Several of those in the book, including Scott, a gay nurse who loses his license after he becomes addicted to opiates, were sexually abused. Most of those Desmond interviewed grew up in violent households or suffered domestic abuse from partners. Nearly all of the fathers were in prison or had disappeared. Poverty robs children of their childhood. Jori, at 14, attempted to be his mother’s protector. “If Arleen needed to smile, Jori would steal for her,” Desmond wrote. “If she was disrespected, he would fight for her. Some kids born into poverty set their sights on doing whatever it takes to get out. Jori wasn’t going anywhere, sensing he was put on this Earth to look after Arleen and Jafaris. He was, all fourteen years of him, the man of the house.” He tells his mother he wants to become a carpenter so he can build her a house. Belle’s family ends up living with Crystal Mayberry, who was 18 and had an IQ of about 70, and who had been “born prematurely on a spring day in 1990 shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back during a robbery.” The stabbing induced labor. Crystal, the daughter of parents addicted to crack, grew up in 25 foster homes. When she aged out of the system, she became homeless. Belle and Mayberry engaged, Desmond wrote, in “a popular strategy poor people used to pay the bills and feed their children. Especially in the inner city, strangers brushed up against one another constantly—on the street, at job centers, in the welfare building—and found ways to ask for and offer help. Before she met Arleen, Crystal stayed a month with a woman she had met on a bus.” But the relationship soured, in part because of tensions between Jori and Mayberry. Jori threatened Mayberry and called her a “bitch” when she attempted to put his little brother outside of the house with no shoes or coat. “You don’t know what it’s like,” Belle shouted at Mayberry as the relationship unraveled. “You don’t know what I been through. You don’t know what it’s like to have your father molest you and your mother not care about it!” “Oh, yes I do,” Mayberry, answered. “Yes, I do! I know exactly what that’s like ‘cause my stepfather molested me when I was just a little girl, and that’s why they sent me to foster care.” The world is too much for Jori, as it is for his mother and little brother, as it is for most of the poor who are hemmed in by the unforgiving walls of poverty. After their eviction, Jori leaves his black and white cat, Little, with a neighbor. When he comes back to collect Little, one of his few sources of joy, Jori finds “a car had ground him into the pavement.” He fights back tears. He takes a foam mannequin’s head, turns it face up and begins to repeatedly hit the face with his fist until his mother screams at him to stop. By the end of the book, Belle loses her two children to Child Protective Services. Desmond captures the stress and shame that makes it difficult to have empathy and that creates disconnected and alienated individuals. He wrote:
Arleen’s children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give them, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn’t deserve it. When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was selfish, or just bad. When Jafaris cried, Arleen sometimes yelled, ‘Damn, you hardheaded. Dry yo’ face up!’ or ‘Stop it, Jafaris before I beat yo’ ass! I’m tired of your bitch ass.’ Sometimes, when he was hungry, Arleen would say, “Don’t be getting in the kitchen because I know you not hungry’; or would tell him to stay out of the barren cupboards because he was getting too fat. You could only say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t’ so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say ‘No, I won’t.’ I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
There are generations being sacrificed to emotional and cognitive dysfunction because of poverty. They lack a basic education. They are rendered numb by trauma. They are crushed as human beings. The rage Jori exhibited when his cat was killed grows and blossoms into a terrifying violence. I see it among my students in the prison. As adults, those raised like Jori explode with an inchoate fury at the slightest provocation, often something banal or trivial. If a gun is available—and in America, guns are almost always available—they shoot. If they are caught, they spend the decades locked in a cage, where there are no more opportunities for education, vocational training, counseling or redemption than in their blighted slums. There are numerous corporations and individuals that make money off this human sacrifice inside and outside prison walls. They have a vested interest in keeping the system intact. These moneyed interests use their power and their lobbyists to prevent rational and humane reform. Desmond captures the true face of corporate America. It is ugly and cruel. Your support matters…

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#bankruptcy#corporate america#corporatism#eviction#homelessness#income inequality#police brutality#poverty#rosa luxemburg#td-original