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

by Andrea Elliott

New York City’s school system—now the largest in the nation—is also among the most segregated. One percent of McKinney’s students are white. It is also true that the vast majority of Success Academy’s students (seven thousand are enrolled in fourteen schools) are Black or Latino and from low-income families. But they possess an advantage over Dasani: They win their spot by lottery, which requires the help of an adult—one with a reliable email account or at least a cellphone that doesn’t shut off. None of these conditions exist for Dasani. What she knows is the other side.

They also rely on public assistance, which can vary from month to month. Right now, in October 2012, Dasani’s family is getting $182 in monthly welfare cash, $1,103 in food stamps, and $724 in survivors benefits for Supreme’s first two children (due to the death of their mother, his first wife). This comes to about $65 a day, which, divided among a family of ten, amounts to $6.50 per person—the cost of a subway trip and a gallon of milk.

White people divide into two categories: those who are paid to monitor Dasani’s family, and those who are called to help. Sometimes the same people wear both hats. Rarely does the family trust them. They figure in Dasani’s life because of the work they do. And on the afternoon of October 4, 2012, this small circle expands to include me, a staff writer at The New York Times.

Dasani and Chanel have no reason to trust me. Eventually, Chanel will confess that if I weren’t a mother, she would never have let me near her children. It also helps that I am not, in her words, “all white” because I am “Latin.” My ethnicity delights Dasani, whose biological father is half Dominican. But to Chanel, race matters more.

Just then, Supreme leaps into the air. His welfare benefits have arrived, announced by a recording on his prepaid phone. He sets off to reclaim his gold teeth from the pawnshop, at a 50 percent interest rate. He will then buy new boots for the children at Cookie’s, a discount store in Fulton Mall. By week’s end, the money will be gone. 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.

Don’t become a statistic is something Dasani hears all the time—from the teachers at McKinney to the preachers on the street. There is little that Dasani can do to become, or un-become, the statistics that mark her life. 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. She does not need the proof of abstract research. She can see with her own eyes where the numbers lead. “I want to get a job—not be on the street like other people.

Contrary to New York City’s image as a progressive beacon, it was a Manhattan-born minstrel named Thomas Dartmouth Rice who in the 1830s invented the slave caricature Jim Crow—a mockery, performed in blackface, that came to personify segregation.

“High scores reflect the parents, not the kids,” Miss Hester says, referring to homes plentiful in food, where studying is not a luxury.

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.

In 1953 alone—the year that his daughter Joanie was born—June had five different employers, bringing him a total income of $2,900 (nearly $29,000 in 2021 dollars). Eventually, he found steadier work as a janitor, mopping floors and cleaning toilets at a private school for disabled children. He worked the night shift. This was not just a professional loss, but a financial one. Black janitors earned 41 percent less than white mechanics. The gap between these incomes, over the next twenty years of June’s working life, would come to $192,000 of lost earnings in today’s dollars.

As more Black people moved to Bed-Stuy, the city withheld sufficient policing and other services. The neighborhood’s fate was sealed in 1935, when the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation began color-coding American cities, using race as a criterion to identify risky investment areas on the map. African American hubs like Bed-Stuy were marked in red for “hazardous.” If you lived in a redlined zone, it was almost impossible to get a mortgage.

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.

This was the dawn of “modern homelessness,” a phenomenon driven by Reagan-era cutbacks, stagnating wages, and the soaring cost of homes.

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.”

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. Dasani has seen this with her mother. Even when Chanel is sober, she is so preoccupied with feeding her children or staying sheltered that she is always on high alert. Her brain is consumed by the project of survival. Chanel cannot thrive like this any more than a race car could win on an empty tank. Only at the top of this pyramid of needs would she find things like “confidence” and “creativity,” which keep a person believing that the base will hold.

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.

One important aspect of this is that it arguably denies the person agency to one degree or another.

“Home is the people. The people I hang out with. The people I grew up with. That, to be honest, is really home. Family who have had my back since day one. It doesn’t have to be a roof over my head…. At Hershey, I feel like a stranger. Like I don’t really belong. In New York, I feel proud. I feel good. I feel accepted when I’m in New York.” She wants to feel at home wherever she goes. And that means having the freedom to speak like her sisters—without hearing the voice of correction, nudging her from “ain’t” to “isn’t.” “I be having to correct myself. It just makes me feel like I can’t really be myself. I always gotta be aware of how I talk, all the time.”

This is a basic but seemingly critical part of the cultural change required to overcome poverty. Language is so key. Closely related to family strength, grievance vs. can-do attitude, etc.