It really is a shame that genocide is such a long-standing tradition, because now we have to hear people like Stark [aka the Marginalized Margarine Queen] whining about it all the time.-_Quilty, DailyKos, Thanksgiving Day, 2005
This piece is a personal narrative commenting on the experiences of socio-economics and class that have shaped my thinking, my work and my life. It was originally prompted by a number of related discussions about the “hard left’s” dysfunctional relationship to wealth and money on a liberal-progressive blog, here and here. There’s a lot of “theoretical” discussion going on these days--especially in the so-called "liberal-progressive" blogosphere--abstractions and speculations that don’t carry as much weight for me as my own experience in a lifetime living on what I have described as the “border between the Ghetto and Gucci.”
Ultimately, piece is most immediately related to this statement—though I’m not sure I’ve succeeded in making that connection in the narrative:
One basic tenet of the Ojibwe belief system I learned at a very early age was this: It is a thing of great SHAME for one man to have great wealth while others of his tribe have none..
Course, that's where we get into the debate on who constitutes a "member" of the tribe: to me, the lack of any meaningful response on the part of the American public—the so-called “hard-left” included--to the FEMA fiasco in the aftermath of Katrina demonstrated quite clearly that most Americans do not consider African Americans "members" of the tribe; I have argued elsewhere that American Indians are placed even lower on the scale of mainstream perception: not even considered "human." But that's not my point. Not here anyway.
Capitalism is not going anywhere. And bringing up terms like "socialism" and "communism" serves only to alienate and frighten the "idiots," the koolaid drinkers. Even *I* have become turned off by it, because I consider it just over-the-top unrealistic.
Capitalism "won." There's no changing that. Best we can do is to make distinctions between forms of capitalism—(see also William Greider, One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism , for an incisive international perspective on these things).
The contrast between the forms of "social market capitalism" that prevailed in Europe from end of WWII up to the turn of the century (and still struggle to hold ground today as the Goliath of American predatory capitalist structures bulldozes Europe) produced much better distribution of wealth, much better social structures, a less violent society, a more "humane" society.
[...]
Nothing wrong with making money--sorry, I cannot count the shoes in my closet (as I've always said, my wardrobe does not jibe with my politics, but what the hell? only my dry cleaner knows;-)--but when the disparities become as crass as they are in this society (or any third world country), we've got problems.
The fact that it can come to this in a "free society" is just another index of the absolute moral depravity driving this country as a whole--as reflected in the people who run these corporations and all others who feel comfortableamassing this kind of wealth while others go hungry. While others go without shoes on their feet. The kind of opulent wealth we see in the upper classes is fine--you put stock in a 3K shower curtain? fine. goferit--but not when you have millions upon millions living in abject poverty.
Ultimately these corporations are run by human individuals. What the fuck is wrong with these people? How do they sleep at night? Who are they? If they are "normal" Americans, we've got problems. Big huge moral problems. What is it about our society that allows people to think these kinds of disparities are OK, to think it's just "life"--thems the breaks, eh? Can't they see the disparities?
No. They can't. That's part of the problem. They have no clue what it means to be poor. Really poor. Chronically poor. Intergenerationallly poor. And they don’t want to know.
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Poverty is when you are so poor that you cannot afford to heat your home and you freeze to death. Poverty is when you're so poor that, when the next unplanned pregnancy comes along, the only option you see is to leave the newborn infant in a plastic bag hanging from the fence post.
IF--and this is a big IF--IF there remains even a shred of moral decency left in the American "mind/heart/soul," maybe the best way to tackle some of these issues would be to require of EVERYONE, as a prerequisite to any 4-year degree from an accredited institution--that all people who are not BORN into abject poverty be required to spend at least one year of residence in some area of the country that ranks among the "poorest"--a year on Pine Ridge, a year in the 9th ward, a year in any one of our most poverty-stricken urban centers: Heck, it worked for Barbara Ehrenreich, maybe the rest of America could benefit from the same experience!
If, after that, they can still continue to amass these levels of obscene wealth without doing everything in their power to strive toward a more equal distribution of wealth, well then we know. They are not human and should be banished from the human community altogether. I wouldn't know what else to do with them.
