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Street roots
Jan 17, 2014
A homeless woman on the streets of Portland, Christmas, 2013
BY JAY THIEMEYER
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
/ ’T M ie title of author Sasha Abramsky’s
new book, “The American Way of
JL Poverty,” might sound a bit
patronizing to patriotic ears, given that
Abramsky was born in Great Britain and
attended Oxford University. But living now
in his mother’s homeland of America, which
he has traveled and documented in such
publications as The Nation, The Atlantic
Monthly, Salon, Slate, Rolling Stone and the
Village Voice, Abramsky’s admiration for the
American backbone — and its
responsibilities - is unquestioned.
Nonetheless, he explores the issue with
critical eyes. His describes what he calls the
scandal of poverty in the world’s wealthiest
nation. While that might not be news on the
face of it, Abramsky dives into
understanding the machinery of how we got
here and, more importantly, what we can do
about it. It’s not as hopeless as it might
seem if people agree to change, and the
United States has a proud legacy of making
that change. The book’s foundation are the
interviews with people experiencing
poverty, and the circumstances surrounding
their situation, making each tragedy both
highly personal and sadly universal. (Many
of the interviews on which this book is
based are accessible on the audio archive,
www.thevoicesofpoverty.org.)
Abramsky and his family live in
Sacramento, Calif. In 2000 he was awarded
an Open Society, Crime, and Communities
Media Fellowship, and he is currently a
Senior Fellow at the New York City-based
Demos think tank.
I
Jay Thiemeyer: How did this book come
about?
Sasha Abramsky: I’d been doing an
awful lot of reporting, going all over the
country, driving, flying, going to these out of
the way communities and talking to people
about their everyday lives, and about the
ways in which they were making ends meet
age of affluence; that everyone was ’
participating in this extraordinary growth,
and the country was becoming almost 100
percent middle class. Harrington had
worked for years with people who were
homeless, who lived in slums, who didn’t
have enough money to buy food for their
kids. He knew that the story was
incomplete, that millions of Americans were
being rendered invisible, that their voices
were going unheard. The ¿haflenge to ,
himself was how to make visible the
invisible. And the broader challenge was to
hold up a mirror to America, because here
is a country that is espousing great ideals
about opportunity, aspirations and freedom.
Wonderful ideals but they aren’t always lived
up to.
Harrington holds up a mirror and says,
look, this is part of our image that we don’t
like looking at. What are we going to do
about it? And it triggered a huge national
conversation. It resulted on the War on
Poverty, so when Lyndon Johnson gets up
and delivers his state of the union address
in 1964, he turns the War on Poverty into a
moràl challenge. The defining moral
challenge.
One of thè things I write about is that
from the 1980s onward, we lost that moral
. energy, and there are many reasons for it
As a society we began to move away from a
commitment to limit inequality and limit
poverty. .The two are very much part of the
same story. Over the past 35 years what you
see is at the top of the economy, things
have never been so good. We have more
billionaires than we ever had. We have more
people with extraordinary luxury in their
lives on a daily basis. But on the other end,
on the bottom of the economy, people are
J.T.: Your book has been called a successor
to Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.” increasingly unstable, increasingly
precarious.
Does that parse with you?
or not m aking ends meet. And I became
fascinated by the fact that in the middip of
boon times, when the stock market was
going up, when
housing prices were
going up, when
unemployment was r
fairly low, a huge
number of men,
women and kids that I
spoke who were
finding they couldn’t
feed themselves. I
would see families
waiting in liiie for free
Abramsky
food. And when I
talked to them, it
wasn’t just that they couldn’t feed |
themselves, it was that everything was
becoming precarious^ People were finding it .•
harder to pay mortgages or rents. They
were finding it harder and harder to pay for
insurance, or buy medicines if they had no
insurance. And at every level, their daily
, lives were becoming more of a challenge,
*more of a sense of daily instability.
And then, after 2008, all of those things
that had already been going on during the
boon years. They magnified, so you started
seeing a level of poverty spread all over this
country that we haven’t seen for years. It
wasn’t that it was concentrated in one area,
it was everywhere. You could find it in the
cities, but you also found it in suburban
track housing.
It seemed to me we were witnessing an
emergence of a new shape of society. That
the America that was emerging was
something that looked unfamiliar.
S.A.: I’m very honored by the
comparison. Michael Harrington has always
been one of my journalistic heroes because
he did something extraordinary. He took
the narrative that America had entered the
now and then?
S.A.: One of things I always tell my
students is to be careful not to put rose-
colored glasses on. Don’t romanticize the
past I think it’s too easy to say everything’s
gone to hell in a handbasket today, and
things used to be so much better, because
the past was by no means rosy. There were
tremendous problems in the structure of
our society of the late 1950s and early 60s.
There was endemic racism. There was an
extraordinary sexual hierarchy, There were
all kinds of unpleasant hierarchies and
poverty was very prevalent in the early
1960s. But I do think that there was a
moment, a period in the 1960s, when as a
culture, we were willing to confront a lot of
the problems in society and look for very
creative solutions. And that partly came
from the bottom, up, from tremendous
grassroots organizing projects, from Cesar
Chavez organizing farmworkers to
Stonewall in the late 1960s defining gay
rights. So there was this moment where the
language of empathy was allowed to flower
from the grassroots up. But we also had a
political leadership who really thought the
sky was the limit, that anything that
America set its mind to do, it could
accomplish. That went all the way from the
moonwalk to the War on Poverty, where
Johnson could use the moral platform of the
presidency to say we are going to end
poverty in America. Not just limit it, but end
it
In hindsight, I think that was a mistake,
because I think it set in motion the
backlash. It’s very hard to end poverty. All
societies are going to have a level of
poverty; it’s a question of how much.
The War on Poverty did a tremendous
amount of good. It took millions and millions
of Americans who were poor at the start of
1960s, and by the mid 70s, they’d been
J.T.: You underline in your book the lack of
raised out of poverty. By many measures,
empathy today compared to 1962, especially
what happened in the '60s and 70s was a
with the Civil Rights movement sort of cueing
tremendous success, but because it was
people to the fact that there was a great deal of
injustice. Talk about that difference, between
See POVERTY, page 4