Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
6 - Shame on you: Making the Toxic Narrative Stick
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
Summary
“I think shame is used as a tool against people who grow up with no money.”
Jameela Jamil, actor and activist, talking to Project Twist-It“Poverty kills the dreams and cages the dreamers.”
Participant in ATD Fourth World research, EnglandShame: the weapon of choice
In early 2019 I sat down to talk with a young woman for Project Twist-It who, like me, spent much of her childhood in the UK in poverty and who relied, as my family did, on various forms of government benefits to get by. Now in her early 30s with a successful career and living in the US, the experience of being poor, and the shame, fear and ridicule it brought with it, endures. She told me:
“I grew up with no money and I was raised by a single mother. Growing up poor just instils in you a feeling sometimes of hopelessness. Because it feels like the system is stacked against you. Children absorb everything. Even if they don't understand it, they are ingesting it. All I can say is that it's like a constant feeling of fear, like a low boil of fear with moments of extreme fear. I moved 13 times before I was 12 years old because we would run out of money and be unable to pay the rent and bailiffs would come to our house, which is a very scary situation.
Being seen as some sort of lowly liar or being lazy because you have to accept money from the state is common. We don't take into account people's actual situations. Politicians, especially in the last ten years, use more words that allude to people who are on benefits or people who need help from the system … as lazy dependants. As vampires just sucking the blood out of the economy. And their wording is condescending and patronising. They are dismissive. [They] couldn't even imagine a day in most of these people's shoes. They don't think of the context.”
The young woman is the actor, activist and star of the NBC hit comedy The Good Place, Jameela Jamil. When we met, Jameela, as someone who spent so much of her youth in poverty, wanted to tell her story and help put a spotlight on the truth of being poor – including the role that shaming plays in upholding a narrative of ‘undeservedness’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Shame GameOverturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative, pp. 173 - 192Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020