Interestingly, and perhaps encouragingly, John Seery recently laid out some of these same issues quite pointedly in a Huffington Post column titled Mo'Money: I Don't Get It:
Western literature is replete with warnings against excessive wealth. Aristotle thought that money making should be seen as an instrumental activity, but not as the point and purpose of life itself. Jesus said very clearly that you cannot serve both God and mammon. Dante put the Gluttons in the 3rd circle of his Inferno, where they'd wallow in garbage and excrement for all of eternity; he put the Wasters, those who in life lacked moderation in thinking about money, in the 4th circle of hell, where their souls would be dragged down for all time by enormous weights; and he put the Usurers in the 7th circle, where they will squat with leather purses hanging around their necks, with their eyes forever fixed on their purses. Walt Whitman, in "Democratic Vistas," saw over-exercised commercial ambitions as a threat to the future of American democracy: "The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater...In business (this all-devouring modern word, business) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians." Andrew Carnegie, in "The Gospel of Wealth," advocated aggressive wealth accumulation but then thought that rich people should eventually turn their attentions and monies over to charity--and if a rich person didn't properly dispose of his wealth, Carnegie proffered this public verdict as his epitaph: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
We have plenty of brainy people in this country who produce charts and graphs and equations supposedly demonstrating that if outlandishly rich people continue to do their thing unabated, all boats will rise, the economy will grow and grow, the profit motive should therefore be left entirely unregulated, in any official or unofficial way. Paul Krugman suggests that the Democrats should face reality and realize that class concerns largely define political loyalties. Myself, I continue to be haunted by Goethe's Faust: It would seem that we are living in a country populated by a lot of people who apparently have bargained away their souls for the prospect of experiencing worldly insatiability.
So it's not like the Anishinabe have a monopoly on the notion that it is a thing of great shame for one man to be in possession of great wealth while others go hungry. The problem, it seems, is presented by the world of difference between "theory" and "practice." And this has indeed been the underlying fundamental problem between the conflicting worlds of Native Americans and the unsettler population ever since the Great White Father in heaven began signing treaties allotting parcels of land to individual Indians "to their heirs and assigns forever"--"forever," apparently functioning as a mere abstraction in the minds of the Great White fathers, but not in the minds of the Indians who signed on the dotted lines in these transactions, based on a very literal, concrete in-the-real-world understanding of these terms. Talk is cheap, and theory illustrous: putting lofty ideals in practice has always posed a problem to the unsettler population of this country.
Seery is to be commended for shifting the focus from the abstract concept of "corporate wealth" to the individuals who are in possession of the same:
Why would a sentient, functional human being want fifteen houses? What do you do with fifteen houses? Did any of those houses feel like a home? Would you remember where the bathrooms are in fifteen different floor plans? Did Ken and Linda hang out with their neighbors in any or all of those houses? Did they keep fifteen duplicate sets of their favorite spices, paintings, books, china, pajamas, underwear and other toiletries in those houses, or did they furnish every one of them uniquely? What a hassle. Sorry, I just don't get it. I don't see the attraction. Mind you, I understand--I think I do--the basic human motivations that fuel our capitalist system (though the latter-day version certainly departs from Ben Franklin's frugality or Max Weber's notion of an ascetic work ethic). I understand wanting to surround yourself (and your loved ones) with comfortable and beautiful material items. I understand and appreciate luxury and even extravagance. But maintaining fifteen residential homes (not just as property investments) seems beyond the pale--and I don't think you have to be a commie pinko to be baffled by such perverse behavior. At what point did Ken and Linda decide that they needed to jump from, say, five to ten homes? And what was the trigger that prompted them to cross the threshold from fourteen to fifteen? What were they feeling? Were they happy at that point, finally, or was number sixteen in the offing? Did acquiring each house seem like a new triumph, or did the sense of accomplishment wear thin around the eight or nine mark? Did they exult in their plentitude--for instance, did they see themselves as somehow closer to God with each new purchase, members of the elect? (Ken's father was a Baptist minister.) Or were they simply dog-eat-dog, top-of-the-heap, out-of-control consumerists--people who had just lost perspective, caught up in a never-ending whirlwind of acquisition?
