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A question of honor


The sexual mores of Egyptian culture confine sex to marriage, but marriage in Egypt is an expensive enterprise.  For the upper middle class, it requires rings with diamonds — and many of them — a furnished apartment and lavish engagement and wedding parties to entertain the entire extended family.  Families with less money haggle over the prices of refrigerators and washing machines.  The expense and stress of what can be viewed only as a thinly veiled business deal between two families intent on solidifying their relationships means that marriage is often postponed until both parties are in their late 20s.

While furnished apartments and bathrooms with marble, not tile, may be the topics of discussion during these family negotiations, the consummation of an Egyptian marriage ultimately rests on the woman’s virginity. Since there’s no male virginity test, women bear the responsibility for upholding their culture’s sexual morals, and they pay a high price for it. In rural and poor communities, honor killings, like this recent one in Kuwait, are carried out by relatives in an attempt to preserve their families’ honor, and rid the family of both the shame and economic burden of having an unmarriageable female in the family).  Among the middle class and wealthy, losing your virginity before the wedding night entails a visit to a plastic surgeon to have your hymen reattached.  Unlike in the United States, single mothers aren’t a demographic, or the target of social services programs — they simply don’t exist.

Or, to be more accurate, they don’t exist publicly; or at least, they didn’t, until now. Hind el-Hinnaway, a 27-year-old Egyptian costume designer and single mother, has captured national attention and sparked what many hope will blow open discussion about women and sexuality in Egypt.  El-Hinnawy has filed a paternity suit against the famous television actor Ahmed el-Fishaway, demanding that he take responsibility for their child. The two met on the set of his television show and allegedly entered into a civil marriage — a contractual relationship that does not require a wedding, but permits a couple to cohabitate. She became pregnant, and chose to go ahead and have the child rather than have an abortion. When el-Fishaway chose to ignore her, she took him to court and is now suing him in a landmark paternity case — the first in Egypt to use DNA testing.

El-Hinnawy hopes the case will force Egyptians to examine the hypocrisy embedded in their society, which increasingly embraces a model of gender relations embedded in what many consider a dangerously conservative interpretation of Islam.

“I did the right thing: I didn’t hide, and eventually he will have to give the baby his name,” she said. “People prefer that a woman live a psychologically troubled life; that doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t become a scandal.”

—Laura Louison

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Quote of note



“The Americans came to free the Iraqi people from Saddam — I didn’t expect this was going to happen. When they first came, it appeared that they were good, but this incident changed the entire picture of what Americans look like.”

—Hussein Mutar, an Iraqi imprisoned at Abu Ghraib, testifying in the trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr.

Yesterday, a military jury found Special Graner guilty on charges of assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts, and dereliction of duty during his tenure as a prison official in Abu Ghraib. His sentencing is scheduled for today.

While the Bush administration continues to portray the Abu Ghraib scandal as the actions of a few, masochistic soldiers, it remains difficult to view the incident as an isolated one in light of the investigations of torture and human rights violations that now extend to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, as well as Iraq.  The Bush administration continues to distance itself from previous legal speculation that torture techniques were permissible, but for Iraqis like Mr. Mutar, the damage has already been done.

—Laura Louison

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Promoting peace, with some gender equity on the side


On Tuesday, Egypt and the United States signed a trade agreement to establish the creation of Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs) within Egypt.  These zones will allow for Egyptian factories within the QIZs to export their products to the United States, duty-free. The agreement is seen as a reward for Egypt’s recent attempts to reestablish a positive relationship with Israel, and possibly shift the tide of anti-Israel popular opinion in Egypt — but as Orly Halpern reports in The Christian Science Monitor, a similar agreement in Jordan is having unexpected results.

Jordan’s QIZs increased their exports to the United States from two million dollars in 1994, to one billion dollars in 2004; the materials used in the QIZ factories come in part from Israel.  There isn’t any evidence that Jordanians have changed their feelings about their neighboring country, but the factories have functioned as a catalyst for increasing female independence. Jordan’s QIZ employs tens of thousands of workers, who are predominantly female. The jobs provide newfound economic independence for Jordanian women, who were previously solely dependent on males for sustenance, and removes them from the seclusion of their homes by providing dormitory housing for workers.

United States’ support of the Egyptian economy is nothing new, but in a country where school children understand the Holocaust as a positive historical event and draw swatstikas on their notebooks, it will take more than linking economic aid to support of Israel to alter popular opinion. However, by providing economic empowerment to Egyptian women, the trade agreement may have even more insidious results — women with economic power.

—Laura Louison

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EZ Pass Identity


Picture this: you’re standing in line at customs in JFK International Airport, the duty free bottle of wine in your hands growing increasingly heavier, when a customs official walks up to you with a bar code scanner and says, “Okay, Ms. Louison, you can go ahead now.”  As you walk through the gates and leave the other unlucky souls behind, you thank God and the State Department for the $8 computer chip in your passport.

According to The New York Times, the State Department will soon begin issuing a new style of passport — one that carries your facial measurements and identifying information in a computer chip embedded in its front cover and pages.  Following in the steps of Australia, these new passports are meant to combat identity theft and passport fraud, but privacy watchdog groups like the The American Civil Liberties Union are concerned that the new technology will both violate individuals’ rights and leave American travelers open to potentially hostile electronic spying.

“This is like putting an invisible bull’s-eye on Americans that can be seen only by the terrorists,” said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program.

Laboratory tests, as yet substantiated in the field, indicate that the chips may be readable up to 30 feet. “Skimming” (electronic snooping) may be combated by carrying passports in a foil envelope or encrypting and password-protecting the data — but despite these measures, the ACLU sees the new technology as evidence of the United States’ increasing evolution into a surveillance society.  The combination of ever smarter technology and post 9-11 security measures increasingly beg the question: when do our individual liberties outweigh our national security?  

