A Framework for Understanding Poverty
Ruby Payne
It is important to note that the approach to discipline advocated in this book is to teach a separate set of behaviors. Many of the behaviors that students bring to school are necessary to help them survive outside of school.
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
Ruby Payne
In the United States in 2003, the poverty rate for all individuals was 12.5%. For children under the age of 18, the poverty rate was 17.6%, and for children under the age of 6, the rate was 20.3%. up more than 2% in two years (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2004)…
Poor inner-city youths are seven times more likely to be the victims of child abuse or neglect than are children of high social and economic status (Renchler, 1993)…
The United States’ child poverty rate is substantially higher – often two or three times higher – than that of most other major Western industrialized nations.
Bloodlines
John Piper
Homicide is the number one cause of death for black men between fifteen and twenty-nine years of age and has been for decades. Of the roughly sixteen thousand homicides in this country each year, more than half are committed by black men. A black man is seven times more likely to commit a murder (excluding military actions) than a white man, and six times more likely to be murdered. (Black mothers live with these numbers. We don’t know how they sleep at night.) Ninety-four percent of all black people who are murdered are murdered by other black people. The life expectancy at birth of black men is sixty-nine years, compared to seventy-five years for white men, eighty for white women, and seventy-six for black women. In the past several decades, the suicide rate among young black men has increased more than 100 percent. In some cities black males have high school drop-out rates of more than 50 percent. Young black men are twice as likely to be unemployed as white, Hispanic, and Asian men. Although black people make up just 13 percent of the general population, they make up nearly 44 percent of the prison population. At any given time, as many as one in four of all young black men are in the criminal justice system—in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole. By the time they reach their midthirties, six out of ten black high school dropouts have spent time in prison.
A Community of the Broken
Christopher L. Heuertz
God seeks provision for the poor (Lev. 23:22; Deut. 15:4, 7-11; Ps. 41:1; Prov. 28:27), identifies with the poor (Ps. 68:5-6; Prov. 14:31; 17:5; 19:17; Isa. 3:14-15; 1 Cor. 1:27-29; 2 Cor. 8:9; James 2:5), validates the authenticity of our Christian life through our relationships with the poor (Prov. 21:13; 22:9; 28:5; 29:7; Isa. 58:6-11; 1 John 3:16-18), and uses the poor as the standard for judgment of individuals and nations (Ps. 109:6-16; 140:12; Jer. 22:16; Amos 5:11-12; Matt. 25:31-46).
Habits of Highly Effective Justice Workers
Rodolpho Carrasco
Doing justice by walking alongside people as they develop critical life skills is not exciting. Protesting on Wall Street against globalization is exciting. Getting arrested at the courthouse is exciting. Filling the National Mall with hundreds of thousands of people is exciting. But staying proximate to people as they learn lessons they should have learned years ago?
Link: Complete Article
Hillbilly Elegy
J.D. Vance
One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support. Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities.
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality…How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence? … Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation–those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society would say, “He should have stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him…
When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country.
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I focused in on a light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was scowling at another boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before three in the afternoon. I was in the sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here? Who could know? The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children–and fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. The boy did not shoot. His friends pulled him back. He did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the order of things. He had let it be known how easily I could be selected. I took the subway home that day, processing the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents. I did not tell my teachers, and if I told my friends I would have done so with all the excitement needed to obscure the fear that came over me in that moment. I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, compromised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room.
Code of the Street
Elijah Anderson
Blacks have always been apart from the dominant society, and they have always been segregated and beset by the problems that come with segregation. The past thirty years have brought a greater inclusion of blacks in American society and a sharing of its fruits, but these developments have most often helped those blacks who were ready to take advantage of them–the middle classes, the educated people. The poor, who lack the skills, the education, and the outlook to take advantage of these new opportunities, have been not beneficiaries but more often victims of the changes.
Ambassadors of Hope
Robert A. Seiple
I suppose we all have our own definitions of abject poverty, but for me people are poor when they are forced to make choices that preclude ethical considerations, actions that are forced from the very heart of darkness.
The Alpha Project 