America's Poor and the Great Recession

Foreword

Foreword I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. —dr. martin luther king, jr. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he spoke of a bold vision in which everyone on earth would enjoy safety and security. He believed wholeheartedly in a coming age in which every person would have enough to eat, access to education , and the respect owed to each human being. His statements echoed those of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1941 also called for a future in which people “everywhere in the world” would experience not only freedom of expression and freedom of religion, but also freedom from want and freedom from fear. For both these leaders, the vision of a just and peaceful planet rested on universal access to basic necessities. FDR and MLK recognized that when people go hungry, when they don’t have a decent place to live, when they can’t get access to transportation or medical attention —much less an education or vocation—they are not truly free. In America today, however, “poverty” has become an impolite topic. We don’t often talk about the poor in mainstream discourse, and when we do, it is rarely with concern over their standard of living . Far from embracing the idea that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, it has become the norm to disparage poor people as failures, as stupid or lazy, or as criminals or drug users or frauds exploiting the system. Occasionally, a politician or pundit c · america’s poor and the great recession makes a nod toward the “deserving poor”—a term that itself demonstrates the contempt in which poor people are held. More commonly, financial hardship in America is described in terms of a “struggling middle class.” The irony of that characterization is that what the middle class is so desperately struggling against—and what portions of it have now fallen into—is poverty. Facing Facts What does poverty in America really look like? Together with my abiding friend and public radio co-host, Princeton University Professor Emeritus Cornel West, I set out to answer this question in 2011. Our Poverty Tour took us around the country, meeting and giving voice to our brothers and sisters who are living beneath the poverty line. We sought to hear and share the stories of the men and women, children and seniors, families and individuals who are trying to get by with too little. Before starting the tour, we needed a clear understanding of the true scope and magnitude of American poverty. We had to know how many people in our towns and cities could not meet their basic needs, and what they had access to in terms of assistance . We wanted a detailed portrait of America’s poor—not only the color of their skin, but also how they live and work and take care of their families. We were also determined to understand how the country’s present economic conditions and policies were affecting the poor, and what could be done to make those policies more responsive to the needs of low-income Americans. For this factual foundation, we turned to Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs Dean John D. Graham and Assistant Professor Kristin Seefeldt. Along with their team of graduate assistants, they prepared for us a white paper titled, “At Risk: America’s Poor During and After the Great Recession,” which formed the basis for this book. Through their rigorous research, they described the characteristics and patterns of American poverty and how these features interact with the country’s economic history, reality, and forecast. What their work revealed was not only informative and illuminating but also atrocious and appalling. viii foreword · c Some 50 million Americans are living in poverty, and that number keeps on growing. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of poor Americans increased by 27% although the country’s population only grew by 3.3% during that period. Millions of people who were once solidly middle class can no longer feed their families. More people are experiencing long-term unemployment than at any time since the statistic was first recorded. Fellow citizens hit worst by the Great Recession were those who had historically suffered from previous...