Poverty Prose: The Poverty Myth

“Poverty” is as much of a buzzword as “privilege.” In the decades when truly progressive Democrats ruled the stars and stripes, poverty commanded political importance arguably above that of the White House. It soon lost its status, only to experience a resurgence recently pronounced in a Brooklyn accent and accompanied by its loyal opposition, “the billionaire class.” Poverty is chronically misunderstood. To most people, it's a statistic. Maybe not a specific series of digits (except if you can ask the US Census Bureau), but an approximate quantity.

But poverty is more than that. As the opposite of privilege, it describes more than just financial hardship. Anything lacking privilege is impoverished. This includes income, but also sexuality, gender and race. Poverty is socially and culturally imposed disadvantage. It differs from society to society, culture to culture. The uniform existence of the schism between poverty and privilege breeds differences, which is why impoverished society differs from privileged society, and impoverished culture stands in stark contrast to privileged culture. In America, the society of privilege is generally characterized by whiteness, straightness, cis-ness, richness and correctness. You can harbor some of those but still not fit that mold perfectly. You can be born gay to a rich white family in a liberal San Francisco neighborhood. Alternatively, you can be born white and straight in a poor rural farm in North Dakota. And some societies within the greater American one hold bifurcations that differ from each other, where traits that are privileged elsewhere are more of a disadvantage than anything else there. It wouldn't be ideal to be born white in Compton, USA. You can be privileged in some ways and impoverished in others.

Obviously, the term is much more complex than our buzzword understanding. That doesn't disqualify the significance of its popular definition. Financial poverty is a real problem, arguably the worst because it affects every single part of identity and ability. By broadening the definition, we don't delegitimize that. We address it more effectively. Most of us are impoverished in some way, somewhere if not here. Because of that, by broadening the definition, we include ourselves in it. We are much more likely to be sensitive to an issue if it includes ourselves.Yet, because of the fundamental lack of full understanding of the term, both sides are polarized. To the generally impoverished, privilege is despised. To the generally privileged, poverty is kept at a “socially-aware” distance, fended off by disclaimers.

And that's the problem. By not admitting the shared traits that we share, we segregate. Poverty is always something “over there,” experienced by “those people.” This is definitely a problem at Middlebury. We as a community are hyper-sensitive about our privilege, being all “socially-aware.” In my Visual Sociology class last week, a student asked in reference to a picture, “how would a typical Middlebury College student see these? Poverty-stricken,” in a tone communicating its “other”-ness. But there is poverty on this hill, too. There are the financially insecure, who can only attend because financial aid is generous. There are first-generation students, who got here only through incredible personal motivation. There's a LGBT community and there's a black community. If poverty is on campus, then it's segregating to consider it “over there.” It's here, walking with us, laughing with us, sleeping in the same dorm rooms, crossing to BiHall in the same comically frenzied pace. Sure, we're all privileged because we're at a “prestigious liberal arts college,” but that doesn't mean many of us aren't impoverished, too.

And that's why the term's true meaning is important.