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The canards that people throw around, both critics and defenders, to explain why today's super-rich want to get even richer don't make complete sense to me. The word "greed" is simply a gloss, an empty abstraction. It doesn't explain why any sane person would want to appropriate billions unto himself or herself. Sure, I like to eat a slice of chocolate cake every now and then. My young children might think that they would like to eat the whole cake at one sitting, but I teach them that they'd get a tummy ache and grow fat and/or diabetic. But we've got grown adults in America gorging themselves, as it were, on chocolate cake after chocolate cake after chocolate cake. This is not "rationally self-interested" behavior any more, as the economists so often put it. It's completely over the top. It defies common sense. Call in the anthropologists and clinical psychologists to study it better. The word "addiction" doesn't arrest it. It's more like a freak show.
Yes, it is time that we all begin calling it what it is. That we finally begin calling these individuals out--as individuals, not as hapless links in an impenetrable chain of pathological gluttony: I repeat--what the fuck is wrong with these people?
Since it’s not likely that anyone’s going to be jumping on the bandwagon of my suggestion that everyone in this country be forced to actually experience the kind of poverty we are dealing with in this country, I’ve outlined some of my thoughts and experiences on the subject here. Ultimately, the structures we erect to organize our lives are the product of the mindset that inheres in us as individuals. Changing the structures necessarily requires that we change the mindset. In that spirit...
The basic rundown on my personal history: I was born into abject, chronic, intergenerational poverty—4th (of 6) child of a single, mixed race (American Indian/white) mother with an 8th grade education, alcoholic, alternately employed as waitress, cleaning lady, foundry worker and/or living off welfare in the tenements of a small mid-western town, in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood. I remember how we had to keep moving because the ramshackle apartments we lived in kept getting “condemned” and torn down. I spent the first 6 years of my life with virtually no parental supervision—my mother was a hippy, party-animal, and most of the time—out protesting or partying (I have written about that experience in the piece “The Personal is Political: The Story of a Coat”). We spent our days playing on the railroad tracks behind the tenements—so, I quite literally spent my early formative years living “on the tracks.” The neighbor lady, mother of my Mexican friends, used to feed us homemade tortillas and peanut butter from the AFDC. A defining moment of my childhood was watching from the tenement window as some stupid rich white motherfucker came racing down the street, windows locked, AC running full blast, and committed a hit-and-run that killed that woman’s six-year old son. From this day forward, some version of the statement “EAT THE RICH” has been a foundational principle in my mind and my life.
My first social interaction with the world outside this pocket of poverty and privation in a small Midwestern town came when I walked myself to kindergarten and “enrolled” myself in the public school system. My mother was never home and didn’t even know it was time for me to start school. I distinctly recall becoming conscious of class differences in the first grade, when I was almost immediately segregated from my neighbors/friends and placed in groups with kids from the “other side of the tracks”—strangers with shiny new shoes, neatly combed hair, girls wearing ribbons and bows, kids whose parents drove cars. Kids whose parents took them to McDonalds and who had TVs and sleepovers at home. Kids who didn’t know what a commodity cheese sandwich was and thought AFDC was some kind of social club!
It was something about the Iowa Basics tests, the teachers said when I asked why I was the only one of my peers being singled out to hang with these creatures from another planet! And I was never comfortable with these people because I was always (self)-conscious of the things I didn’t have—things that all the rest of the “smart” kids had. Things that none of my friends and neighbors had. I didn’t resent the “things” these other kids had, I resented the separation from my friends and the fact that “society” seemed somehow to be offering me a ticket to these things, but not to the remaining members of “my tribe.” It pissed me off then and it pisses me off now because I never trusted the intentions behind it: obviously, there was something “special” about me that made “them” want to support me, to “invite” me to join their ranks, their clubs, their societies and social dysfunctions, to “save” me, but not the rest of my “tribe.” Somehow, in the eyes of polite white society, I had “something to offer.” Well, yes. And the others don’t?