And, on a personal level, will my new passport put me in greater individual risk in order to protect our country? When I first moved to the Middle East, I was repeatedly warned not to show anyone my passport unless absolutely necessary — both to avoid being overcharged, but also to avoid being targeted as American.  The possibility that someone could walk next to me in the street and identify me instantly is unsettling, to say the least.  In our current climate of hostage-taking, unless the State Department can guarantee my anonymity, I’ll avoid replacing my passport for as long as possible.

—Laura Louison

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Sunshine in the clouds


As 2004 grinds to a dismal halt, a spot of hope appears: a study of HIV positive children in Zambia reveals that pediatric deaths from AIDS can be halved by administering a readily available and inexpensive antibiotic.  

The Guardian reports that a study conducted by the Medical Research Council found that administering co-trimoxazole (also known as Bactrim) cut AIDS-related deaths by 43 percent in children. While co-trimoxazole is a prophylactic and therefore cannot prevent HIV from developing into AIDS, it effectively deals with the secondary and tertiary infections, such as pneumonia or tuberculosis, that often result in AIDS-related deaths.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF have accordingly altered their policies regarding HIV and AIDS medical treatment for children. In a world where as many as 1,300 children die daily from AIDS, this is thrilling research.  At last, there is some news worthy of celebration at your Thanksgiving table.

—Laura Louison

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Adoption and racism: a response


Over the past several days I have received a vast amount of mail in response to my October 29th PULSE Posting, “Pssst … Wanna buy a baby?”  Unfortunately, much of this mail was vitriolic in tone, and made offensive comments regarding my supposed race and/or the race of my child.  I have responded to most individuals who wrote me, as long as their email was not aggressive, but would like to address several points that were common among all emails.

Clearly, Davenport’s Christian Science Monitor article, and my summary thereof, does not reflect the entirety of the wide-ranging debate surrounding adoption.  Rather, it highlighted a concerning new trend, albeit without hard or fast statistics as adoption it seems, is a field without extensive data collection. The international adoption of African American babies is concerning, particularly when held in contrast to the rising numbers of international adoptions by middle class Americans.  As citizens invested in an ongoing dialogue about identity and race, we cannot help but question the implications of these trends.

Several readers pointed out significant barriers to interracial adoption beyond those illustrated in the article. One such obstacle is the decaying American foster care system, in which children linger indefinitely in a netherworld between ever changing caregivers.  Unlike foreign countries, the United States does not support a large orphanage system and in most cases, presses for reunification of the family rather than adoption by a permanent, non-kin caregiver.  The foster care systems’s problems are manifold, and in no way make adoption within the United States an easy process.  In addition, there is a history of social work agency resistance to interracial placement, as unnecessarily traumatic or, worse, inappropriate.

I do not believe that  personal experience as either an adopted child or an adoptive parent is necessary to hold an opinion about adoption, no more than experience as a member of a minority ethnic group is necessary to form an opinion about racism. Those individuals touched personally by adoption may no doubt have different opinions based on their unique experiences.  Nonetheless, as we pursue dialogue, no topic can be held as sacred, and it is our most personal beliefs and actions that often necessitate the closest scrutiny.

—Laura Louison

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Psst…wanna buy a baby?


The State Department’s international adoption statistics indicate that international adoptions by United States citizens have increased by 140 percent since 1995. These numbers mask a troubling insight into the racial politics of the American middle class.  As Americans fly to China, Russia and Guatemala for their children, (14,396 children in 2003), African American babies must be exported to other countries to find loving families.

As Dawn Davenport reports in The Christian Science Monitor, citizens of other countries increasingly look to the United States to find healthy African American babies ready for adoption. Americans do not go overseas because of a lack of children: while adoptive parents can wait up to five years for an American-born Caucasian child, the waiting time for parents eager to adopt an African American boy is under a year.  

“I think that more Americans would adopt these babies if they knew they were available,” says Stacy Hyer, a white American living in Germany with two adopted black children.

But to blame the paucity of interracial adoptions on lack of media coverage does not fully address the complexity of the problem. Adoption is an expensive business, Davenport reports, and the costs of international adoption can hover around $40,000, compared to $10,000 to $12,000 for an African American male. While these numbers vary according to circumstance, it may not be frugality that drives Americans abroad, but lingering concerns and worries about the reality mixed race families face. Can Caucasian parents provide a good home for an African American child? Will he lose his connection to his culture? Who will do his hair?  Will he be the victim of heightened racism in a suburban, all-white community?  International adoptive parents may be more immune to such fears, and certainly, there are wonderful American parents whose love defies both their individual and community’s prejudices. Nonetheless, as African American children languish in foster care, middle class parents send them an undeniable message by choosing to predominantly adopt from abroad: you are less desirable than a child whose skin color is closer to our own. The adoption fees for African American babies reflect this terrifyingly prevalent attitude.

These trends may be changing as a younger, more racially fluid generation becomes parents, but the numbers can’t help but be disquieting.  An informal search for prospective parents revealed only three couples interested in adopting an African American child, while pages and pages of smiling, heterosexual couples sought Caucasian babies. Caucasian and international orphans undoubtedly need love too, but according to the Child Welfare League, there were approximately 542,000 children in the foster care system in the United States as of September 30, 2001, of which 38 percent were African-American. November is National Adoption Awareness Month. One can only hope that it will be used as a platform to increase awareness about the hidden racism of international adoptions.

