Final Paper: Poverty and Community

Da’rell Calvin

English 102

Professor DeWit

29 May 2014

Poverty and Community

The United States is among the richest nations in the world yet the poverty rate is still extremely high. Many marginalized groups - such as Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans - continue to be shut out from middle and upper class communities leaving them in lower, impoverished areas. While the one and only "positive" outcome of such high levels of poverty is the increased level of kinship and community within these areas, the negative outcomes are much more extreme and range from increased levels of homelessness, alcoholism, dropout rates, incarceration, and so forth, that result from an overall low quality of life. The United States has created situations and increased the levels of poverty throughout America for centuries, while marginalized groups face poverty the rich just seem to get richer; the level of community established in impoverished areas is evident and, if used correctly, it could be a vantage point to reducing the poverty levels and increasing the overall quality of life in the United States. By closing the gaps between the rich and poor areas of cities, communities can come together to reach a middle ground of strength and solidarity.

            American’s have created a divisive nation from the very start of its formation. One of the greatest examples of this action was the treatment of the Native Americans.  In his TED Talk, titled “America’s Native Prisoners of War,” Aaron Huey chronicles the history of the Lakota Indians. He begins by mentioning the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824 and continues to mention a variety of treaties that were created and broken as well as massacres of Native Americans that were disguised as battles in war over the course of the next two centuries. Following the more distant history of the Lakota Nation, Huey discusses the statistics of poverty and its effects within the Lakota tribe. Huey mentions that in 2010 the unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation was 85 percent and many people were left homeless or packed into rotting buildings with other families. Huey discusses the fact that over a third of the reservation was without electricity and 80 percent of the population is below the federal poverty line. Alongside the high levels of poverty there was also a high rate of tuberculosis, alcoholism, cancer, drop-outs, and infant mortality. Huey then challenges viewers to think about what he just said, “How should you feel about the statistics I mentioned? What is the connection between these images of suffering and the history I read to you? And how much of the history do you need to own, even? Is any of this your responsibility today?” (Aaron Huey, “America’s Native Prisoners of War).

            Another aspect of the history of poverty within the United States is evident during and after economic downturns. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West discuss “ten lies about poverty that America can no longer afford,” one of these lies is the idea that the Great Recession has ended. Smiley and West said that, “while 60 percent of the jobs lost during the economic downturn were in mid-wage occupations, 73 percent of the jobs added have been in lower-wage occupations such as cashiers, stock clerks, and food preparations workers” (173). With the creation of low-wage jobs and the loss of middle-wage jobs workers who once held middle-wage jobs were left with either a lower-wage job, or no job at all. This left more people in worse-off positions than before the Great Recession and increased the level of poverty by putting more people at or below the federal poverty line.

            When communities face increased levels of poverty, there is often an increase in high-school drop-out, disease, alcoholism, incarceration and mortality rates.  In the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the narrator Arnold Spirit, aka Junior, was upset after his dad’s best friend, Eugene, was shot to death at a 7-11 on the reservation as a result of a drunken argument over the last drink of a bottle of alcohol. As a way to keep his spirits alive, so to speak, Junior said that “[he] kept making lists after list of the things that made me feel joy. And [he] kept drawing cartoons of the things that made me angry.  [He kept] writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became [his] grieving ceremony” (Alexie, 178).  This grieving ceremony is but one example of the ways people are affected by poverty in and around their homes. Perhaps the most empowering, and only positive, effect of such high levels of poverty tends to be the increased levels of kinship and community within impoverished areas of cities.

            When communities face poverty, the people within the community often come together to develop a strong bond and kinship.  One of the places where people come together within their communities is the church. An example of people coming together as a community in the church can be found in Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. In this autobiography, Pastor Gregory Boyle talks of a time when a Latino man who used to attend the church but is now doing well for himself states, “This used to be a church.” Pastor G responded by saying, “You know, most people around here think it’s finally a church” (73, author’s emphasis). The now-well-off Latino man felt that Pastor G’s church was no longer a church because it had become a community filled with people from all walks of life – gangsters, drug addicts, homeless people, et cetera. Pastor G, on the other hand, felt that this was the reason it was finally a church, because it had become a place where all people were loved and accepted, but more than that, it was a place where they were taken care of. While G had that discussion with the Latino man, he had another one with people inside the church about what the church smelled like, it went like this

 ‘What’s the church smell like?’ People are mortified, eye contact ceases, women are searching inside their purses for they know not what. ‘Come on now,’ I throw back at them, ‘what’s the church smell like?’ ‘Huele a patas,’ (Smells like feet), Don Rafael booms out. He was old and never cared what people thought. ‘Excellent. But why does it smell like feet?’ ‘Cuz many homeless men slept here last night?’ says a woman. ‘Well, why do we let that happen here?’ ‘Es nuestro compromiso’ (It’s what we’ve committed to do) says another (74).