At the age of nine, I was removed from the home by social services and placed in an upper middle class foster home, together with my younger brother. A successful optometrist and his elementary-school English teacher living in a red brick, two-story, three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, plushly carpeted and wallpapered home on a tree-lined street in an upper middle class neighborhood. It was not a temporary foster home, the arrangement was supposed to become permanent and result in adoption. These were not “professional foster parents”—they were a couple who couldn’t have kids and wanted to adopt. My “Iowa Basics scores,” apparently, were what made me a particularly “attractive” candidate; my brother was thrown in as part of the package deal. And I was supposed to be thanking my lucky stars for it.
It “worked out very well” for my brother, it did not work for me: the people were and to this day remain hard-core Republicans—true believers, bona fide members of the faithful-29%er-flock; at least one partner in this (now divorced) couple is a multimillionaire today, the other is not far behind. They had us campaigning for Nixon in 73 and, because she was local chair of the committee to re-elect, we once “enjoyed” the “honor” of hosting Ed and Tricia (Nixon) Cox (Nixon’s daughter and son-in-law)!
In a recent commenton a liberal-progressive blog, I described the “aha-moment” entailed in that abrupt transfer from abject poverty to upper middle class wealth:
The experience of coming from extreme poverty into solidly upper middle class world overnight, without ever having *seen* or *imagined* that kind of wealth—which, in retrospect, I know to be merely “modest” wealth, certainly nothing “opulent”-- it's pretty much indescribable. You just stand there, amazed, amazed at clean carpets, amazed at books lining walls, at things all of us take for granted. Queen size beds, matching sheets, socks without holes, *shoes* without holes!
[...]
I still see this moment of encounter, and the very same mouth-dropping "shock and awe" today when I take children from economically disadvantaged communities into suburban schools: "Like, wow! they have carpeting here. Wow! look at all these computers. wow!" Their mouths drop. I see it *all* the time.
This moment of encounter between the very poor and the even modestly "wealthy" is *obscene*; that "shock and awe" moment is absolutely obscene. It is heartbreaking to see and to hear. But if my experience in the now nearly 40 years since I first made it is an index, it is an important one for people of poverty to make.
Just as the rich (people of prosperity) need to see how the poor (people of poverty) really live, the poor need to see how the rich really live--if for no other reason than to clarify the degree of moral depravity we are dealing with here.
What I didn’t point out there was how much this situation has pissed me off from the very beginning. And all along the way, this incomprehensible reaction to my reaction: I was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to “rise above.” Yo. I for me and me for me and none for all.
And indeed, I am and always have been extremely grateful—for some of it. For God’s sake, that woman took the time to fix” my egregious grammar and strip me of my “ghetto English.” I am eternally grateful to this woman for the doors, windows, indeed, the worlds she opened up to me—first and foremost, the library! But I still resent the fact that there are millions of children in this country today who will never be that lucky. Children who may never see the inside of a library, children who may never know that there is carpeting in the school library of almost any suburban school, and computers, and all sorts of other “amenities” that are simply incomprehensible to those born into abject poverty—like toilet paper. Children for whom, if they are ever talented or smart or just plain “lucky” enough to be “given” this opportunity, the price attached will be to abandon the world that they know—a world that, were it not for the poverty, would truly, truly be that proverbial ‘no place like home.’ To be separated, “removed from the home”—as the then-current social service jargon would put it--and to be advised to forget that world over there on the other side of the tracks ever existed. The assumption being, I suppose, since the material standards of this world of wealth were undeniably and objectively “better,” the moral and social standards must necessarily be better, too. I don’t think they are, and the primary index of that is the fact that these people can live with themselves, that they can sleep at night in the midst of these glaring injustices, these abhorrent disparities.
To me personally, though, it is not a matter of “better” or “worse”: I wasn’t comfortable in that world then, and I’m not comfortable in it now.