—Laura Louison

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Quotes of note


“Yesterday we refused to go on a convoy to Taji. We had broken-down trucks, nonarmored vehicles. We were carrying contaminated fuel.”

—Specialist Amber McClenny, 21, on her mother’s answering machine

“My message to our troops is, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing. We’re standing with you strong. We’ll give you all the equipment you need. And we’ll get you home as soon as the mission’s done, because this is a vital mission.’”

—President George W. Bush, September 30, 2004, Presidential Debate

As The New York Times reports this morning, members of an Army reserve unit who refused to deliver a fuel and provisions shipment to troops north of Baghdad are currently under investigation for insubordination. Reports that 18 soldiers have been held at gunpoint for two days remain unconfirmed by the Pentagon, but relatives insist that the soldiers acted out of conviction as they felt they were being ordered to undertake a suicide mission.

The troops claim their trucks were deadlined — unsafe and unsuitable for combat operations.  Despite Pentagon claims that this remains an “isolated incident,” these claims echo concerned rumbles heard earlier in the war: American soldiers  are ill-equipped and insufficiently prepared for their duties. As John Kerry pointed out in the first debate, parents shouldn’t have to purchase body armor for their enlisted children as a birthday present.  

The gap between the President’s rhetoric and the reality American troops face grows ever wider.

—Laura Louison

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Democracy in action?


I regularly receive emails in my bulk mail folder counting down to the November election: “36 days ’till November 2nd!” “35 days ’till regime change!” I used to read them religiously, moving them into my Inbox and forwarding them to friends, signing petitions and (occasionally) giving money. But now, as the election grows closer, my fervor has slackened.  I won’t be voting in November.

It’s not that I’ve taken a principled stand against the electoral process. It’s that my country has made it nearly impossible for me to vote while abroad. As the New York Times reported, the overseas voting process is mired in a complicated and contradictory bureaucracy, and effectively disenfranchises the 3.9 million civilians abroad.

I moved overseas with every intention of continuing to fully participate in the political process and vote via absentee ballot. You can’t request an absentee ballot before being out of the state, so I had to wait ‘till moving to acquire one. The United States embassy sent out a convoluted memo directing citizens in Egypt to request absentee ballots by mail, but didn’t explain how. A friend pointed me towards this website, run by Kerry supporters, but I’ve received neither absentee ballot nor confirmation that Philadelphia City Hall ever received my request. Even if city hall did receive the request, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever get the ballot; Egypt’s mail isn’t known for its consistency. I’ll attempt to request yet another by fax today, but if that doesn’t work, my only remaining option is pick up a Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot at the consulate – and the American consulate is only open in Cairo four days a week, all work days.

To be fair, it may not be the federal government’s fault; the Times’ article reports that 18 states did not have systems in place to mail ballots at least 45 days before the election. The government has designed and activated a system for voters to receive ballots instantly via the Internet — but access to the site is limited to military personnel and their families. In a time of war, it’s difficult to see this move as anything but partisan, despite the Pentagon’s claims to the contrary. While there’s relatively little polling of military personnel or civilians living abroad, a Zogby poll found that 58 percent of Americans with passports supported Kerry. Both parties have made a concerted effort to attract overseas voters, insisting that the registration and voting process are not as complicated as the media has reported.  

I’ve been repeatedly reassured that “they don’t count those ballots anyway”, but that’s inadequate consolation, knowing as I do that the overseas vote may be essential in a swing state like Pennsylvania. After all, “…four years ago in Florida, absentee votes from Americans living overseas turned a 202 majority for Al Gore into a 537 majority for George Bush…” It’s frustrating to find that four years after the debacle of that election, the United States has failed to address the flaws in its electoral system, even as we attempt to “bring democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq.  

—Laura Louison

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Reviews

Will work for food

The price tag on the White House reveals that living the American dream isn’t cheap. And as David Shipler suggests in The Working Poor, the American dream also doesn’t come easy to most — no matter how hard they try.


(Courtesy of Knopf)

To read ITF’s interview with David Shipler, please click here.

There’s a popular liberal bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Following in the tradition of other canonical anti-poverty works like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Cold New World, David Shipler’s The Working Poor incites a similar sentiment. His investigative journalism delves deep into the seamless nature of poverty by unveiling the poor we are most likely to overlook: those who work.

This investigation is a formidable challenge — partially because poverty isn’t an easy subject to read about, but also because tackling the roots of cyclical poverty in America is like navigating a spider web: Everything is interconnected. In attempting to address the manifold causes and effects of poverty, Shipler bounces between migrant workers and drug-addicted mothers, homeless men and college-educated women. His subject shifts can at times be jarring or feel cursory, but Shipler’s work is ultimately powerful and moving because it is imminently readable. When Ron Suskind reviewed The Working Poor in February 2004 for The New York Times Review of Books, he explained, “This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read, and read now.” And this is a book many people can read. Shipler explores his subjects’ lives in an easy narrative, resisting the temptations of dry academic discourse. The book’s strength lies in Shipler’s ability to step aside and give his subjects the floor. His role is that of a guide, not merely a witness.

Budgets, bank accounts, and other enemies of the working poor

The working poor occupy an economic position the middle class typically only know from their summer job experiences in high school, a position we have difficulty acknowledging as anything other than transitory. But the working poor are always floating in our peripheral vision: the man who hands us our coffee, the woman who watches our children, the housekeepers who come through our offices at night while we relax at home, the bank teller who collects food stamps to support her kids. The job opportunities available to those who live on the brink of poverty are, for one reason or another, largely minimum wage. Such work doesn’t pay sufficiently in either salary or benefits to sustain a family. The stories — and struggles — of those Shipler terms “the working poor” poignantly illuminate the gap between what we consider poverty and what it really looks like for millions of men and women.

