Poverty, by America

Desmond recognizes that he is adding to a large body of literature on the subject of poverty in America, which he characterizes as having mostly focused on descriptions of life in poverty and appeals to sympathy for their plight. By contrast, he uses the phrase “by America” in his book’s title to implicate the social systems that sustain American poverty. Desmond’s book is brief and focuses on its own argument, so it lacks a more comprehensive literature review. A more complete glimpse into the works that he is engaging with illustrates the context of Desmond’s case. He mentions the work of photojournalist Jacob Riis, activist Jane Addams, and Professor Michael Harrington as all contributing to the awareness of poverty without answering the question of “why,” but there is ample literature that attempts to combine description with analysis.

Arguably, such works have not so much failed to ask why but have not been properly comprehensive in their explanation. One of the most famous recent examples is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001), an instant classic that quickly became required reading in many college courses. Trained as a scientist, Ehrenreich spent many years as a journalist and activist before going undercover as a waitress, maid, and retail worker, recounting her own difficulties while focusing on the plight of those who do it as an actual living rather than as a part-time sociological experiment. Ehrenreich’s personal experiences fed into her broader claim that there was a disconnect between low-paid workers and the “professional managerial class”—the mid-level operators of the restaurants, hotels, and retail chains where she worked, who had just enough power to see themselves as on the side of the owners even though they themselves were also victims of the same system.

Another recent example of analyzing the causes of poverty is Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us (2021), which argues that following the Civil Rights Movement, many white communities decreased funding for social services rather than share them with Black citizens. The emblematic example is of a public swimming pool that, upon being desegregated, the town ordered drained rather than allow all citizens to enjoy it. McGhee also explains how many economic questions, particularly the housing crisis of 2007-2008, had racial dimensions that went underexplored, as Black and brown people were far more likely targets of subprime mortgages due to not only their more precarious economic status but also the presumed indifference of the law to their being victimized by predatory practices.

Desmond is sensitive to the minor gradations within classes that end up feeding into the oppression of the bottom tier, as well as the role of race in fueling class antagonism. His work attempts to go further in citing the whole structure of American society as responsible for the plight of the poor. A lack of class consciousness and an overabundance of race consciousness are themselves byproducts of a capitalist system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, and so major changes to America’s economic system are necessary to relieve both its class and racial antagonisms.