Photo credits to Pettifoggist. 

Originally published on The Undefeated.

My mother and my father remember chatting with friends at a nondescript table at the 1989 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference. Sitting with them were Walter Dean Myers, Jim Haskins, Virginia Hamilton and her husband Arnold Adoff — all award-winning writers of fiction and nonfiction about the black experience.

For writers and editors, ALA was, and is, the place to be to pitch ideas, make deals and meet people in the publishing world.

As my parents and their friends shared stories and caught up, Haskins joked that if someone rolled a grenade under the table, black children’s literature would be set back several decades.

To read more, click here. 

Photo credits to Luca Venturi. 

Originally published on The Undefeated. 

Not long after I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last August for a yearlong fellowship, a friend back in Memphis, Tennessee, asked me how I liked the city.

I raved about the city’s walkability and the beauty of Boston’s subways. Compared with Memphis’ horribly inefficient bus systems, the T is a mass-transit marvel.

Memphis, I told my friend, was still home, but Cambridge felt like freedom. I couldn’t articulate exactly what I meant until I moved back to Memphis earlier this month.

To read more, click here.

Photo credits to Cameron Parkins. 

Originally published on TalkPoverty and The Nation.

When my father, aunt, and uncle decided to pool their money to buy my grandmother a house closer to one of her children, they didn’t need to look far. The house next door to mine had just gone up for sale.

I had played with the children who lived next door for years, so my father asked me what the inside of the house was like. “I don’t think you want to buy that house,” I told him. He was confused—the house was in perfect condition on the outside, a cute little colonial-style two-story. Yes, it was built in 1921, but it had an immaculately kept lawn and a big tree with a swing in the backyard.

But the inside of the house looked nothing like the outside. The owners had started renovating years before, but stopped midway through when money got tight. There were no walls in the kitchen and dining room, and no flooring. Old knob-and-tube wiring hung, exposed, from the studs. One planned bathroom had barely been started, it was just exposed pipes in the wall. The basement had a dirt floor that got muddy when it rained, and the washing machine was propped on plywood in the corner.

An exposed stud in the kitchen was a sad testimony to the history of the house. The heights of the family’s three children were marked there, starting when each child was 2. By the time the family moved, they were in their 20s—proof that the house had been unfinished for decades. My family thought I was lying until they saw for themselves.

“I can’t believe they lived like that,” my dad said, “all those years.”

The house next door is a symptom of and a metaphor for the larger phenomenon of suburban poverty. Americans have ready-made stereotypes for poverty in urban and rural areas, of crime-filled streets and crumbling housing projects or broken-down farmhouses and beat-up pick-up trucks. But suburban poverty, thanks to its stereotype-defying nature, is often more difficult to understand.

My family bought that house, and the more than two acres of land it sat on, for $20,000. The sale notice in the local paper caused a scandal in my suburban community—housing prices in the region are low, but not that low. Neighbors were unwilling to believe that $20,000 was all that house, with its pleasing exterior, was worth.

As my family worked to renovate the house, we realized that we had much more in common with the family next door than we thought. My father, a cabinet maker, had always gotten along well with the machinist patriarch of the house next door. They bonded over a shared identity as working-class men, relating to each other’s long shifts and six-day work weeks. But my dad hadn’t realized how much his neighbors struggled. They had seemed so much more prosperous from across the property line.

We were also a working-class family that struggled to make ends meet, fighting to finance a slew of large and small expenses—from car insurance to braces to broken household appliances. We did not always juggle these costs well. I went without health insurance for months when the premium swelled and my dad struggled to find a plan he could afford. My parents are divorced, and because my mom lived in poverty, we received food stamps and free school lunches. My father, meanwhile, has struggled to scrape together $15,000 in retirement savings, despite working full-time his entire life.

The neighbors likely didn’t know any of this. To them, the equation was clear: The interior of our home was finished, so we must be better off than them. Was it possible that each of our families had spent years thinking, wrongly, that their neighbors were doing better financially?

Across the country, the phenomenon of suburban poverty is growing. In my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, some 13.9 percent of suburban residents lived in poverty in 2011. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of suburban people in poverty in the United Statesgrew 64 percent. These trends have been mirrored in rising student participation in the Free and Reduced Price Lunch Program—often used as a measure of families living in poverty—in suburban school districts nationwide. In 2011, 40 percent of students in suburban districts were eligible for this program.