Why the gap? Americans, it seems, remain largely incapable of reading between the lines when it comes to the reality of the economic crisis. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the American dream doesn’t make room for ambiguities. We want people to climb from poverty to wealth (or at least the middle class) through hard work, to sweat their way off the welfare rolls. The media jumps on success stories as evidence of our socio-economic fantasy. But as Shipler suggests in the aptly titled chapter, “Work Doesn’t Work” — or rather, not all work works. Shipler argues that the American dream positions the poor as scapegoats and allows the middle class to ignore the trauma and hardship that frame their need. The working poor are left balancing their fragile lives against myths of hard work and perseverance.

To demonstrate the tenuous position occupied by the working poor, Shipler asked his subjects to keep budgets. Presented in the same easily navigable storytelling style that characterizes the rest of his work, the budgets, broken into simple numbers, reveal just how little budge room people working for minimum wage have, as they treadwater. Christie, a childcare worker, had a budget that looked like this:

Income:  $37.68Child Support Check
$660.00Monthly take home
$697.68

Expenses$15.00Gas
$6.00Take day care kids to zoo
$3.00Fee to cash paycheck (no checking account)
$172.00Rent (w/ late fee)
$31.47Layaway for Christmas presents
$40.00Shoes for two kids
$5.00Corduroy pants (second hand)
$5.00Shirt
$10.00Bell Bottom Pants
$47.00 x 2Bi-weekly car insurance
$43.00Phone
$34.00Gas (apartment)
$46.00             Electricity
$8.00 to $15.00        Prescriptions
$150.00Car payments
$72.00Medical insurance
$43.00Cable
$784.47

Simply put, it’s expensive to be poor in America. America’s working poor pay a double fee their predecessors never encountered. First, the working poor are required to pay surcharges to cash paychecks, wire money, receive child support, and file their taxes. They also face a marketing establishment that has argued successfully over the last 20 years that all Americans — rich and poor alike — deserve cable TV and the opportunities to dine out and wear name-brand apparel.

As Shipler demonstrates, poverty knows no racial, gender, or language lines — but it does disproportionately affect women. The majority of Shipler’s subjects are female, and many are single mothers. His sample reflects a gendered wage gap where women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a male. As the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reveals, this statistic has a devastating effect on women’s long-term earnings.

Poverty’s trail of tears

But budgets and the poverty line alone cannot define poverty. One of the book’s most exciting contributions to the popular discussion on poverty is the causal link it draws between trauma and endemic poverty — a correlation long familiar to academics and anti-poverty workers, but often invisible to those distanced from the front lines. Shipler explores this connection through Sarah’s personal narrative

I got molested twice as a child … When my mom and dad broke up and my mom moved out, my mom decided that she wanted to be a kid again ‘cause she had me when she was eighteen. She went to bars quite a bit. I was nine years old, and I stayed home by myself. So that was real hard. I was in foster homes, group homes. I was molested by an uncle and a family friend. I have a lot of mental health problems because of my upbringing. That’s why I can’t work. I suffer from severe anxiety, panic, post-traumatic stress syndrome, all kinds of different stuff.

Unless treated, trauma — particularly childhood trauma — profoundly impairs human beings’ ability to reach their potential. Shipler cites a 1997 study finding evidence that children subjected to stress often continue to display high levels of cortisol that then affect their neurological development. Childhood trauma is frequently linked with adult chemical dependency and exposure to violence. Dr. Sandra L. Bloom’s literature review, The PVS Disaster: Poverty, Violence and Substance in the Lives of Women and Children, reveals that between 50 and 70 percent of women on welfare have been in an abusive relationship at some point, a significantly higher proportion than the general population.

Trauma survivors are marked by a sense of powerlessness, what Shipler calls a “corrosive suspicion of worthlessness.” This feeling is compounded by his subjects’ sense of economic irrelevance. As one of Shipler’s subjects, Ann Brash, observes: “People who don’t call when they can’t come to work probably don’t think they’re important enough … It’s more than low self-esteem. It’s invisibility.”

Partisan politics and nonpartisan money matters

In incorporating this discussion of trauma within his examination of poverty, Shipler blows open partisan dialogue about poverty programs — making The Working Poor an essential read during this election season. Current political dialogue fails to address the endemic nature of poverty when it chooses to see people as either bad or lazy, or to place full blame on insufficient funding. As Shipler indicated when I spoke with him, “Liberals tend not to want to see the families’ individual failures, and conservatives tend to see only those [failures, ignoring] societal issues … only if you define the problem thoroughly can you invent thorough solutions.”

Shipler posits that the solution lies in part with integrated programs, like So Others May Eat (SOME) in Washington, D.C. Anti-poverty initiatives must not only address concrete issues like job training and benefits advocacy, but also what Shipler calls “soft skills” — how to show up for work on time, how to negotiate with peers and employers, and perhaps most importantly, how to heal from emotional injuries.  Dr. Bloom’s work has focused on helping service providers create trauma-informed systems that teach healing skills as a means for growth.

In order to create trauma-informed and integrated services, liberal and conservative social service ideologies must meet. Shipler writes:

In Watts, I asked the math teacher at Grape Street Elementary what problems could be solved with more money. ‘Practically everything except the trauma that kids are exposed to,’ he said. ‘And with more money we could provide services that deal with that better.”

