How The Other Half Lives Is Hailed As The Defining Text

The purpose of this essay is to inform the reader of a real problem, media misrepresentation, and to try to have the reader change the way the think, feel, and perceive the poor. She gives examples of encounters she has had that are a result of the damaging depiction and conveys to the reader why those thoughts are wrong by using her own personal experiences. She mentions that before entering college she never thought about social class. However, the comments from both other students and her professors about poverty were alarming to her. Other people viewed the poor as, “shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy” indigents. Hook opposes that stereotypical image of the poor, referring back to being taught in a “culture of poverty,” the values to be intelligent, honest, and hard-working. She uses these personal experiences to her advantage by showing she has had an inside look at poverty.

Tommie Shelby is an American philosopher and a professor of African American studies at Harvard University. In his article “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” Shelby discusses poor, black neighborhoods that have persisted in America for decades due to few public policy efforts to make things better. In his article Shelby brings up two approaches to this dilemma that he opposes. The first is the personal responsibility approach which appeals to American values of hard work and ultimately places blame on the poor rather than the government or society. The Technocratic approach on the other hand does the opposite. It blames the government for failing to fix the social conditions of the poor and refuses to blame the poor themselves even if they have done actions that have not necessarily improved their well-being. Shelby’s approach is a mix between the two. He says that we cannot blame the poor if the injustice of our society has changed the content of their obligations and thus making their behavior reasonable due to the unfair conditions they were subjected to. In other words they are a product of their environment. Shelby wants to get his point across that the existence of ghettos today is evidence that our society impaired by structural injustices and that the ghetto is not only the problem of those living in it, but all of ours.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America was the first book of its type that I’ve ever read, a real life analysis of what its like to “live in poverty,” working minimum wage jobs trying to make ends meet day in and day out. It was an intriguing story of how a woman with plenty went on to document how she lived without and I found that Ehrenreich’s commentary throughout the book offered a refreshing perspective to the usual conversation that surrounds poverty; she never thought that she was better or better off than those she met working low-paying jobs, and she was always conscious of how race intersected with class throughout her so-called field experiment.

In his essay Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto, Tommie Shelby considers the question of what sort of criticism can be raised against the behaviors and attitudes of people who live in ghettos and who earn low incomes. He refers to this group as the “ghetto poor,” and he argues that they are open to far fewer kinds of criticism than many people claim. At the same time, Shelby does not go so far as to say that the ghetto poor are free from all criticism. In this essay, I will present Shelby’s distinction between civic duties and natural duties, describe how each kind of duty plays a role in Shelby’s analysis of possible criticism of the ghetto poor, and raise an objection to a segment of Shelby’s argument against criticism of the ghetto poor.

Author Bryan Stevenson (2014) writes, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned”(p.18). According to the non-profit, Feeding America (2016), in 2015, 43.1 million, or 13.5%, of people in the United States were impoverished. Poverty is a vicious cycle, trapping people and families for generations. The inability to escape poverty is due in part to difficult class mobility in the U.S. but also because certain factors reinforce the idea and state of poverty. Bryan Stevenson’s bestseller Just Mercy, Lindsey Cook’s article “U.S. Education: Still Separate and Unequal”, Michelle Alexander’s excerpt “The Lockdown”, and Sarah Smarsh’s “Poor Teeth” all explore the idea of poverty and the systems that sustain it. While all four readings focus on poverty differently and explore it using different techniques, they all share similar big picture ideas about how poverty is fortified through systematic, societal, and psychological efforts.

In How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Riis reveals and decries the horrific conditions that the urban poor and immigrants were subjected to as a result of shifts in the social order brought about by industrialization. Riis, a Danish immigrant himself, had a heart for the poor and wrote the How the Other Half Lives, also a photojournalist endeavor, to provide social commentary about urban poverty and the willingness of the upper class to turn a blind eye and allow the “other half” to live in destitution.

Ewen then presents the reader with Ira Steward, a weaver and leader in the Massachusetts movement for and eight hour workday. Steward goes into further detail of the reason that the middle class felt the need to focus so much on their appearance. “To advertise one’s self destitute, is to be without credit, that tides so many in safety- to their standing in society- over the shallow places where ready resources fail” (qtd. in Ewen 192). Ewen uses Steward to explain that “the poor man is an unsuccessful man” (qtd. in Ewen 192). In America, we are judged by what we own. Being poor not only means that the person is unsuccessful but it is almost as if that person isn’t even a citizen. Keeping up an image that looks good is almost like buying your way into citizenship and acceptance. “The more expensive and superior style of living adopted by the middle classes must therefore be considered in the light of an investment, made from the soundest considerations of expediency- considering their risks and their chances-and from motives even of self preservation, rather than the mere desire for self indulgence.” (qtd. in Ewen 192). Ewen presents the idea that a person’s image