The suburban poor face a unique set of challenges, because suburbs simply do not have sufficient infrastructure for handling poverty. Those struggling to get by in suburban communities can have a difficult time accessing public transportation to travel to work, reliable childcare for unpredictable work schedules, or even a soup kitchen.

Even as the numbers of suburban poor climb, awareness of their existence is minimal. The suburbs still conjure images straight from a 1950s sitcom, complete with soccer moms, family dinners around a table, and perfectly manicured lawns. And while these things still exist in the suburbs, it is shockingly easy to ignore the rising tide of poverty there.

The suburban poor themselves may help to exacerbate to these stereotypes by hiding behind them. Looking presentable and fitting in are made easier by hand-me-downs and thrift stores that sell nice clothes for cheap. Poor suburban children may be able to attend highly rated suburban schools alongside the children of affluent families, their classmates and teachers none the wiser. And once-proud middle-class citizens, now unable to pay for rent or food, may struggle with guilt or shame and opt not to share their stories or even seek out help.

The family next door succeeded in blending in, but they were not alone in their financial struggles—not in our neighborhood and certainly not in our larger suburban region. I don’t know if they realized that. Life in the suburbs can be isolating, especially when there is pressure to hide your circumstances from friends and acquaintances. If everyone who is experiencing poverty hides it, then all of those people end up thinking they are alone.

My family would have thought the same, if not for the house next door.

Photo credits to Flazingo Photos. 

Originally posted on the Huffington Post. 

During the last weekend in July, I found renewed hope and optimism for the future of our country. I joined 70 students from across the country who are interning this summer in the District of Columbia assembled in the Hall of States Building near Union Station. We were gathered for a three-day Public Service Weekend, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University and sponsored by the Public Policy and International Affairs Program, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, and Deloitte. On paper, the weekend was about learning about careers in public service, graduate school opportunities, and competing in a policy competition.

But the reality was so much more powerful.  The theme of the conference was “Let Your Voice Be Heard: A Next Generation Conference for Undergraduates”, and these were not just any seventy interns. We had all been chosen for our academic achievements, our personal stories, and our abilities to make diverse contributions to the field of public policy.

There were many inspiring moments during the conference, such as when Manson K. Brown, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Deputy Administrator for NOAA, described the challenges of being one of the first African American men to graduate from the Coast Guard Academy. Or when Candi Castleberry Singleton, the founder of Dignity and Respect Inc., encouraged us to act as the ampersands in our world, uniting disparate groups and identities.

One of my most memorable conference moments happened when I sat down at a table with five other interns. Over the course of our conversation, we realized that all of us were first-generation college students. The six of us were students at community colleges, state schools, private universities, and even an Ivy League— we had taken many paths in our quests to become the first in our families to attend college.

My fellow participants were the most inspiring facet of the conference by far. Among them were non-traditional students who were attending school while raising children. There was an Iraqi refugee who had overcome many hurdles to receive an education. There was the son of a human trafficking victim, who shared his mother’s story during the policy proposal competition. There was a woman, diagnosed with alopecia, who decided to stop wearing a wig and started an international nonprofit that encourages self-love.

I left the conference feeling both inspired and reassured. If students like the ones I met at the conference are the future of policy leaders in the United States, then our country is in very good hands.

In a piece published by the New York Times, writing fellow Stephanie Land explores the role that class plays in the minimalist movement. She writes that, for many Americans, a minimalist life is an economic necessity and not a lifestyle choice.  For those struggling to get by, living with even less is neither desirable nor possible.

She also writes that the perception of deal-hunting Black Friday shoppers as examples of the evils of consumerism shames low-income shoppers who need sales to be able to afford otherwise unattainable items. Ultimately, she argues that low-income families do not stand to benefit from the minimalist movement.

To read the full story, click here.

Photo credits: Tony Webster. Source: Flickr Creative Commons. 

Originally published on Common Dreams. 

I don’t want to end up like Alton Sterling.

Or Philando Castile. Or Eric Garner. Or Freddie Gray. Or Amadou Diallo. I don’t want to end up dead after a police stop, probably based on wrongful suspicion, which leads cowardly police officers to resort to unjustifiable force.