Pleas for more money and discussion about trauma aren’t popular issues in election years, and, unsurprisingly, as of this writing, neither candidate has sufficiently addressed an anti-poverty platform capable of effectuating large-scale change. Given President George W. Bush’s history of programmatic cuts and tax reform designed to assist the upper echelons of American society, liberals look to Democratic candidate John Kerry for leadership. While Kerry’s plans to raise the minimum wage to $7 per hour and expand health care coverage for larger percentages of the population demonstrate a desire to reach low income voters by speaking to their concerns, his agenda is at best a superficial attempt at appeasing liberals rather than a genuine attempt to address poverty and mobilize voter turn out. This failure, of course, could hurt the Democrats as much as it hurts the working poor since the vote of the latter is essential to the former’s prospects of electoral success.  As Shipler points out in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, “Historically, the lower a person’s income, the greater his support for the Democrats — but the less likely he is to vote.”

The poor may not vote because, like Ann Brash, they feel invisible or because they don’t have transportation to the polls or child care. But they also don’t vote because they don’t see answers to their everyday problems in the candidates’ rhetoric. Kerry’s claim that the minimum wage raise will positively affect working mothers is accurate, but it still won’t raise them above the poverty level. Most living wage campaigns define a living wage as $8.20 for a family of four (although in urban areas, this rate is correspondingly higher). Raising the minimum wage for a 40-hour per week employee would amount to $3,800 more annually; enough to buy more groceries and jeopardize food stamp and welfare benefits, but not enough to ensure a family’s financial stability.

Focusing on minimum wage and job creation as solutions to poverty neglects the larger picture. As the Center for Law and Social Policy points out, 42 percent of projected job growth over the 20 years will be for workers with post-secondary training. But Bush proposes doubling the number of students trained by the workforce — without increasing the program’s funding. Minimum wage jobs are disappearing, and as Shipler writes in his conclusion, “the minimum wage is a blunt instrument, and the skill to use it is not perfected.” Shipler’s call for increased employment training and the revival of vocational education necessitates that Sen. John Kerry and other Democrats challenge private industries to step forward and bear responsibility for training workers.

But given the tendency of most politicians to consistently place a greater emphasis on middle-class families than on low-income workers, will private industries have any incentive to expend the resources necessary to train lower-income workers? It’s difficult to tell. After all, talking about poverty too much is derided as a liberal malady, the territory of left-wing journalists and activists incapable of seeing the long-term economic future; politicians are reluctant to tackle the issue whole heartedly for fear of alienating those constituents whose votes they rely on.

But perhaps we are moving away from these traditional divides: The poverty crisis in this country is attracting increasing attention from those in the center. Barbara Ehenreich’s bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America, was a fixture on bestseller list and selected as summer reading material for students at the University of North Carolina.

If a dialogue concerning poverty is to move to the center of our nation’s agenda, it will require not just armchair liberals willing to read a book or two, but political participation of all types at  all levels of the economic spectrum. James Agee wrote in 1936, ”Let us then hope better of our children, and of our children’s children; let us know there is a cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun …”

But if Shipler’s work teaches us anything, it’s that it isn’t enough to merely hope anymore. Incisive investigative journalism has only so much power to effect change As Shipler writes in closing: ”We do know how to do much more than we choose to do. Our insufficient will has not carried us even close to that twilight region where our competence fades.”

Shipler made the working poor visible, but the rest, it seems, is up to us — the readers, the voters, the workers, the employers, the privileged. We’re the ones who have to figure out how to make them feel visible — and powerful.

To read ITF’s interview with David Shipler, please click here.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the following links are used

The Working Poor
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0375408908

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0805063897

ORGANIZATIONS >

SOME program
URL: http://www.some.org

Center for Law and Social Policy
URL: http://www.clasp.org

America’s Second Harvest
URL: http://www.secondharvest.org

U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty Measurements
URL: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html

ACORN’s Living Wage Campaign
URL: http://www.livingwagecampaign.org

National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Voter Registration Project
URL: http://www.nlihc.org/vrem/

National Coalition Against Homelessness’ Voter Rights Manual
URL: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/vote2004/

Jobs with Justice
URL: http://www.jwj.org

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Agee and Walker’s Great Experiment
URL: http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_5.html

Dr. Sandra Bloom’s work
URL: http://www.sanctuaryweb.com

“

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Interviews

Working with the poor

A conversation with David Shipler regarding The Working Poor.

Runner-up for BEST OF ITF INTERVIEWS (SO FAR)


Recently, InTheFray Contributing Writer Laura Louison spoke with David Shipler about The Working Poor, the upcoming election, and the potential for investigative journalism to effectuate change:

The interviewer: Laura Louison, InTheFray Contributing Writer

The interviewee: David Shipler, author of The Working Poor

In the introduction to The Working Poor you state that you were curious about working people who’d been left behind as the economic boom took off and as welfare reform was put in place. Tell me a little bit about your incentives for undertaking this project and your reaction to what you learned through your research.

My incentive is part of a quest to understand my own country. I was working abroad for many years, and then covering foreign policy after I returned. I began to feel that that subject was too vicarious, and what I liked to do when I was living overseas as well, [was] write about the country I was living in. Since I was living in the United States, I wanted to focus on the most vexing problems facing America, so I began with race relations, and wrote A Country of Strangers, which was published in 1997, that [raised many] questions of poverty. I think both those issues are enormous ones for this country, and I wanted to try and understand them as well as I could. When I set out to write about poverty, I felt that since that particular condition was freighted with so much ethical baggage — that is, the idea of work as a moral enterprise in this society, and so many poor are vilified for not working, that I would try to remove as much of the moral element from the equation as I could by looking at only the people who were working, or who were [working] periodically at least, and trying to get ahead that way. So that was my motive for focusing on the poor or nearly poor, who were actually at work.