Shelby defines the ghetto as a primarily black, urban neighborhood with high concentrations of poverty. He identifies two inherent problems, extreme chronic poverty and the behavior demonstrated by residents deemed as deviations from mainstream norms, such as engaging in crime. Furthermore, Shelby refers to two common criticisms concerning ghetto poverty. One asserts that poverty is a symptom of moral depravity in the urban poor as beneficiaries in a perpetual welfare state. Another concentrates on the failure of government to fight poverty and insists on more public assistance. Shelby distinguishes his argument by focusing on the actions of ghetto resident through the principles of justice. He introduces the concept of society in terms of a cooperative scheme in which participants benefit from a mutual advantage. It then follows that individuals who benefit from the scheme must adhere to the civic obligations which enables such a scheme to develop. Consequently, refusal to adhere to these norms of society while benefiting from it violates the principle of reciprocity.

* Sense of the tragic nature of the life of African Americans in poor areas (para 5): “the pimps, the whores, the junkies”

Go to Chicago, New York, Paris or Madrid, on every street corner you see a person less advantaged, poor, and desperate. Then go in a store, see others carrying expensive bags, swiping their credit card left and right. We live in a world of extreme poverty, balance seems nonexistent. Poverty can result in broken homes and in turn, broken lives. In the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Walter Mcmillian’s adult life, Trina Garnett’s childhood and Antonio Nuñez’s domestic life show that poverty was the cause of their incarceration and determined the success of their lives.

Because mankind was made in God’s image, Christians aspire to follow the footsteps of Jesus as he leads the pathway to the Kingdom of God. So just as Jesus, “healed the leper, the paralyzed, the blind, the deaf, and many who suffer from many diseases,” followers of the gospel are called to “pass through this world doing good.” Not only did Jesus heal, but he turned it around and allowed the once sick to heal. They became “agents of healing and invited to be agents of their own destiny” (Saying and Showing, pg. 31). And as Christians, the gospel calls them to do the same, focusing their attention to the “most abandoned and mistreated” and help bring them to be a part of society.

This reading was slightly hard for me to relate to at first. Then the more I thought about it the more I realized how many encounters and interactions I’ve actually had with scenarios like these. In Young’s reading about the woman and her two kids who had to settle for a place to live that wasn’t ideal I was incredibly frustrated. It’s seriously sad to think that there are other people going through similar struggle like this. It’s not logical to make three months’ rent deposit and pay for the other startups that come with an apartment, especially when you have to kids and you’re a single mom. She’s obviously trying to do what’s right but because of her situation she is not able to. This is part of the reason I think poverty recycles itself, because we do not give a lot of the opportunities needed to get out of slumps like this. Minimum wage is not ideal and struggles to meet the cost of living, especially if you’re a single mom with two kids. After this first part, the reading got more into what we can do as a society, and I think my favorite idea that was talked about was how we do not have the choice of where we are born into. I did not choose to be a white female but it’s what I was born into. When Johnson got started with “Changing how we think will not be enough to solve the problem.” I disagreed quite a bit. Sure it is true for some groups but I find it hard to believe that it’s true for all. Johnson also stated that if everyone took responsibility and kept

The American citizens who suffers from poverty did not have the choice to be or not to be in their situation so they suffered greatly since they were not given equal opportunity's as the rest of America. People might have thought that these people on the streets are just lazy people who never gave a damn in their lives and did not want to work for their necessities. But Michal Harrington knew the real reason why this so called "Other America" was the way they were, " But the real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of the country, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group ... [so] most of them would never even had had a chance to get out of the other America" (The Other

In How the Other Half Lives, the author Jacob Riis sheds light on the darker side of tenant housing and urban dwellers. He goes to several different parts of the city of New York witnessing first hand the hardships that many immigrants faced when coming to America. His journalism and photographs of the conditions of the tenant housing helped led the way of reformation in the slums of New York. His research opened the eyes of many Americans to the darker side of the nation's lower class. Though it seems that he blamed both the victims and the board forces of society, I believe that he placed more of the blame on the board forces for the conditions that many immigrants faced.

The place where the story takes place is 145th street in Harlem. Harlem is a neighbourhood in New York. The people in Harlem is very poor and half of them don’t even have a job. There is also very much criminality in the neighbourhood. As we can read on page 18 line 14 “One thing about 145th street. Half