The couple kept my brother, adopted him, and sent me off to “reform” school. From there, I was again placed in a foster home intended to be “permanent”—with a high-powered (then in law school) corporate attorney and his wife, both of whom stemmed from “old” corporate money. That lasted a little longer, but not much. They suddenly got pregnant, had a son of their own, and pretty much requested that I sign a sort of “pre-nup” agreeing that, should anything ever happen to them, the whole of their “estate” would go to him. I would have no claim on the inheritance when my “adoptive” parents died. Well, I didn’t give a damn about the assets, I really didn’t, but the message they sent in seeking to secure the future of their goddamned genetic progeny seemed vaguely Hitlerian to me—even though I couldn’t have articulated it that way at he time. Thanks, but no thanks. Take your blond-haired blue-eyed boy and make sure you carefully vet his future fiancés--gold-diggers are legion in this country!
I learned a lot about arguing and debate from the man, though, and for a time, even had aspirations of becoming an attorney—based on his excellent example.
After that, I became a ward of the state and was transferred from one “residential treatment” center to the next detention center, county jail and/or temporary foster home until social services finally found yet another exquisite foster home—the stuff American dreams are made of --again intended to be permanent and lead to adoption. They were extremely kind-hearted, extremely “cultured,” ivy-league educated (intergenerationally!) open-minded, extremely high-powered (in state/federal government and civic circles) and extremely wealthy people—with the very best intentions. Very old wealth, and the very best intentions. But I still could not accept their wealth or their world. We are still friends today, and the relationship is only mildly strained by the “socio-economic” tensions that still necessarily exist between us. Politically, at least, we are on the same page. But we keep a polite distance and rarely talk about money—according to the standards of polite society, it would be impolite to so much as broach the subject.
I am certainly happy to report that they later did succeed in adopting another child—an orphan from a third world country—who has lived “happily every after” with them. It warms my heart greatly to know this—because in retrospect it seems pretty clear that, no matter what happened, this little ward of the state was going to survive. I don’t think that third world orphan would have had a shot. I am grateful, very.
I had the silver spoon handed to me—coated with sugar, even, and apparently with very little compromise involved. But I could not take it. What I have today, I have earned. On my own. With no “help” from these various connections but the things they gave me as a child.
After another brief stint on the “institutional” circuit, I finally landed with a solidly middle class couple—a social worker and an accountant—who were able to provide me a more or less “normal” and moderately comfortable home environment to complete my last two and a half years of high school. I moved out my senior year, though, was declared a legal adult and waitressed my way through my final year of high school before I left for college the following fall and subsequently worked my way through college (waitressing, cleaning houses and tutoring English at the university), with a double degree in English and German. Finally, my shoes were able to take me where I wanted to go!
Based on “excellence of achievement” and the vehement support of the only female member of the faculty at the time, I received a scholarship to go to Germany. The remaining members of the committee voted against me on this “prestigious” award—based largely on my reputation as a flamboyant campus political activist and organizer in the anti-arms race, feminist, and environmental causes, including the campaign to stop Project ELF. I remain friends with 3 of 4 of these committee members; to the other one, a consummate sniveling and patently mediocre white boy suffering from the advanced stages of a cultural superiority complex, I just let these other three relay to him news of my latest publications and other “achievements” in the field; on those rare occasions when social or professional circumstance have forced me to suffer the agony of his pathetically boring company, I refuse to speak a word of English with him and readily admit to taking some degree of satisfaction in knowing that this illustrious professor of German can barely follow my German today!
So it was that I left this country on an academic exchange scholarship in 1984—in response to Ronald Reagan’s re-election, I was determined to make the move permanent, and equally determined to be involved politically in Germany. And I was. Elected to student government (which is much more “serious” and certainly more influential nationally in Germany than here), and remained politically active (at the organizational and participatory level) on gay rights, feminism, environmental and other traditionally “left” wing issues throughout my tenure in Germany—including, but by no means restricted to, protesting the international policies of the US government. I made my living primarily as a professional musician, supplemented at times with income from free-lance translation and a few on-and-off stints in corporate employment, as a translator/technical writer. I returned to this country in 1992/93 for personal reasons I’ll omit here because it would take too much digression to explain.
