Poverty is No Laughing Matter

Editor’s Note: This month, Teaching Tolerance launched a new series of lessons called Issues of Poverty. This week’s featured lesson can be found here [2].

A few years ago, a picture from The Roanoke Times became the fodder for emails and blog posts. It spread across the Internet in a matter of days, eventually ending up on late-night network talk shows.

It began as part of a simple and obscure local news story about road construction. In the article, a pregnant woman in her 30s wondered what effect the high decibel sounds of jackhammers and earth-moving equipment would have on her unborn child.

What made this conjecture so worthy of scorn and mockery?

The accompanying picture showed the heavily pregnant woman was smoking. Many people across the Internet were both scolding and laughing at this woman and her ignorance of the conventional wisdom of prenatal care. The story became viral and the [3]Times [3]followed up a week later [3].

The woman in the photo had dropped out of high school and was unemployed. Her only work history was in the fast-food industry. She was unaware of her viral notoriety because she did not have Internet access.

Her doctor at the free clinic recommended that she try and wean off of her two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. She managed to cut back to a half pack a day. Caught in the never-ending treadmill of poverty, meeting immediate needs took precedence. Learning later about this woman's life made me realize that the world was laughing at her because she was poor and uninformed. I began to examine this classism within myself.

My students know that I am familiar with many of the popular memes and tropes of the Internet and like to discuss them with me. One piece of Internet ephemera is a scan of a news article where a woman welcomes the new dollar store as a more casual option to Wal-Mart.

Another is an entire website created to mock Wal-Mart customers as a demographic of extreme obesity and poor fashion choices. Most of my classes find these examples hilarious and are shocked when I raise the specter of the classism behind the humor.

My students are aware of prejudice and make efforts not to judge on the basis of race, sex, religion or sexual orientation. In their eyes, however, poverty is different. They view poverty as a voluntary state. To them, living in a near- permanent state of poverty is the result of bad decisions or personal deficits. None of my students ever defined themselves as poor in anonymous classroom surveys.

Studies have shown that people are comforted by the knowledge that they are more successful financially than others. About 40 percent of families making less than $20,000 a year self-define as middle class, even though guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [4] indicate that number as below the poverty line.

Most of the kids in my classes are middle class, skewing to lower middle class, but there are definitely some whose families fall below the poverty line. As a school, roughly 30 percent of our students receive free or reduced lunch. Many of them have parents in blue-collar jobs, and the idea that they would be biased toward those stuck in poverty is one they reject.  

One tool in changing their perception of poverty has been the We are the 99% [5]blog [5] that sprung from the Occupy Wall Street movement. As my students read and discussed the stories, they began to realize a single moment of “bad luck” or one bad decision can launch a family into a near inescapable spiral of debt.

These discussions opened the door to study the multi-generational nature of poverty within a family and why it is so difficult to escape. With upward social mobility in the United States [6] at its lowest levels since the Great Depression, families may be trapped in poverty regardless of their work ethic or innate talents.

At the end of our conversations about the nature of poverty, the humor in being poor seemed a little less funny and more like the mean-spirited mockery that it actually was. As we continue into a future with a declining middle class, awareness of the cruelty behind the laughter at these topics becomes more important for us all.

Coleman is a high school social studies, computer applications and sound recording teacher in Alabama.