I don’t want to die like this. Nobody does.

But the statistical fact is that black men are likelier to be victims of the criminal justice system. Black men are victimized by lengthier sentences. They’re victimized daily by harassment and stop-and-frisk. And in the worst cases, they are victims of police who kill them, an act that is  rarely prosecuted.

On July 5, police killed Sterling. The next day police killed Castile. Two pointless deaths of black men, followed by the killing of five Dallas police officers by snipers during protests against police brutality.

We are at war with our selves, in part because of our inability, neigh the unwillingness, to acknowledge the hard reality that black Americans are treated differently. Video showing the death of Alton Sterling clearly reveals that he was in custody and in submission when officers  shot him multiple times. Philando Castilewas shot and killed the next day after being stopped  for a busted tail light.

Racism and power converge during a police stop, and the racist misuse of police power is (all too obviously) rampant.

And because I don’t want to end up dead after a police stop I can’t think about Alton Sterling or Philando Castile without also considering that only three weeks ago the Supreme Court weakened citizens’ protections against police harassment. The ruling essentially gives police, who already enjoy widespread power to stop citizens, even wider latitude to stop and frisk people on the street.

The case inspired Justice Sonia Sotomayor to pen a blistering dissent haranguing five other Justices that the time has come to speak honestly about racism in law enforcement. Or else, she said, the justice system risked “treating members of our communities as second class citizens” under the guise of upholding the law.

The case Utah v. Strieff dealt with a pedestrian who was subjected to an unlawful police search on the street. The officer Douglas Fackrell had no evidence that pedestrian Edward Strieff had committed any offense. Yet the officer illegally detained Streiff and demanded identification and found that Strieff had “a minor traffic violation.” The officer then frisked Strieff and discovered a small amount of illegal methamphetamine. Strieff was convicted of unlawful possession. The case was dismissed on appeal, on the accepted principle that police officers must legally obtain evidence. Unconstitutional evidence is tossed out of court.

But the Supreme Court decision ruled by a 5-3 majority on the state’s appeal that while Strieff’s constitutional rights had indisputably been breached by an illegal stop and the breach may have been worsened by an illegal search, the officer who committed the constitutional infractions merely made “good faith mistakes,” which shouldn’t make illegally obtained evidence unconstitutional. If the reasoning sounds like a contradiction, that’s because it is.

In a dissent which was joined by the other women on the high court, Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sotomayor offered a bit of commonsense council: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion’s  technical language. This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification and check it for an outstanding traffic warrant—even if you have done nothing wrong,” wrote Sotomayor. She noted, “It’s no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny” and cited Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow as a reference. Justice Elena Kagan wrote separately that the ruling “practically invites” police misconduct and unjustified searches.

It’s the willful ignorance that allows five members of the Supreme Court to ignore the pervasive reality of police brutality which draws Sotomayor’s particular ire. Systemic racist police harassment is usually the initial catalyst behind the chain of events that lead to the tragedies of  the kind which millions have seen on videotape—again and again.

Sotomayor’s words calling police harassment humiliating and outlining reasons that police harassment is a racial matter demand re-reading after this week’s violence.

I frankly consider myself fortunate that in all the many times I have been stopped on the flimsiest pretexts—sometimes with an explanation that I resembled someone who had purportedly committed a crime, other times with no explanation other than “Put your hands on the side of the car and spread your legs now”—the situation was resolved before I was arrested or killed.

I never leave my house without an ID. I expect to be stopped by police who will demand my ID. I am hardly unusual among African Americans who have reached the age of 50. I have become so accustomed to the possibility that I’ll be targeted that it has become the grudgingly accepted modus operandi. It should be a constitutional offense. Instead, it’s a way of life.

Sotomayor in her dissent recognizes that the time has come for something greater than legal  jargon for the sake of legal precedent and effectively accuses her fellow Justices who wrote the  majority opinion of hiding behind the law. Anyone interested can download the full text of  the Utah v. Strieff ruling, including Sotomayor’s blistering dissent.

Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are dead because America has not accepted that racism in the criminal justice system exists at a crisis level which demands immediate change and action.

Originally published on the Huffington Post.