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
2 - What? There are Poor People in the Richest Nation on Earth?
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
“Poverty, or poor, or working-class – whatever level of not enough you’re at – you feel it in a million tiny ways. Sometimes it's the condescension, sometimes it's that you’re itchy.”
Linda Tirado, in Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America“What poor Americans have usually demanded (when they have demanded anything at all) is not charity or welfare but a safe job and a decent wage. What they have had to settle for (when they could get anything at all) was paltry and demeaning aid work with wages so low that they still remained poor.”
Stephen Pimpare, A People's History of Poverty in America, p 9A price to pay: the human cost of poverty in America
Dogs bark excitedly as we approach Christine Riccione's apartment in a public housing complex on the north side of Charleston, South Carolina. It's a typical soupy hot Carolina summer afternoon and once myself and George, a professor of history and a local activist, are inside, Christine apologises for the noise of a portable air conditioner positioned on the floor that rattles furiously against the fierce heat. Once the two dogs are dispatched to the bedroom, it's marginally quieter and Christine settles into the sofa to tell her story.
Like so many in her situation living on the breadline who I spoke to while working on Project Twist-It and this book, Christine told us she was determined to talk about her experiences and what she had learned along the way because stories like hers often remain untold or are misunderstood or misrepresented.
“Tic, tac, toe. We were like dominoes being flushed down, you know?”
Once we are all seated Christine describes how, after a series of car troubles three or so years before (she doesn't recall the exact dates) she lost her minimum-wage job delivering pizza near Columbia, the state capital. Around the same time, the other earner in the family and also a delivery driver, her brother-inlaw, saw his car written off in an accident.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Shame GameOverturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative, pp. 52 - 82Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020