Duckworth, hinges not solely on talent or IQ but also on “grit,” which she defines as the “passion” for a goal combined with the “perseverance” to meet that goal. Absent the passion, perseverance wanes. Absent perseverance, passion is fleeting. When a person possesses both attributes, long-term goals can be met. People can learn to become “grittier,” says Duckworth, who measures this quality with a “Grit Scale.” The grittiest people are not discouraged by setbacks or distracted by new ideas.

There are some uncanny parallels between Duckworth’s research and the early views of Milton Hershey, who in 1924 said, “If a man does not like the work he does, he is not a success; if he loves his work, he does good work and lots of it.” Three years later, Milton told the aptly named Success magazine: “When you tackle a job, stick to it until you have won the battle.” Milton called this “character building.” Duckworth calls it “building grit.” She advises choosing one thing and learning it well—precisely what Milton demanded in his original deed of trust. If a student is deemed “incompetent” to “master a trade,” reads the trust, this is grounds for expulsion. But how to teach such mastery? Duckworth gave some pointers. Hershey’s houseparents should try to create “optimal conditions,” instilling in these children the discipline of “deliberate practice.” This is how Olympic athletes and professional musicians hone their skills. Children can do the same. They must set “stretch goals,” which are things they cannot yet do. They need instant feedback and constant repetition. When the goal is conquered, a new “stretch goal” is set.