In 1999, I went back to school, got an MA from a private, ivy league school, subsequently turned down that same school in its offer for placement in the PhD program, then got my PhD from a less prestigious school, but with a much more “welcoming” environment where I felt more comfortable—both with regard to social interaction, and with regard to my ideas and academic work. Today I live a fairly cushy existence (more as the result of my partner’s income than my own) working as a freelance translator, editor, occasional professor and some-time musician from a place I call my “Hobbithole in the Hood.” I have no intention of seeking a tenured position or anything else that would force me to conform to the constricts and constraints of the “upper middle class” world that has always been uncomfortable to me, and remains so even now that I have all the necessary social and professional “accoutrements” needed to “blend in” and “hang” with those “strangers in their shiny new shoes”—they are still strangers to me because I do not understand how they can live as they do while other members of this society do without. That is not a judgment, nor a condemnation: I just don’t understand it. It is utterly alien to me.
I see professional life as a process of “pimping my skills as a writer/translator/teacher/editor to finance my (largely ‘volunteer’) work as a musician. My husband does the same, though he is employed by corporate America in the advertising business.” Both of us are very conscious about where we spend our money and we are always seeking to keep these resources we have worked very hard to get in our community. I suppose it is a separatism, of sorts; a form of “tribalism” and looking out for our own. After Katrina, I personally would like to see more of it—and suspect, in fact, that I will. That we all will. More than likely, these segregationist and separatist turns will not be understood by society at large and, more dishearteningly, not by the liberal-progressive community.
Today I live in a socio-economic space that I call the “border between Ghetto and Gucci”—and its demographics are in fact “mapped out” in my geographic location: I live on the street that is considered the border between one of the most economically disadvantaged, predominately black neighborhoods to the south and the upscale, mixed race, but predominately white neighborhood surrounding the prestigious school from which I received my MA (members of the university community are acutely aware of these demographics; they talk about “protecting” themselves from the “encroaching” poverty which, in this case is almost always seen as being “black”; incoming students are advised of the coordinates of the “safe zone” [i.e., do not venture south of this street, or west of the other];) It is a daily, visual and visceral experience of what Claud Anderson has described as a world of Black Labor, White Wealth.
The demographics of my neighborhood to the north and to the south are changing rapidly, in a process of gentrification that I applaud on the one hand—because I appreciate the economic diversity it brings to the neighborhood and the impact this will have on city services—not least of all public schools; on the other hand, to me it feels very much like the invasion of those “strangers in shiny new shoes” moving in now on “my” territory in the same way I was forced into their midst as a child, and I am reminded of the Tret Fure lyrics to “Movin’ in for the kill”—“they do just what they want, they do just what they will...”
Aside from my education, I don’t have much more in common with these strangers in shiny new shoes today than I did then: I love the shoes—the shoes are comfortable, and I have become a sucker for “comfort” and life’s little luxuries; I don’t love the fact that these strangers still seem to lose little sleep over the fact that they wear these shoes while others go barefoot; that only very few amongst them seem to give any thought to the connections between their wealth and others’ poverty; that they generally tend to get very nervous when anyone seeks to address the issue in their presence! It is absolutely taboo to call them out on it—especially as individuals. Kind of like asking any middle-aged German, “So what did your father do during the war?” I suppose we probably like to shop in the same places and theoretically might have the same HMO—but aside from casual conversation at the drycleaners’ and department events, I don’t seek further contact with these people. And I resent the fact that they are “gentrifying” my neighborhood—moving in here with the same capricious lack of consciousness that allows them to sleep well, wrapped in the satiny luxury of their 600-threadcount sheets, even while others sleep beneath bridges—or on the carpeted floors of public libraries.
Race and economics. There are of course statistics and studies to confirm that there are more white people living in poverty in this country than there are non-white. But my views on these things are not shaped by abstract studies and statistics. They are shaped by my experience and my degree of comfort in the world—and above all, what I see every day when I walk out my back door. Today, it is simply a fact that--of all the non-Black, non-Indian, or non-Hispanic people I know who share my current standard of living--there is not one amongst them who was born into a social class anywhere below the solid middle class. In other words: I don’t know any white people in my current economic class who ever experienced real privation—except in perhaps temporary “dry spells” or periods of “hard times” (which they often misconstrue in their own minds to be real experiences with “poverty”).
