I read a large chunk of this book sitting in my car in the leafy suburban paradise of River Forest, Illinois while waiting for my daughters at a birthday party. It is a suburb of Chicago filled with $300,000+ single family homes, well-manicured lawns, good schools and safe places for children to play. There are probably at least a couple dozen suburbs of similar affluence in the metro Chicago are.
I live a couple suburbs over in the more working-class/blue collar Town of Cicero. Cicero has some pockets of deep poverty and has had a fair number foreclosed/abandoned homes and other evidence that the Recession hit hard. Nonetheless, Cicero is not blighted and the neighborhoods have mostly held on. The schools are decent, if a bit crowded and it’s not unsafe for children to play outside. There are also probably dozens of Chicago suburbs similar to Cicero.
I bring up these two suburbs as examples to illustrate my main concern with Smiley and West’s manifesto on poverty: the black and white division between “the rich” and “the rest of us”. I’m going to guess that very few people in River Forest consider themselves “rich”, despite their average family incomes approaching or exceeding the six-figure mark. Indeed, I would be surprised if very many River Forest residents are in the 1%, let alone the 0.01% who actually control the nation and the world.
On the other hand, despite its comparative lesser wealth, I doubt many people in Cicero consider themselves really poor. I would guess that more Cicero residents than River Forest residents are struggling to make ends meet, but by-and-large people are managing to stay in their homes, the Catholic Schools fill up each year and the food pantry, while well-patronized, is not overrun. All of which is to say that, while I agree that income and wealth inequality is real and rising, it’s really not the way I’d guess that most people view the nation. Poverty is certainly on more people’s radar and probably a growing concern for more of the lower middle and working classes, but it’s not (yet?) a reality for most Americans and presenting this book in such black/white terms is really not going to win over those still in the middle, especially those who enjoy moderate affluence and don’t appreciate feeling demonized. I think it would have behooved Smiley and West to define their terms and demarcate their lines more clearly and acknowledge that there still is a middle class, albeit a shrinking one.
My other issue is that this book is fairly shallow and superficial. It is definitely easy to read – each chapter is broken down into sections that take up no more than a page or two, often off-set with quotes, charts and statistics. But this ease comes at the expense of depth. To adequately cover the nuances involved in discussing poverty, one could easily fill a book twice this size. As just one example, an in depth discussion of the complicated and mutually interacting relationship between poverty and education (and how both are influenced by the privatization of public assets) could have been very beneficial and enlightening. But instead, Smiley and West seemed content to stick with statistics that we have all heard before and sound bites that you already agree or disagree with – there is nothing here that is going to change anyone’s mind.
I do give Smiley and West credit for trying to start a conversation on a very difficult topic that most of us would prefer to brush away with platitudes about bootstraps. The most powerful parts of the book are the unfortunately too brief profiles of actual people now living in poverty since the Great Recession. And I credit them with offering positive solutions to the problem, even if they do hedge that there is probably not enough “political will” to accomplish such visions.
But there again, I wish they would have delved into the concept of “political will” a bit deeper. In a democracy, “political will” comes from the people making demands upon their elected officials. If nearly half the country is living at or near the poverty line, why isn’t this being translated into “political will”? Sure, they talk about the toxic role of money in controlling the political process. But last I heard, it’s still one person, one vote, not one dollar, one vote. So where does the apathy of the American people come from that tolerates this situation? Why do we keep voting for candidates who don’t represent our interests? We could look, for instance, at our “two party” system in which both parties serve the same corporate behemoths (but that might require criticizing the first black president). We could look at the resistance to third parties, even among those who declare themselves fed up with the two major parties. We could look at the effects of fear, demagoguery, trauma and toxic stress and how those factors are manipulated to continue the “political divide” that benefits the elite. In short, there are any number of avenues that Smiley and West could have explored in depth that could have made this a much more powerful book. Of course, I guess that would have made it a longer and more difficult book to read, and I suppose we’re all too apathetic for that.
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