Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
3 - A twisted Tale: Evolution of the Poverty Narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
Summary
“It is almost certainly the case that more is known about how much poverty there is than about what it means to be poor.”
Robert Walker, The Shame of Poverty, p 31“There are folks who fall out of … their stable lives into poverty and can't handle it. You know, because of the narrative that what you get, that it's your fault.”
Sheilah Garland-Olaniran, community advocate, Chicago Poor People's Campaign, talking to Project Twist-ItThe games we play: targeting the poor and most Vulnerable
In the 1980s the British satirical TV show Spitting Image, in which puppets resembling the biggest political and cultural figures of the day poked fun at their real-life counterparts, there was a regular segment called: ‘The President's Brain is Missing’. Each time the segment appeared, a presidential lackey would rummage around desperately trying to find the puppet president's brain (roughly the size of a walnut) in time to prevent Puppet Ronald Reagan doing something socially good. In Episode 2 of the first series in 19841 (after the brainless president uncharacteristically called for cooperation with the Russians on nuclear disarmament) this is what happened:
Lackey: Delves under the bedclothes in an attempt to locate the tiny brain.
Puppet President Reagan: Sitting up in bed looking dopey declares: “Together with our Soviet allies we must fight poverty and injustice … We must all, Americans and Soviets, reach out our hands to poor people everywhere. And, when they reach forward to grasp our hands, we must…”
Lackey: Finds and hastily reinserts the brain, exclaiming: “Back to normal!”
Puppet President Reagan: Continues: “… knee ‘em in the nuts. Yes, my friends, God gave us poor people for only two reasons:
1. To work all week for practically nothing.
2. To give us something to laugh at on Sundays.”
Poverty, as one of the many people I interviewed for Project Twist-It succinctly put it, “stinks”. Poverty is a desperate, humiliating, degrading, gruelling position to find yourself in. Poverty is not noble. Poverty is not, as some would have us believe, a ‘pathology’, a sickness or about being ‘dumb’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Shame GameOverturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative, pp. 88 - 128Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020