When left-wingers and right-wingers toss out their “expertise” and “solutions” for poverty they so rarely mention one of our worst enemies, a dragon we must confront and spear on a daily basis if we don’t want to sink beneath the surface. This dragon is not laziness nor is it racism. It is learned helplessness.
Frontpage Mag In 2014, I published an essay listing ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. Something happened last Monday that hurt my feelings a lot and reminded me of another reason: I’m poor. This is counterintuitive. The Left depicts itself as the champion of the poor; the Left depicts right-wingers as hating the poor. Backstage, behind all the speechifying about “compassion,” a very specific left-wing attitude to the poor is abhorrent to me. I encountered that attitude last Monday. I felt disgust, rage, and sorrow.
The average per capita income in my city, Paterson, NJ, is a bit more than half of the US average. One in four persons is living on less than $13,000 annually. Paterson was founded in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton. Thanks to its picturesque facades, Paterson is often used as a film set. In 2019, Steven Spielberg filmed his remake of West Side Story here. Sets are hermetically sealed. Directors, scriptwriters, actors, choreographers, composers, enter this city lugging mobile, self-contained, restaurants, dressing rooms, and even sun and rain. They never breathe the same air as a Patersonian, yet they tell the story of Paterson. When Spielberg was here, using our decaying city as his backdrop, he erected, in downtown Paterson, a set of a decaying city. He came all this way just to use his techno-Crayolas to scribble up a simulacrum of what a decaying city should really look like.
Yes, Spielberg’s set is a metaphor. People who are not poor say who the poor are, why we are poor, and what should be done about us. They script us. They choreograph us. They erect sets blocking your view of real poor people. They announce their own authority and they cry, “Authenticity!”
Everyone negatively stereotypes the poor. I’m poor and I succumb to using slurs like “redneck,” “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “toothless.” “Redneck” refers to the sunburned necks of those who labor manually in hot sun, like my carpenter brother; like me when I was a landscaper, one of many manual labor jobs I took when I was working my way toward a PhD. “Toothless” is an insult meaning stupid, primitive, and backward. But we all know what “toothless” really means. “Toothless,” when used as an insult, means that those who can afford dental care are comfortable disdaining those who can’t.
