Poverty’s Evil Twin
by John Merrow
In this deeply polarized nation, I have found something that unites Republicans and Democrats: neither party talks about poverty, despite our current epidemic of child poverty and its consequences for the life chances of millions of children. From what this political junkie has seen and heard, both parties have studiously avoided talking about it at their respective conventions. Democrats in Charlotte talked incessantly about ‘the middle class,’ while in Tampa the Republicans gave off a distinctive vibe: “If you are successful, you did it yourself. If you are poor, you messed up. Not our problem.”
Poverty is on my mind, however. As readers of last week’s blog post know, in an otherwise inspirational profile of a forward-looking summer program in Providence, RI, we inadvertently conflated race and poverty in the opening 45 seconds. The opening visuals conveyed the message that poor people were black and that well-off people were white. That inaccuracy — the number of whites in poverty is actually
