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August 1 - August 5, 2022
Almost half of New York’s 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line.
Fort Greene’s two economies are an experiment born of gentrification—a term derived from the gentry, which means “people of high social status, nobility.” 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 place that has been “discovered,” as though no one had been living there.
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.
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.
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.
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
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“Because they never had anything, so they were…selfish people. And I just didn’t get with that. I couldn’t understand that,” Chanel said of her mother and aunt. “We was like strangers. And so that’s how I met the streets.”
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
There was no more thrilling place for a twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur than Manhattan at the height of the Gilded Age. It was a city of stunning contrasts, of squalid tenements and lavish mansions. A handful of tycoons had amassed great wealth—the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the steel mogul Andrew Carnegie, the banking giant J. Pierpont Morgan, the shipping and railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Some habits are “a rural thing” and some are an “urban thing.” When asked whether hoarding food is rural or urban, Jason and Tabitha say the same words, at the exact same time: “It’s a poverty thing.”
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.
Pollak does not see these behaviors as irreversible, and neither does Hershey. The school has aligned itself with the work of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist known for pioneering the “growth mindset”—a theory that the brain is malleable; that a person can get smarter with effort, good strategies, and the help of mentors.
Dweck’s research challenges this belief. She shows that when children think that their intellectual abilities can improve, they are more likely to work hard. And working hard allows the brain to “grow,” by strengthening its neural connections.
At Hershey, the growth mindset can be reduced to one word: “yet.” The school wants its children to go from saying “I’m not good at math” to saying “I’m not good at math yet.” The “yet” places them on a continuum where mistakes are embraced rather than shunned. Students are taught about the “growth mindset,” using it as a crutch when they stumble. In math class, they can be heard telling one other: “Wait! Don’t get frustrated. We can feel our brains growing!”
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.
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.
Lately, when Dasani gets mad, her housefather has only to say, “Those who anger you…” and she finishes the sentence: “…control you.”
All of Dasani’s siblings have been placed in therapeutic homes, bringing the foster parents an average monthly income of up to $1,900 per child. For each day that these children remain in foster care, the Foundling agency receives another $93 for every child. In total, the care of Chanel and Supreme’s children is costing more than $33,000 per month—a figure that will approach $400,000 per year. The Foundling supervisor, Linda, often thinks about this math. It would cost far less to keep a poor family intact, sparing them the trauma of separation, by placing a full-time aide in the home to
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She sees his slogan on the socks of her English teacher, Mr. Baker—the same white man who teaches code-switching in class. The students are aghast. When they challenge Baker, he cites the Trump mantra, which Dasani repeats coolly: “that he gonna make America great again.”
“There comes a point where talking about it doesn’t make you feel better anymore,” reads Dasani’s Facebook post, taken from a poetry website. “You just live with your mouth closed and your walls up and your heart hidden.”
To be poor is to be surveilled.
