Born Poor, Stay Poor: The Silent Caste System of America | C. Nicole Mason | Big Think

We’re not talking honestly about what it really takes to get from poverty to the middle class. So, for example, we know that only four percent of people who are born into poverty will ever make it to the upper middle class or to, you know, have middle class success. And so what that means is that 96 percent of people are not making it out. And I think we’re being dishonest when we say everybody has a fair and equal chance of achieving the American Dream.

So it wasn’t until college that I figured out that I was poor. I hadn’t – before then I had no context for what it meant to have less than other people who lived around me or across town. And I certainly didn’t know that I was outside of what was considered the middle class. And the first time that I heard about people living in poverty was in a political science class. In there we were talking about welfare policies. And one of the big policies at the time was welfare reform.

And the debate was raging about what should be done and a lot of the conversation was up here and really detached from the women and families that were going to be directly impacted by the policy. So we heard a lot of things about welfare queens, people living off the system, not wanting to work, women being lazy, having multiple children. And that really wasn’t the reality for the women who were actually impoverished.

And so when we look at the kind of policies that result – the kind of policy, the welfare reform policy that we got on the other end we got a policy that said well, you can’t – if you don’t work you can’t receive benefits. And you have time limits. And if you have another child you’re penalized. Those policies and that restrictiveness was counter to the everyday lived experiences of the women who were actually receiving the benefits.

So what was excluded from that policy was a clear pathway out of poverty like education. There missing – in the very beginning there was very few provisions for childcare and a lot of other things that we know family and women need to be able to chart a path out of poverty. When people think of poverty they think about money and resources and cash.

But a big part of poverty is the lack of social connections and social networks. And what we know is that those social networks and connections are really powerful in terms of helping people to navigate complex institutions and structures. And for poor people those social networks are often missing.

And when we talk about bridging from poverty to the middle class social networks and social capital that are really important to making that leap. And so when we talk about what can institutions and leaders do to support that it’s really important to make sure that children and people in low income neighborhoods have ample access to bridge opportunities meaning opportunities outside of their community, that they’re engaged in programs not only within their community but outside of their community that connect them to people outside of their normal social network.

What we need to do is be working together across class, across race and across all these markers of difference to figure out what are the connections? How might we support one another? And looking at the richness of what each of us bring to the table as opposed to assuming there’s a deficit coming from one end.

The poor housing, the poor quality schools, the infrastructure, the lack of libraries and institutions in communities and hospitals and high unemployment. We’re not talking about how those things are barriers in and of themselves to people escaping poverty. And so when those things are absent from communities people are rightly preoccupied with securing those things.

And we’re not having that conversation about what does it really look like for a community to be thriving. We know what it looks like. We’ve seen it, you know. We know that communities that have great schools, low levels of unemployment, low levels of crime, high civic engagement, great grocery stores and banks. Those communities are doing well.