The implications of “intergenerational poverty” are simply beyond their sphere of experience. So there is a whole realm of my experience as an American that they simply cannot really comprehend. I can break the taboos and talk to them about it, I can write about it, I can try to tell them what that experience is. But, even for the few amongst them who want to hear about it, it’s almost impossible to make clear. There is a gulf between us, an unbridgeable gap. More than that, no matter what I say, nothing seems to have any impact on their behavior.
I do, however, know many Blacks and quite a few American Indians who have made this same journey from “rags to (modest) riches”—and so share this experience. It is a bond that can be expressed in something as small as a knowing look. And most of those Blacks and Indians I know who have made that experience are determined, as am I, to brings those few means and resources they have since acquired back to their communities: that is, committed to the project of redistributing wealth.
I am reminded of what those really wealthy foster parents once said on one of the rare occasions that we addressed the issue of ‘what the hell happened’: they said, “we didn’t know what we were dealing with. We had read the history, we knew your story, but we just didn’t know. We couldn’t know.” Very few people of great wealth are willing to admit such a thing—or even think about it. The “gap” just doesn’t cross their minds.
For those of us who have transcended systemic poverty, especially the kind that is tied to the economic and social oppression of a given ethnicity or race, I think there is often a much different relationship to wealth and money than people who have not made this same experience are aware of or can even comprehend. I was reminded of that when the lying-in-the-lap-of-luxury-finger pointers mounted their moral high horses in response to some of the Katrina victims who used the 1,000-dollar-debit cards to go shopping for “little luxuries”—like shoes. Sanctimonious, uncomprehending bullshit—from strangers in the shiny new shoes on both the left and the right. I did not begrudge any one of those people their shopping sprees. I can relate. Very much so. I understand—with absolutely no apologies--the need to “compensate.
Sure, there are enough “nouveau riche” upwardly mobile “buppies” out there—people in Black and Indian communities who are perfectly willing to “take the money and run,” to walk away from their friends, even their families, to climb the ladders of success and “join the club,” doing the “I-got-mine, so-fuck-the-rest-a-y’all”-thing. “Windigo,” as Buffy St. Marie once put it, “they run in every race.” Chronic intergenerational poverty is not synonymous with sainthood, and I’d be the last to “fault” anyone with a desire to leave the whole kit-and-kaboodle behind! But there are a lot of us who simply cannot. We are not saints. We are simply human beings marked for life by the tragedy of chronic, intergenerational poverty, and determined to help—(or force!) this society to address these systemic, structural “issues.” Call it “survivor’s guilt,” call it what you will. Whatever it is, it does not allow us to safely tuck our tuckusses on the Gucci side of the tracks and forget about what’s on the other side. We are forever mindful of the “gap.”
I was talking to one such woman the other day, an African American professional who has returned to this neighborhood for precisely the same reasons I am here. She said, “You know, when I come home at night after a long day’s work, I just want to feel comfortable. I don’t want to have to cut through all the bullshit.” I knew what she meant. I knew exactly what she meant. The bullshit she was referring to wasn’t any kind of overt racism or outright racial animosity. She was referring to these strangers in shiny white shoes, and the way the collective cultural arrogance of white privilege and white wealth—inevitably, so it seems—imposes its standards, its prejudices, its manners—the way it moves in, takes over, and before you know it, once again, the price tag for “membership” in the community of the “haves” becomes abandoning your friends, your family, their standards, their customs, their everything. The price tag attached to wealth, even modest wealth, in this country is donning the cloak of “whiteness,” subscribing to the manners, the mannerisms and above all, the terrible taboo of addressing these disparities in any meaningful way!
Author and human rights activist Randall Robinson recently summed up this “bullshit” quite aptly in his most recent release, Quitting America, where he writes:
Most white Americans in their dealings with black, brown, and all other varieties of nonwhite people are altogether well-mannered and are often all the more damaging for it. For indeed fine manners and America’s national opiate of choice, chauvinistic narcissism, combine to immunize white Americans en masse from self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-criticism. If they don’t like us, it is only because they are jealous of us.
