The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

[bucolic_frolic]

https://www.amazon.com/Injustice-Place-Uncovering-Poverty-America/dp/0063239493

"Three of the nation’s top scholars ­– known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.

This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, poring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse.

The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need."

_____________________________________

A sociological look at the problems plaguing America. You think segregation ended in the 1970s? It's alive and well. I couldn't believe what I'm reading. The authors have prescriptions for what ails us. Ending poverty, segregation, providing economic opportunity. All the bells and whistles that never happen.

[cyclonefence]

1. LBJ sent out people to investigate these pockets

back in the '60s. I'm from WV, and Jay Rockefeller was one of them. The rural poverty--rural is not really the right word because of the many coal towns that had been ravished and abandoned, as well as the people up in the hollows who had never had a chance since the day they were born--uncovered caused upheavals in some academic and legislative circles. It was what allowed me, a middle-class girl from Charleston, to receive financial aid to a fancy northern college, and was a centerpiece, briefly, of the War on Poverty.

Legislators eventually lost interest, and my relatives in Minden, a coal mine town (and you have to understand that this was a town built by mine owners to house coal miners which ended up isolating them and their families when the mines closed (and "house" is just part of it; stores, churches, civic halls, etc. were part of the deal) far from any sort of help much less prosperity, as well as the railroad towns like Hinton, once a bustling little almost cosmopolitan town, which suffered a lesser fate, but still failed.

I'm glad attention is again being focused on these parts of the USA, but I despair of any real solution to the problem. I've really lost hope for my state, falling into oxycontin addiction and horrible racism.

I do have to credit Jay Rockefeller, however, for his genuine and lasting devotion to helping the people of WV. From poverty worker he moved into state government and then to the US Senate. He spent the rest of his political life trying to help WV; he was no "carpet bagger," which the Republicans in the state tried to make him out to be. He stuck with us.