As for what I found, well that’s a very big question with a very big and long answer. I’m a liberal, but I’m also a reporter so what I tried to do was to take my ideological lens and put it aside, and look with clear eyes, if I could, at this condition, this situation, and talk to people about what forces converged upon them to bring them where they were — namely working, but not able to move out of that zone of the edge of poverty. And what I found was that the forces were both societal and personal. That is, there were failures of the society’s institutions: public education, private enterprise, government services — and there were also terrible family problems that weighed people down and created in them legacies of hardship and disability from which they found it difficult to recover. [The] whole pattern [of domestic violence, for instance,] is tied in with alcoholism often, drug abuse, and so forth. I think [this cycle] affects people’s ability to function well in the economic marketplace.

So many women told me they had been sexually abused as children, and they had to say that, I think, as a way of explaining why they distrusted men — no surprise – and why they had difficulty forming lasting relationships. [This] has both an emotional and an economic consequence. If you’re earning low wages, and you’re part of a family that has two or three wage earners, that’s one thing, but if you’re a single wage earner, that’s quite a different thing. So, that realization that the problems of these folks really encompassed a broad array of issues, both those that are family-based and those that are societally based, led me to a couple of conclusions.

One was that the best way to address the issues was to reform not only societal institutions and policies, but also to provide services that could help people recover personally. And you know, if institutions where [poor] people go very often — schools, medical clinics, so forth — can become gateways to arrays of services, either containing them under one roof or at least referring people to services, and trying to address the whole range of problems that a given person or family faces, then some headway can be made, I think. The other [conclusion] is that in the political arena — and this sounds like a very naïve thing to say in an election year — that liberals and conservatives have to stop shouting at each other and start listening to each other if any headway’s going to be made here.

I find a lot of liberals — and this does not include people who actually do anti-poverty work who actually understand the problems — who are rather doctrinaire, and I’m one. I’m not doctrinaire, but I’m a liberal and tend not to want the family’s individual failures, and conservatives tend to see only those [failures, ignoring] the societal issues. If liberals and conservatives — and I include here conservatives who really want to do something, and not those who say, “Well, it’s their fault therefore we don’t have any obligation,” pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that everyone carries around, then they’d have a [complete] picture of the whole problem. And only if you define the problem thoroughly, can you invent thorough solutions. So that’s a plea for political dialogue across the ideological lines, which is not a very likely element, but I still think it’s necessary.

It’s also in many ways, I think, a plea for political involvement by people in lower socio-economic classes, which is really not something that I think is possible for many people who are struggling.

Well, I think you’re right … I just did a 568593.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions”>piece that ran in the L.A. Times about how important it [is] for Kerry to mobilize low-income voters with economic appeals because, as you probably know, the lower you go down in the income strata, the lower the voter turn out, but the higher the Democratic support among those who do turn out. So, it ran in 2000 from 75 percent of eligible voters turning out who earned over $75,000 turning out down to, I think it was 38 percent of those earning under $10,000 a year. And I did a little arithmetic and figured that if, that you could have added 6.8 million voters if those under $25,000 turned out at the same rate as those under $75,000. Of course, there are many reasons that low-income people don’t vote.

Among them, the exhausting lives that they lead, the complex logistics of getting to the polls when they have to juggle strange job shifts and child care and all of that, but I think beyond that there’s a sense of disengagement that exceeds people at other income levels. I mean, it’s a petty universal phenomenon in the United States, that sense of : “What difference is it going to make, the politicians are all the same. I can’t believe them, They’re not talking about my issues.” That’s not [an attitude] restricted to low-income people, but I think those of low-income feel it a little more acutely, and don’t see the connection between a vote and a policy. That’s certainly a key, a key issue in this election year especially I think. And I know there are pro-Democratic organizations, such as Emily’s List and People Coming Together, that are targeting low-income voters, and working on it.

Well, it really taps into the invisibility of poor people that Ann Brash talks about in your book.

A lot of people [feel invisible] I think a lot of people internalize that perception of themselves. They don’t feel that they matter, and that comes out of not just the way that society treats them when they’re poor, but also their own repeated failures. I mean, if you failed in school and in relationships and on the job repeatedly, you don’t have a lot of confidence in your own ability to affect change. The sense of powerlessness is really quite overwhelming. Some people will say that it’s their fault that they are where they are, they’ve made mistakes, they should have done things differently, they’ve saddled themselves with huge debt, and I think that too is an internalization of society’s view of them, and I think it belies their underlying doubt about their ability to make change. It’s like Sara Goddell [and Willie in The Working Poor] who said, “Yes, it’s our fault,” but Sara said she felt powerless to change. I think there are lots of reasons for that. You can encounter this surely in the women you counsel, this sense of powerlessness?

[That’s certainly an integral dynamic of] domestic violence because you give power over your life to an intimate partner. But most of the women I work with are people who, once they get to me, are system veterans — people the system has failed at many levels —  and so I think they don’t see themselves as powerful in their relationships, but that’s also part of a whole dynamic. They don’t see themselves as powerful in relation to their welfare worker, [or] in relation to their children and youth worker … The list goes on and on and on.

I wonder if you looked at the way they were parented, whether that sense of powerlessness began there. That the parents, or the parent, or the older grandmother, or whoever was the primary caregiver, took from them the decision-making abilities, or the right to control what they could control. You know, people who have looked at the patterns of play in children, and who use play therapy, have seen how important it is to let a child set the course of play, make some decisions, and have the decisions impact the way the adult interacts with the child. So the child does something, the adult interacts, reacts, and then there’s a circle of interaction, and the child then reacts and does something else, and so forth. That kind of play may not happen in certain families. I don’t know if it’s based on socio-economic levels — but I’m sure, it’s a lack that exists at other economic levels as well — but for people who are poor and have a lot of other issues piling up on them, that one can help to create a whole syndrome.

