The Faces of Poverty in North Carolina

Stories from Our Invisible Citizens

Gene R. Nichol

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469666174
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Poverty in Sociology

More than 1.5 million North Carolinians today live in poverty. More than one in five are children. Behind these sobering statistics are the faces of our fellow citizens. This book tells their stories. Since 2012, Gene R. Nichol has traveled the length of North Carolina, conducting hundreds of interviews with poor people and those working to alleviate the worst of their circumstances. In an afterword to this new edition, Nichol draws on fresh data and interviews with those whose voices challenge all of us to see what is too often invisible, to look past partisan divides and preconceived notions, and to seek change. Only with a full commitment as a society, Nichol argues, will we succeed in truly ending poverty, which he calls our greatest challenge.

1

POVERTY, EQUALITY, AND NORTH CAROLINA’S GREATEST CHALLENGE

Even here in eastern North Carolina, with all its challenges and its hard history, people think, unless you see a child actually starving or a homeless family literally on the street corner, or unless that’s actually occurring in your family, then poverty’s not really a problem. In an affluent country like the United States poverty is mostly hidden. It’s hidden here too. You have to be willing to seek it out, to go and try to understand it. You also have to be willing to look at it from the broad sweep and the historical perspective. Most people aren’t interested in doing that. Entrenched poverty affects everything. It is layered, generation after generation. Most poor people in this county (Wayne) have never had a real chance.—Shirley Edwards, 72, community and civil rights activist, Goldsboro, North Carolina

We speak much for equality in the United States. Our first statements as a nation attested to a “self-evident truth” that all “are created equal.” President Abraham Lincoln reminded us, at Gettysburg, that we were “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition” of equality. Our central nationalizing constitutional amendment guarantees, to all, “equal protection of the laws.” We pledge daily allegiance to an assurance of “liberty and justice for all.” Lyndon Johnson, in his most noted and eloquent speech, went so far as to claim that “this was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose.” The “great phrases of that purpose,” such as that all are created equal, “still sound in every American heart.”¹ We talk a great game. But what we do has little in common with what we say.

The statistics of American poverty are straightforward and demoralizing. Almost 13 percent of Americans, over 40 million, fall below the federal poverty threshold, about $24,339 in 2016 for a family of four.² Our poverty is skewed sharply on the basis of race. Twenty-two percent of African Americans and 19.4 percent of Hispanics are poor, compared with less than 9 percent for whites and 10 percent for Asians.³ It is also skewed by sex and age. Fourteen percent of women live below the poverty threshold, compared with about 11 percent of men. And the youngest among us, the most vulnerable, are typically the poorest. Eighteen percent of American children live below the poverty threshold; thirty percent of our kids of color do.⁴ Children represent 23 percent of the overall population but 33 percent of those in poverty.⁵ In the 2014–15 school year, we had 1.3 million homeless schoolchildren.⁶

In 2016, 41.2 million Americans, 12 percent of households with about 13 million children, were reported by the federal government to be “food insecure”—experiencing significant hunger in their day-to-day lives.⁷ Unsurprisingly, given our national economic prowess, we now have the greatest income inequality, the largest gaps between rich and poor, since 1928. The top 1 percent takes 24 percent of our national income, while the bottom 90 percent secures only 50 percent.⁸ Wealth disparity is even more pronounced. The top 1 percent of Americans holds 39 percent of our country’s wealth; the bottom 90 percent claims, shockingly, only 23 percent.⁹ The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million put together.¹⁰ We’ve been on this intense separating trend for forty years.¹¹

International comparisons are bleak, and telling.¹² We countenance greater levels of poverty and child poverty than most other advanced industrial democracies.¹³ In fact, we consistently rank at or very near the bottom of poverty listings with peer nations. We have the worst levels of food insecurity among the advanced countries.¹⁴ And we have decidedly steeper income disparity than our peers.¹⁵ To find our match in income inequality, perusing the list of nations, you have to move past the European nations, of course, and the other New World nations, past India, past Turkmenistan, down to our colleagues at the bottom of the registry: Mozambique, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Togo, and South Sudan.¹⁶ In every meaningful sense, we’ve become the richest, the poorest, and the most unequal advanced nation in the world.¹⁷

In North Carolina things are worse. Over 15 percent of us—more than 1.5 million—live in poverty.¹⁸ About 650,000 Tar Heels live in deep poverty, with income levels less than half of the traditional federal poverty threshold.¹⁹ Very large numbers have no health insurance. The median household income nationwide is $57,617. In North Carolina it’s only $50,584.²⁰ The state has, reportedly, the second highest percentage of low-wage employees in the nation.²¹ Nearly half of the state’s counties suffer poverty rates over 20 percent.²² The federal government reports that ten eastern North Carolina counties demonstrate “persistent poverty”: Bertie, Bladen, Columbus, Halifax, Martin, Northampton, Pitt, Robeson, Tyrell, and Washington. That means at least 20 percent of county residents have lived in poverty for the past 30 years.²³ In most of those counties the national authorities could as easily have said 150 years—tracing a line directly back to slavery.²⁴