Many, if not most, Americans will read this and no doubt sigh a “what’s the big deal, and where is this place you’re talking about, anyhow?” As a practical matter maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal, were not such coarse little bricks being hurled willy-nilly across the world daily by brainless, insensate white Americans, high and low, numbering in the thousands. And no, I have not suffered an inexplicable lapse of language judgment. I use the words brainlessand insensate advisedly, if perhaps somewhat desperately. White people around the world insult black people, brown people, everyone-but-them people, regularly and gratuitously, without even the bitter, dubious flattery of conscious intent. From overbearing congressmen, to wide-eyed cruise line steerage, to fuzzy-cheeked Ross veterinary students who somehow cannot bring themselves to walk amongst the locals without a flank of attack dogs.
This is the kind of “shit” I am talking about. This is the kind of bullshit that any and every white American drags into the neighborhood on the heels of his or her shoes—unless that white American has been diligently engaged in scraping that shit off their souls for decades. Because you can’t wipe this shit away with an affirmative action plan, and you can’t scrape it off by talktalktalking amongst yourselves in the vacuum of a “liberal-progressive” blog or an all-white yearly convention in Las Vegas!
So, as I watch my neighborhood “gentrify”—as properties are being bought up by wealthy developers, or by wealthy parents of wealthy (and yes, mostly white) kids to provide them with alternative housing near campus, as my less fortunate neighbors are displaced because they can no longer afford the property taxes on their modest homes, or the rising rental rates, and, in my view, as the neighborhood goes to hell--I prepare now to move further south of the “ghetto-Gucci” line (and take my Gucci with me, thank you very much!) where the racial and ethnic demographic is not likely to change any time soon, if ever, I find myself resenting these encroachments. I don’t want these “strangers in the shiny new shoes” moving into my neighborhood—at least not until they can learn to cut through the “bullshit” they inevitably bring with them—I’m tired of that bullshit, and so are my neighbors. I know where the shiny new shoes are—frankly, I prefer to buy mine in Europe. I know where to go if I want to see these people. What makes these people think, frankly, they have the “right” to move in here? What makes them think they are “welcome” here? But I know, these thoughts do not likely cross their minds. They probably think they’re doing us yet another “favor.” Besides, it’s a free country after all and no one has any right to tell anyone else where they can or cannot live. No. But it doesn’t make the bullshit any more pleasant—or less rude by virtue of its “innocence,” by virtue of its “inadvertence,” by virtue of the strangers’ obliviousness to it.
Once again, I will yield to displacement in order to maintain that polite distance between the world of white wealth and the socio-spiritual comforts of the “Hood,” which I enjoy more than the material comforts of the world of the white and wealthy. Yeah, we’ll be heading south soon. The library won’t be within walking distance anymore, and the schools won’t be very good (but there will be lots of Citgo stations nearby!), there will be life, and loudness, the front porches will be peopled in summer, there will be no “stigma” attached to the time-honored tradition of “taking home a plate” from the BBQ, and my husband won’t ever have to pull out his “ha, ha, ha-she’s-a-pistol-line” next time I forget my manners and go off on some “ghetto talk” tangent about the sanctimonious, condescending entirely unintentional bullshit some sniveling yuppie boy has to spew when he gets his undies in a twist over some comment I have made that is entirely incomprehensible to him—not because the comment is universally incomprehensible, but because there are worlds between his experience of America and my own and, while he might know, on some abstract level, that this world of mine exists—it is nothing he’s ever experienced, and, more often than not, nothing he ever hopes to experience—not even for the simple sake of “knowing”: he has no desire to know about this world. He wishes this world would just go away. And even if he were to visit this strange land of chronic intergenerational poverty, he still would not know. Because, whether he stays for a year or a decade, there’s always that home over on the other side of the tracks to go back to.
I’m tired of it. Tired of the standards being set by the world of white wealth and white privilege—even when the suburbanites suddenly decide to “go native” and move into “the Hood”—or to occupy any other social or cultural space to which they are not indigenous. I am tired of these strangers in their shiny new shoes. Tired of people who will likely never understand how much something like shoes can matter. How shoes and the shit stuck to their souls can put worlds between us, without most of us ever even noticing. What to do with these strangers, strangers who don’t even realize that, from this side of the tracks—indeed, from my position smack dab in the middle of those tracks--they are the strangers, strangers in a very strange land.
