Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen

Seventeen years ago, three-year-old Anthony and four-year-old Maurice died in Dade County, Florida. Their mother worked to support her family but her income was too low to pay for child care. Since she qualified for government help she was put on Florida’s long waiting list for child care assistance, a list with 22,000 names. While waiting she relied on friends and relatives to care for the children. Some days those arrangements fell through and the boys were left alone while she went to work. On one such day, Maurice and Anthony climbed into the clothes dryer to look at a magazine in a seemingly cozy place, closed the door, and tumbled and burned to death. The
Miami Herald
wrote, “There are hundreds, maybe thousands more tragedies waiting to happen in Dade County alone, in every home where young children are left to fend for themselves. They’re not latchkey kids, they’re lockup kids, locked inside for the day by parents who can’t afford day care, can’t afford not to work and can’t get government assistance. Anthony and Maurice might be alive today if affordable care had been available.”

Years later, in another American city, Antonio was born to Maria, a young mother who was sent home with him the day he was born. Only she didn’t have a home. She was a single parent with no extended family support. She loved her baby and within the limits of public assistance was able to find a small room to rent. When Antonio was about three months old, Maria called a health clinic to report her baby was sick. The nurse told Maria to bring him in. Maria said she didn’t have transportation. The nurse asked for the baby’s symptoms and, after hearing Antonio had suffered diarrhea for two days, concluded he had a flu virus and advised Maria to keep the baby hydrated. “Feed the baby liquids every hour; Pedialyte or apple juice is good.” Maria went to her refrigerator. She didn’t have Pedialyte or apple juice or even ice. But in her cupboard she did have tomato sauce, so she filled the baby’s bottle with it and stayed up all night feeding him every hour on the hour. The sodium content of the tomato sauce accelerated the baby’s dehydration and by morning his tiny body was lifeless.

Anthony, Maurice, and Antonio died from poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth. Should Anthony and Maurice have died because their mother could not afford child care when she had to go to work to support them? Did Antonio need to die because his mother lacked transportation, adequate access to health care, and food? These were three real children, each a sacred gift of God, and a member of our American and human family. We could have prevented their deaths and thousands of other child deaths like theirs; we still have the opportunity to alleviate the daily terrors and perils millions of other poor children and families face by making more just choices in our rich, powerful nation.

Our nation’s current budget choices favor powerful corporate interests and the wealthiest taxpayers over poor children and families’ urgent needs. The gap between rich and poor is at its largest recorded point in more than thirty years. While thousands of children, parents, and grandparents stand in unemployment and soup kitchen and homeless shelter lines waiting for food and a stable place to live all across America, lobbyists for powerful corporations and rich individuals and special interests line up inside Congress and the White House and state houses to get hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax breaks and government handouts.

Follow the money and you find out what we truly care about and stand for as a nation. Budgets represent moral and social choices, not just economic ones. They are a test of what we value as a people. Our budget priorities say we do not value our children and poor families. Poor children, families, and individuals cannot eat promises, be sheltered from the cold by photo-ops, or escape poverty through eloquent speeches about compassion with crumbs from America’s table of plenty.

It is morally shameful that a child is born into poverty every forty-three seconds, and without health insurance every minute in our nation. Persistent and pervasive poverty and child neglect in our country are not acts of God. They are moral and political choices we make as Americans. We can change them. We have the money. We have the power. We have the know-how. We have the experience. We have the vision. And we have the moral and social responsibility. What we lack is the civic and spiritual engagement of enough citizens, and political, faith, and media leaders to pierce the profound lack of awareness about and indifference to preventable and solvable child and adult suffering. As we seek the spiritual and civic resolve we require, we are hindered by the poisonous politics of self-interest and greed; narrow ideological agendas that reflect the belief that government should help the rich and powerful most and the poor and powerless least; and the political hypocrisy of leaders at all levels of government and in all parties who leave millions of children and families behind while pretending to do otherwise. Anthony’s, Maurice’s, and Antonio’s stories are just the tip of the iceberg of the child suffering that affects millions of children every day and will sink our ship of state and nation’s soul if we do not change course.

In his fine book, Dr. David Hilfker describes many of the underlying causes of poverty in our nation, especially black urban poverty; explains why past efforts have not eliminated poverty; and shows why and how we can and must do better. For our children’s and nation’s sakes, we need to approach present and future efforts to end child and family poverty with a new level of moral and political commitment, and urgency and vision. Now is the time for all of us to raise our voices and stand together to help America truly honor the ideals of freedom and justice for which it purports to stand. Like the widow in the New Testament parable who pestered the unjust judge, we need to speak up for justice again and again and again until our requests to leave no child or person behind in the richest nation on earth are heard and acted upon. America has been blessed with so much. Let us determine to be a blessing to all the poor in our own nation and around the world.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
President, Children’s Defense Fund

Introduction

When we Americans want to do something about poverty, we usually set about “improving” poor people. We may offer education or job training, establish programs to develop the parenting skills of young mothers, require addiction treatment as a condition for receiving housing, put a time limit on welfare benefits in order to motivate poor people to work, or refuse additional welfare payments to discourage further childbearing.

This practice of improving poor people has a long history. Early American reformers traced extreme poverty to intoxication, laziness, and other kinds of unacceptable behavior. They tried to use public policy and philanthropy to elevate poor people’s characters and change their behavior. As the years passed, different sets of behaviors were blamed for poverty and successive methods suggested to improve the poor. Later reformers looked to evangelical religion, temperance legislation, punitive poor houses, the forced breakup of families, and threats of institutionalization—all to improve poor people.

This approach has rested on the persistent belief that the individual faults of the poor are the primary causes of poverty: ignorance, lack of training, addiction, laziness, defective character, sexual promiscuity, too many children; the list goes on and on. It is not surprising, of course, that a nation so strongly committed to individualism should so often search for the roots of poverty within the poor persons themselves.

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