Invisible Child Quotes

“For these are all our children. We will all profit from, or pay for, what they become. —James Baldwin”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Almost nothing counts more than the person who shows up.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“By this equation, anger + fighting = triumph = survival.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“If we get lost, I enlist the GPS, which has the whitest voice of all. Chanel supplants it with her own impoverished GPS, reengineering each set of directions into phrases like 'Yo bitch, I said hang a right on Roosevelt" or " AH shit, you missed it again, now we gotta reroute this motherfucker. " She wants to launch an app called Hood GPS , to spare drivers from the robotic white voices in their ears.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: The donated clothing is top shelf. Used purple uggs and pantagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans. A Phil & Teds rain shell fished from the garbage protects the babys creaky stroller.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Today, one must dig to uncover the history of Black Fort Greene, whose pioneers seem in danger of being forgotten. Dr. McKinney’s former brownstone at 205 DeKalb Avenue—the site of her thriving medical practice—would be listed for sale in 2016 for nearly $2.7 million, without any mention of its history. Instead, the names of Brooklyn’s slave-holding families dominate the terrain. Boerum Hill (named for Simon Boerum, a man with three slaves). Wyckoff Street (Peter Wyckoff, enslaver of seven). Ditmas Park (four slaves). Luquer Street (thirteen). Van Brunt Street (seven). Cortelyou Road (two). Both Van Dam and Bayard streets are named for the owners of slave ships, while Stuyvesant Heights is named for the man who governed the New Netherland colony of the Dutch West India Company, which shipped tens of thousands of slaves. Even the McKinney school began with a slave-owning name. Back when Dasani’s grandmother was a student, this was still the Sands Junior High School, named for Joshua Sands (enslaver of six) and his brother Comfort Sands (three). None of this is known to Dasani, whose parents only talk about the slavery of their Southern ancestors. The North is where they came to be free.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“It is now July 2015, the midpoint of a summer that feels like no other in Supreme’s memory. Two weeks earlier, a white supremacist had gunned down nine Black worshippers at a historic church in Charleston. The country seems ripe for another civil war, with a cohort of white Americans defending their Confederate flags while Black activists mount a movement that has enshrined Eric Garner’s name. 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.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“But by age four, the poor children had developed less “gray matter,” the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional behavior, problem solving, memory, and other skills critical to learning. 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.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“you have a big enough why, you can endure almost any how.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“Almost half of New York’s 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“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.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“Fake” is a word that Dasani uses all the time. Politeness is “fake” if it hides a person’s true feelings. Restraint is also “fake,” whereas giving someone the middle finger is “real.” Dasani will only be real. She is fond of saying, “This is who I am. Love me or hate me.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“When it starts to get uncomfortable, you know you’re getting better,”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“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.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“neuroscience of poverty,” tells another story.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Her Knee will have to be replaced, he says. This should come as bad news. But to Chanel, it feels irrelevant. It is like opening a letter after a tornado has flattened her home and reading that she needs a new roof.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“It takes no time for Dasani and Kali to create their own Hershey inspired system, categorizing skin color by chocolate type. Hershey's lightes kids are "white chocolate". The brown students are "Milk Chocolate". Anyone of a deeper shade is " Dark Chocolate" . "Caramel is reserved for Latinos. I'm basically a Rolo, Dasani tells me. It a candy that's milk chocolate with Caramel on the inside.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“This is the place that years ago, had caught the eye of Dasani's Brooklyn principal, Miss Holmes. She had been standing in the theme park below, squinting up, saying, " What is that?". Now Dasani stands at the thop of that hill, gazing down at the park. SHe sees a tangle of roller coasters and other rides, a view that leaves her awestruck. It is hard to know which site holds more power- a theme park in the eyes of of a poor child, or a palatial school in the eyes of a Brooklyn principal.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“She had landed the better odds, starting with the drug that ruled their respective childhoods. Chanels mother had chosen crack. Supreme's parents had fallen to heroin. Both habits could be catastrophic, but given the choice, crack was the better bet. A crack addict could learn to function between highs. Heroin left people flattened.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Even dasani's name speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn's bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgengences. Who paid for water in a bottle? Just the sound of it- Dasani- conjured another life.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Money was so tight that the following year, in 1994, Chanel agreed to have some teeth pulled. A dentist in East New York was offering a subway token, worth $1.25, for each tooth. Working from a dingy office on Pennsylvania Avenue, he billed Medicaid for this scam. None of that mattered to Chanel, Roach, Margo, or Joanie, all of whom had teeth pulled. Chanel remembers her body thrashing in pain as strangers held her down in the chair. The dental office charged Medicaid $235 for pulling four of Chanel’s teeth. She left with a few subway tokens.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Joanie was in no position to judge her daughter. If anything, she felt guilty. She had turned her life around too late.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“Babies made life bright again. They were a salve, a chance to try out wisdom gleaned from past mistakes.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“Entitlement is born of self worth.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“In 2014—one year after Dasani competed in a track competition at the Pratt Institute—Spike Lee stood onstage there during Black History Month, delivering a rant against gentrification. “Then comes motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” fumed Lee. “You can’t discover this! We been here.” He went on to compare Fort Greene Park to the Westminster Dog Show, “with twenty thousand dogs running around,” while lamenting how his father, a jazz musician who had purchased his home in 1968, was playing acoustic bass when his new neighbors, in 2013, called the police. “You just can’t come in where people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here?” The same forces are reshaping Bed-Stuy, the historic neighborhood where Dasani’s great-grandfather June first landed and where her teacher, Miss Hester, still lives. Around the corner from her basement rental, a trendy café now sells $4 espressos. Miss Hester resents the neighborhood’s white transplants, walking around “as if I am the outsider, and I’m like, ‘Excuse me I was born here!’ ”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“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 Prosperity." It is no accident that the constitution connects welfare to posterity, which means all future generations. For prosperity relies on the existence of children, and it was children who gave rise to Americas' modern welfare program.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“Dasani shares a twin mattress with her closest sister, Avianna, whose name was inspired by the pricer Evian brand of water.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“To write about a child is to reckon with other childhoods.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

“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 until after the series ran, when James called to make an offer: Would Dasani participate in the mayoral inauguration?”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“It did not matter that Reagan had chosen an extreme outlier to represent the masses (she was identified as Linda Taylor, a con artist in Chicago, investigated for homicides, baby trafficking, and kidnapping). She bore no resemblance to women like Grandma Joanie, whose own welfare assistance would peak at $650 monthly—scarcely enough to cover clothing, meals, school supplies, and the other needs of her two dependent children.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City