Fourteen percent of men and 17 percent of women live below the poverty level in North Carolina.²⁵ Women make 82 cents on the dollar, compared with men.²⁶ About one-third of female-headed households live in poverty.²⁷ Twenty-two percent of Tar Heel kids statewide are poor—almost 500,000 of our children.²⁸ Nearly one in ten of those under eighteen lives in extreme poverty, on an income of around $12,170 a year for a family of four.²⁹ Forty-two percent of Hispanic kids and 38 percent of black children and Native American children are classified as poor.³⁰ Over a third of North Carolina babies, middle-school students, and teenagers of color are plagued by the challenges and barriers of wrenching poverty. And income inequality has risen very dramatically in North Carolina over the past forty years.³¹ Over that period, inequality mushroomed in 97 of North Carolina’s 100 counties. From 2010 to 2014, 65 North Carolina counties markedly expanded the trend.³²

Race, it seems, is never far removed from poverty in North Carolina. African American, Latino, and Native American poverty rates are two to three times those of whites. Minority unemployment rates are routinely double. Racial wealth disparity is massive. For every dollar of wealth held by North Carolina’s white households, African American and Latino families retain merely six and seven cents, respectively.³³ Such disparities can be so extreme they are hard to even comprehend. The Great Recession, nonetheless, reportedly made them worse.³⁴

North Carolina has one of the country’s fastest-rising poverty rates. A decade ago, it was twenty-sixth among the states, a little better than average. Now it is twelfth, moving past the competition.³⁵ It also has the twelfth highest rate of child poverty.³⁶ A recent national report named Roanoke Rapids and Lumberton two of the three poorest cities in America.³⁷ Over 1.5 million Tar Heels, 15 percent, participated in the food stamp program (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) in 2016.³⁸ Vance and Robeson counties, in the eastern part of the state, had among the highest food stamp participation rates in the country.³⁹ Almost 1.8 million Tar Heels are classified as hungry, one of the nation’s highest rates. Nearly 560,000, about one in four, of North Carolina kids didn’t get enough to eat last year.⁴⁰

In 2014, Professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project concluded that Charlotte, North Carolina’s richest metropolitan center, had the worst economic mobility of any major city in America.⁴¹ If you are born poor in Charlotte, in other words, you are more apt to stay that way than anywhere else. About the same time, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that North Carolina had, over the last decade, experienced a greater rise in concentrated poverty (census tracts where 20 percent or more of residents are poor) than any other state. When the numbers were peeled back, experts found that four of the ten American cities with the sharpest increases in concentrated poverty were located in North Carolina. Winston-Salem was ninth; Greensboro, sixth; Charlotte, fourth; and Raleigh, third.⁴² As economic engines revved in Charlotte and Durham, isolated neighborhoods there experienced mushrooming child poverty rates, sometimes exceeding 80 percent.⁴³ Families scrambled to survive, almost unseen, even by their neighbors, without access to electricity, sewer systems, and clean water. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district reported over 4,000 homeless students in 2016.⁴⁴ North Carolina now forms America’s leading edge in concentrated poverty.

North Carolina is, on this front, reflective of its region, the South. Each year, the Census Bureau reports demonstrably higher poverty rates for the South than other regions of the country.⁴⁵ Most of the country’s fifteen poorest states are southern. Though about one of seven Americans lives in poverty generally, in Mississippi and Louisiana the rate soars to one in five. In Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and of course, North Carolina, the rates are markedly higher than national averages.⁴⁶ All of the states with child poverty rates over 25 percent are southern. Of the eight states with over 10 percent of children living in extreme poverty (with household incomes less than half the federal poverty standard), six are located below the Mason Dixon line.⁴⁷ The former confederate states set the gold standard in American economic deprivation.⁴⁸

But bad as they may be, these statistics are only the numbers. Dry, bloodless, repetitive numbers. Bound for some dusty bookshelf. Ripe for the forgetting. Poverty, though, isn’t a number. It is a draining of the body, a wound to the soul, an injury that divides and diminishes, as it rejects. The numbers alone miss that. They fail to touch the face of hardship in North Carolina. An even partially accurate portrait of this state’s poverty has to press beyond the trends and tables of census and income reports, unemployment levels, health insurance patterns, and economic impact estimates. The challenges, barriers, and exclusions of wrenching hardship and deprivation and their accompanying heartbreaks can look quite different up close. There’s much more to see closer to the ground. And it can sear.