I’ve interviewed women who got pregnant in high school and dropped out and had babies out of wedlock, who if you talk to them for a while, you can’t help feeling that they were making choices but they either didn’t realize they were making choices, or didn’t realize the long-term impact of the choices, or made choices consciously for the wrong reasons, or were trying to gain autonomy or some kind of independence, a posture from their mother who’s on their case all the time. A lot of low-income parents are highly anxious about their kids, and are deeply afraid of their kids going astray, and react to that possibility with so much anxiety that they’re constantly telling their kids, “No, no, no,” when they live in dangerous neighborhoods, or are tempted by drugs and so forth. I’m thinking about a woman who dropped out of school, and when her daughter dropped out of school, she was just devastated. Her daughter wasn’t pregnant, but in terms of dropping out of school she was following her mother’s pattern, and it was just heartbreaking for her mother to see this happening.

I imagine that if you live in an environment where risks are very rarely rewarded, you’re reluctant to have your children take those risks because it seems like a very scary prospect.

Yeah. The risks are really foolhardy risks, not really risks [that are going] to pay dividends, the kinds of risks that nobody would want their kids to take. I think also you get another pattern here, too, especially in inner-city neighborhoods, of aggressive, pre-emptive anger. You protect yourself by getting in the other guy’s face before he gets in yours. That whole methodology works very well in the street but it doesn’t work at all well in the school or on the job. I remember visiting a school in Baltimore — I think it was a middle school — and talking to kids who were peer counselors, and they were interesting because they were doing mediation with kids who got tin fights, and they had to use techniques, or recommend ways of thinking that [contradicted] what they had all been taught by their mothers, their fathers, their older brothers as methods of survival on the street. So it was almost a code-switching operation where they walked to school every day and they got in everybody’s face, and they got to walk through the school doors and to function there. At least according to the rules [they got] to function with the adults in the school, they had to take a completely different approach. Of course, then there were all the other kids in school and they still had to get in their face. So it was really complicated. How do you sort that out?

And then, on the job, anger management is a big issue. It’s a huge problem for many low-income workers, and it’s one that employers are not equipped to deal with for the most part. So all of that comes into play, and I don’t know how you address it really. It’s very complicated.

To take a different tack, I was curious about what intersections you saw between race and poverty, or ethnicity and poverty. I know that the subjects in your book come from many different backgrounds in terms of language, age — and I know that you’ve written about race issues in America in the past.

(Laughs) At 600 pages about racial issues, I figured I had pretty much covered that subject. I didn’t really set out to ignore race in the book, or even play it down. But I went about this book by trying to find common ground among the experiences of the various demographic groups. So, I went to rural areas, I went to urban areas, to different occupations — agriculture, manufacturing, service. I went to blacks and Latinos and Asians and whites, men and women — although women dominate, as they do dominate the ranks of the poor in the United States in terms of households. [I] began to [see] themes transcending all of these categories. There were certainly differences, in terms of migrant workers in California and native-born Americans in South Washington, D.C., or New Hampshire. But there were also themes that ran through all these folks’ lives. I began to feel that given all that has been written by a whole lot of other people, it was important to focus on those themes and to make sure that readers understood that the phenomenon that they were reading about was not one that was limited to a particular racial group, so that they could see that this was a problem that went across cultures and across ethnic lines in the United States.

Having said that, though race is still a huge factor in poverty. The poverty rates among blacks are much higher than with whites, three times [higher], I believe. The school systems in which black kids learn are inferior to the school systems where even low-income white kids learn, in many ways. The degree of neighborhood dysfunction, if you can call it that, is more severe for blacks than whites, [though in many cases, not all, there are certainly bad neighborhoods for whites, too.] That is, the external factors are powerfully lined up against blacks.

In addition, there’s a whole pattern of discrimination in jobs and elsewhere in other
parts of the society and other parts of life that weigh on blacks in a way that whites just never experience.  The sense of marginalization, the difficulty of either getting a job or getting a promotion. [For instance, at] the rubber company [I visited in] Cleveland, the foremen are white, and there are black workers, and there are racial tensions. And the [boss] couldn’t explain why his foremen were white, but he acknowledged that this was an issue, a problem. So there’s a power structure thing, [and] all these factors make it more difficult for blacks.

The other part of this is the issue of net worth, which isn’t something that’s been explored sufficiently and is not a factor in determining the poverty line, and it should be. They hadn’t updated figures when I did this book, but the median net worth of white families in the United States versus the median net worth of black families with the same education level, and same income, is usually different. And I think that you can describe poverty not only as income but also as debt and net worth, because that has a huge psychological effect as well as a financial one, so that people carrying a whole lot of debt feel imprisoned by that and don’t see possibility and opportunity as attainable. Unless that gets thrown in the mix, you don’t have a full picture. You know the income gives you a still photograph of the present, but the debt gives you a longitudinal picture of what’s happened in the past. And people can argue that if you have debt, you’ve brought that on yourself. Part of that is sometimes true, when people run up huge credit card balances and can’t pay them, but if you’ve been poor and you don’t have medical care, and you have to go to the emergency room, and you don’t have insurance, they have to treat you, but they can also bill you, which means that if you can’t pay, that goes on your credit report. There’s this [white] guy Willy in New Hampshire, who had a pretty good job as a roofer, but he had this $10,000 debt from emergency rooms when his teeth were abscessed and he couldn’t afford to go the dentist. He couldn’t even get a phone installed in his own name because he had this debt, even though he had a fairly decent job at the time.

Black families coming out of the situation of deep poverty tend to carry with them debt, and you know everyone does, but they especially have that burden.

