Must-Read: Ananya Roy: In Defense of “Poverty”

Must-Read: Ananya Roy: In Defense of “Poverty”:

A glimpse of the public assistance bureaucracy that the poor must navigate….

Despite being fluent in sophisticated understandings of poverty and inequality, the… middle-class social justice professionals were thoroughly disoriented by the sheer dehumanization…. Shunted from office to office, in search of basic paperwork, trying to meet convoluted criteria of eligibility, we the privileged… were reminded that we are not poor and that we barely understand the lived condition of poverty. That lived condition, in the United States, is necessarily and persistently racialized…. This history did not start with the Great Recession or even with the era of neoliberalization. It is the long history of racialized expropriation and quarantine. I worry that a general narrative of inequality elides both the specificity of poverty and the distinctive history of impoverishment…