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As we draw to the end of our week of events on poverty, I find myself preoccupied with questions of privilege and lack. Mostly I’ve been thinking about my own advantages, and the ways in which privilege remains invisible to ourselves when we don’t make an effort to become conscious of it. The play Nickel and Dimed really emphasizes that idea when Barbara tries to live the life of the working poor—to make herself more socially conscious—yet the play also shows how hard even consciousness can be as she falls back on her own advantages when she has had enough. Both the play and Shipler’s book allow us to temporarily occupy the lives of someone else, and to me, this is one of the great joys—and dare I say, values?—of literature. To that end, I’m offering a rather random list of texts, mostly novels, autobiographies, and nonfiction, which I think offer that opportunity to occupy someone else’s subject position and challenge our own privilege, whatever it may be. In keeping with last week’s theme, I’m concentrating on texts that explore the question of class privilege, or lack thereof. If you can think of others, feel free to start a blog thread!
). A classic. Examines the plight of migrant workers during the Great Depression and their attempts to organize into labor unions.
A story of a single mother trying to support herself and her son in an inhospitable urban environment which offers no upward mobility, no matter how hard she works.
. Agee (a writer) and Evans (a photographer) created a mixed-genre examination of the plight of white sharecroppers in Alabama. The book is part ethnography and part journalism along with some very lyrical passages about rural poverty during the Depression.
An autobiography by a white man who dyes his skin brown to report on living as an African American in the Jim Crow south. The book is a meditation on black deprivation and white privilege and became a bestseller. It is a bit troubling that Griffin’s voice was elevated over the voices of many African Americans who had said the same things many times before, yet his moments of realization give insight into his privilege.
While lighter in tone than most of the other books included here, Kingsolver explores—among other things—the way that being white and American can shelter individuals from recognizing racism and the repercussions of American foreign policy.
. The authors (one of whom created the television shows Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire) spent a year observing life on a Baltimore drug corner to explore the effects of addiction and urban poverty on a family.
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