It’s not something that we talk about very much. Certainly the picture that a lot of politicians love to paint is that it’s sort of the black welfare queen, and statistics show pretty much across the board that white families are predominantly the largest force receiving public assistance.

Sure, there are many more whites in the country. More than half the poor in America are white. I remember when I did the race book I was in Alabama, [the city council was voting for some kind of benefit]. This black councilman took [a] white council man [who didn’t want to vote for the benefit] to the welfare office one day, knowing that most of the people there were going to be white, and the white guy was stunned.

I know that you were involved in your subjects’ lives for several years, and to go between that and your own life must have felt like quite a disconnect at times. What was like for you to move between two such different worlds?

It was difficult in a way, although my mother once told me that she had raised me to be comfortable whether I was in an embassy or a hut. (Laughs) And I think she succeeded, I’ve been in both in many parts of the world. She also taught me that you can learn something from everyone, and I learned a tremendous amount from these folks, and I admire many of them. I like them very much. I’m still in touch with a lot of them. It’s been a great education and growing personal experience for me.

At the same time I’m a reporter and a journalist, so I needed to restrain my impulse to open my wallet sometimes and just give them money. I think if anyone had been on the edge of real disaster, I probably would have just done that, but nobody was that I knew of, at least by talking to them.

I couldn’t pay them because it was just unethical. But what I have done since the book’s come out is give money to anti-poverty organizations. I’ve given part of the royalties in large enough chunks so that it can make a difference in programs. I’ve been in touch with organizations to find out what they would if they had some money that they can’t do now, so there are a couple of things going on that weren’t going on before, and I’m very happy to be able to do that. I think that money is most useful when it goes to an organization that can match it or can use it to get another grant to do something that they hadn’t been able to do.

For instance, the Korean immigrants group in L.A. that wants to start an organizing school for Korean grocery workers, to help them learn how to organize and learn what their rights [are], and possibly unionize. I gave them a grant to start that, and there’s a malnutrition clinic in Baltimore that had not been able to do any home visiting because they’d had some money for a while but then they’d lost it. So I talked with the director for a while to figure out how to give them money to fund a half-time person for a year. This is not extravagant, but they’ve now gone into partnership with the School of Nursing at the University of Maryland to get a person who will be seeing patients in the malnutrition clinic, and then will follow some of them home or go off and do home visits, to see the liaison and connection and interaction in the home which you know is very important in dealing with malnutrition. And then there [are] some other organizations I haven’t yet contacted or [that] haven’t gotten back to me that I’m trying to figure out how to best help.

The websites for these organizations [I’m helping] are on the Knopf website linked to my book so people learn more].

So from my standpoint, I don’t think [a book like mine] can turn around the lives of individual people. I wish it could, but it doesn’t. But I hope that the issue will be dated in a certain way. The book will be used to call attention to some issues and might have a policy impact eventually. I’m not sure whether that’s really going to happen, but it’s not really the reason I did it either. The reason I did it was to satisfy my own curiosity. That’s why you do a book. So you’re curious about it, and you want to understand it.

But to get back to your original question, yes, I felt very odd moving back and forth between the two worlds. I think it was Ann Brash who says that you know five dollars is big, and 25 is amazing, and that’s a huge amount. It was painful in many ways to watch people going through hell again and again.

It can be hard not to take that home with you.

Well, I did take that home with me. My wife’s a social worker, and she doesn’t deal most of the time with people who are in poverty. She does family therapy, so a lot of the issues I encountered were issues she’d dealt with in different forms. And we talked a lot about what I was learning. I always do when I do a book. She feels as if by the time she gets around to reading the manuscript, she already knows everything. And I always take these things home with me.

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Women’s work


Martha Stewart was sentenced yesterday to five months in a minimum security prison and five consecutive months of home detention for lying about her sale of ImClone stock in 2001, “a small personal matter.” The five months she’ll spend in a federal prison camp in Danbury, Connecticut, isn’t geographically far from her Westport home or her 153-acre estate in New York — but it will be a far cry from what she’s used to. That’s okay though, as the Toronto Star reports, Martha’s like Mandela: she can handle it:

‘I could do it,’ she said, according to excerpts released by ABC late Friday. ‘I’m a really good camper. I can sleep on the ground. There are many, many good people who have gone to prison. Look at Nelson Mandela.’

That Martha would chose to compare herself to the former South African President doesn’t faze her fans, who see her as a trailblazer who taught them to embrace beauty — and her company’s products. Their supportive words are found on Martha’s trial web site, maintained by her company:  

Please do not despair. No matter where you are, you will still be you. And when you are done, I will be right there to support you by watching your show, and buying your products.

You have helped me gain the confidence needed in my own ability to entertain and create that enabled me to undertake some of my own challenges without too much reservation. I just held a Celtic Wake for my beloved mother’s memorial service, and entertained 70 people in my own home (2500 square feet) with food, beverages, and bagpipes.

I am and will continue to support you with all my heart … K-Mart is our local “everything” store and my home is proof of my feelings for the Martha Stewart Brand Products. Once again I wish you the very best. This too will pass Martha.

Martha’s a hero to Kmart, certainly. Our positions on Martha’s lucrative aesthetic brokering and subsequent sentencing reveal more about our society’s complicated feelings about female power and domesticity than they shed light on a public figure. Martha’s case stands apart as a female prosecuted for her own actions, and not for spending her husband’s money, a woman who built her empire on traditionally feminine crafts and was convicted for playing dangerously in a predominantly masculine market. Her actions aren’t heroic, but her fame opens the door for much needed dialogue about gender and business.

—Laura Louison

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