Poverty statistics alone fail to tell the story of some 1,100 low-income Tar Heels waiting in line all night long, some for over forty hours, outside the massive civic center in Fayetteville, hoping to receive free dental care in a remarkable all-volunteer medical mission when the doors opened the next morning. Some folks had traveled, often great distances, usually to have simple procedures, such as having teeth extracted that had long caused intense pain. When my students and I asked, repeatedly, when had they last seen a dentist, most would answer that it was ten or twenty or thirty years ago. “Sure it hurts, it hurts a ton,” a sixty-year-old black woman told me, “but who can afford to see a dentist?” A middle-aged white man who had recently lost his job said his “tooth was killing him.” But when he went to see the dentist, they told him taking it out would cost $3,000. “I just got up out of the chair and walked out the door,” he said. A young mother added, “I’ve got a daughter; if I spent money like that on myself, my girl wouldn’t be able to eat. You’ve got to make sacrifices when you have a kid.” Still, in the end, hundreds of those who waited in the mammoth line couldn’t be seen. There simply wasn’t the capacity. And although in some previous years, ten or more such miraculous “missions” had been held in North Carolina in a single year, more recently the heroic organizers have only been able to manage three or four, or fewer.

North Carolina’s hunger statistics are haunting, but they speak little of the terror appearing in the voices of parents struggling mightily to merely feed their kids. Nothing tears at a parent, they say, like the words “Mama, I’m so hungry.” Those words make you feel “like the worst kind of failure.” We might have been poor when I was young, they explain, but we always had food to eat. “Now I never even really know where the next meal is coming from.” Those standing in line at the food pantries can also surprise. They aren’t, officials explain, the ones people assume would be there. They are not the folks on the side of the road asking for handouts. “They’re our neighbors, the ones who wait on us or take care of our kids or sit down the row at church on Sunday.” They are usually employed. They are almost always embarrassed. Frequently, they once had better jobs. But now they work longer hours for poorer wages and with fewer benefits. Their stories can crush. Parents willingly sacrifice their dignity, their health, and their well-being for their kids. Children are robbed of the ability to thrive and the joy of life by the ravages and the fears of hunger. These are folks who make choices daily that shouldn’t have to be made in a nation of surpassing resources. They are forced into choices that most of us cannot readily contemplate. I know I can’t.

And mere numbers don’t convey in Charlotte, North Carolina’s corporate mecca, the feelings of hundreds lining up each morning by 5:00 A.M. at Crisis Assistance Ministry, in the shadows of the great banking towers, at the edge of “uptown” near Interstate 277. The fearful and weary faces rise early to try to keep their families from being forced to live on the streets. Many of those I met in line were working, most had children, and almost all struggled to pay for food, rent, utilities, health care, and transportation on minimum-wage or near minimum-wage jobs in an expensive city. They often worked more than forty hours a week. Still, they couldn’t keep their heads above water. Trying to survive and support their kids was an all-consuming job. They explained, over and over, that the assistance they hoped to receive is crucial, indispensable, and decidedly appreciated. But what they really wished would happen was that their employers would pay them a wage that somebody could live on in Charlotte. “They know that I work hard, but you can’t get by on eight dollars an hour here.” So, they say, they have to beg for help. But “if I could make a decent, humane wage, I wouldn’t have to worry about food stamps or electricity vouchers or bus passes or rent subsidies.” Then they would be able to make it on their own. They wouldn’t be forced to ask for handouts.

More ominously, health care statistics can reveal a lot, but the figures don’t match the power or the heartbreak of the words of wives who have lost their husbands and of children who have lost their parents because they couldn’t afford the tests and screenings and procedures essential to modern health care. The statistics alone don’t reveal the angst of those unable to see an essential specialist or to deal with life-threatening symptoms because they don’t have the dollars or the insurance necessary to pay the fare. The numbers don’t explain the horror felt by an idealistic young doctor who treated a low-income waitress for months for free—a young woman without insurance and without a strong and healthy heart who died “because we couldn’t get the medical device that she needed.” A patient who, the same doctor reports, “would be alive today” if she was able to secure health care coverage. Instead, she was allowed to die, or was forced to die, simply because she was poor. The young doctor’s words echo those of a rural North Carolina practitioner with thirty years’ experience: “For decades, I’ve watched my patients with no insurance pay a terrible price. I’ve seen women die of invasive breast cancer when they couldn’t afford mammograms. I’ve hospitalized patients who stopped their medicines so they could pay other bills. I’ve seen the slow death by invasive colon cancer of patients who couldn’t afford a colonoscopy and diabetics who couldn’t pay for insulin.”

A similarly vivid and wrenching portrait of poverty in North Carolina, especially the poverty of its children, comes from Title I schoolteachers whose children face “the harshest challenges of extreme poverty.” The teachers speak of child...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables, Maps, and Graphs
• A Preface from the Woods of Hickory
• 1. Poverty, Equality, and North Carolina’s Greatest Challenge
• 2. Poor Kids, Education, and Hardship in North Carolina
• 3. Going Hungry in North Carolina
• 4. Inequality in Health
• 5. Charlotte: Concentrated Poverty and Low-Wage Work
• 6. Goldsboro: Isolation and Marginalization in Eastern North Carolina
• 7. Wilkes County and Mountain Poverty
• 8. Immigrants and Dreamers: Undocumented Students and Higher Education in North Carolina
• 9. Race and Poverty in North Carolina
• 10. From Targeting Poor People to a Politics of Full Membership
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Method
• Notes
• Index