What the church people are saying is that commitment will bring together and build up a community. If you have the right people, people who want to help others in need or who need help, then you need commitment to bring those people together to build up each other and, in turn, turn their community around. Following this excerpt Pastor G and the church continue to talk about how they do not have to leave their church open to the people who are lesser off in their community, but they do it anyways because as a church they feel it is what should be done. Following this story, Pastor G writes, “Compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others; it’s about bringing then in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. ‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate,’ means the dismantling of barriers that exclude” (75). When thinking about poverty and community, and the ways to bring communities out of poverty, this concept is incredibly important. Regardless of religion, it is important to point out that being compassionate helps to blur boundaries. When there are no boundaries between groups and communities then no one group is marginalized from the rest. By bringing communities together in compassion, the communities can begin to build up themselves and each other, thus raising the overall quality of life and reducing the harsh effects of poverty.

            There are many types of communities that come together in the face of poverty; Pastor G’s church community is one example. Another group that came together in less-than-ideal circumstances was Junior and his classmates. Junior went to school off the reservation, so he was placed into a community that wasn’t necessarily his own. After Junior missed school for about 15 to 20 days his teacher Mrs. Jeremy start picking on him for missing a lot of classes. Junior felt weak, he wanted to defend himself but couldn’t bring himself to do it, Junior said, “instead, it was Gordy who defended me. He stood with his textbooks and dropped it. Whomp! He looked so strong. He looked like a warrior. He was protecting me like Rowdy used to protect me” (Alexie 175). The fact that Gordy was protecting Junior made Junior feel good, but more than that, the rest of the class followed suit, they all stood and dropped their books in solidarity. After they dropped their books they walked out, this made Junior laugh. When Junior started laughing, his teacher asked him what was funny and he responded with “‘I used to think the world was broken down by tribes… By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not’” (Alexie 176).  Junior realize that it doesn’t matter about race or if you’re rich or poor, he realized that differences don’t matter; what should matter is how you treat others within your community and outside it as well. I can relate to how Junior was feeling, in our society today so many groups of people are marginalized and pushed to the side as if race, sexuality, or financial situations should make any group less important or valuable than the next.

            By marginalizing groups within society, particularly those who are already living in impoverished communities, we are creating a problem in serious need of being fixed. Marginalized groups living in poverty are those who often end up being targeted by the criminal justice system, these groups represent high percentages of the prison population. Smiley and West discuss this issue in their book The Rich and the Rest of the U.S.: A Poverty Manifesto in which they compiled a list titled “From Poverty to Prosperity: 12 Poverty-changing ideas.” One of these ideas addresses the prison industrial complex:

“Mass incarceration of minorities bankrupts the country; creates permanent, second-class citizenship; and locks formerly incarcerated individuals into on-the-street, economic concentration camps. Potentially salvageable people have been victims of the 20-year, race-based “War on Drugs” and a criminal criminal justice system. It’s time for a major overhaul of the prison industrial complex” (Smiley and West 179).

One of the biggest problems that communities who are impoverished face is the fact that these communities have higher rates of high-school drops outs, alcoholism, gang activity and incarceration. This problem is due to the fact that impoverished communities are often composed of marginalized groups and minorities who tend to targeted by local police forces. What this does is put people who are already in less-than-ideal situations into situations where they are even worse off. One solution to this particular problem would be to be proactive in the community rather than reactive. Instead of waiting until people within a community are, for example, reduced to drug use, or feel they are forced to sell drugs in order to provide for their families as a result of no jobs and a low-quality of life. Smiley and West had another very important idea in the list of poverty-changing ideas, this particular idea deals with the creation of jobs: “We can begin by instituting a 21st century jobs plan built on providing our nation with services and products that are essential to our growth and survival. Many of our low-skilled and unskilled citizens can be trained and immediately put to work on community-based infrastructure projects if we dare to match aptitudes to opportunities” (Smiley and West, 178). What it seems Smiley and West are saying is that if cities put their low- and unskilled workers to work building up community-based infrastructures, such as a YMCA or Community Recreation Center, then they will simultaneously build-up impoverished communities within the city by giving them an income with which to take care of themselves and their communities. Other ways to build-up communities and, in some situations provide jobs, would be to encourage community gardens, after-school tutoring programs, Girls and Boys clubs, and other ideas that would improve the overall quality of life within communities that face such extreme levels of poverty. It is also important to recognize that communities cannot always build themselves up from within; sometimes it requires help from nearby communities that are better off. Take the city of Hayward, for example, there are many well-off and wealthy communities in the Hayward hills, if those communities were to take interest in helping create programs for those in the lesser communities of Hayward then, together, these communities could improve the overall quality of life within the entire city.

            In conclusion, it is imperative that we recognize the problems our Nation has created for many marginalized groups within the United States. It is important to realize that after centuries of maltreatment the Native Americans has placed them in such extreme poverty that many are without the resources that much of America takes for granted. We must also look at the fact that by marginalizing minorities and other groups we are essentially creating an environment of “us” and “them,” of “rich” and “poor” and of “good” and “bad.” The problem of poverty was not created overnight, and it will not go away immediately. But there are many things that can be done to reverse the problem America has created within itself. By looking at the level of kinship and community within the many impoverished communities throughout the United States and by using that kinship to boost the quality of life within the community it will become possible to reverse the many negative effects of poverty while also bringing communities to new level of life.