Poverty in America's Image Problem?

Sorry for the long delay posting this weekend and today.  I've been traveling around CT, NY and MA for wedding-related activities.  I had a chance to catch up with a group of friends Saturday night that included fellow political junkies and writers and some finance types.  People were pretty interested in my blogging gig, and Change.org more generally, which was very cool.  A friend of mine's husband who I don't know too well wanted to know what the other causes were at Change.org, and was surprised to learn how popular global warming was compared to domestic poverty - and not because he's particularly interested in the latter.  It was an interesting conversation in its randomness and it got me thinking - again - about how or whether people think about poverty in the U.S.

On the road yesterday with my fiance, I ventured that domestic poverty needs an appealing iconic image.  He offered the migrant mother - taken by immigration, I responded.  Homelessness is its own category; children offer represent hunger, child abuse or neglect, or the failure of public education.  Or child poverty as its own issue area.   Poor men are often memorialized as white homeless men, perhaps with mental illness or substance abuse problems, or as African-American criminals.  Thanks to Reagan and the rest, all we're left with is the "welfare queen."  Native American poverty is virtually invisible to the public eye, and the current economic crisis has disappeared the working poor, who, in their employee uniforms waiting for the bus, were the emerging image of domestic poverty in the 21st century.

The other challenge for domestic anti-poverty activists is to distinguish our work from global anti-poverty efforts.  Of course, there's an indelible connection between our exploitative, global economic systems and poverty at home and abroad, and we'd benefit from a global workers' movement.  But the surge in activism in recent years to significantly cut global poverty often overshadows the enduring problems we face here at home.  The combination of our siloed approach to social justice with the scope of global poverty with our negative, individualistic approach to poverty in the U.S. really creates a rough road for us fighting economic hardship here at home.

I cruised around Flickr and Google this morning, comparing search results for the different Change.org causes and our respective blogs Google rankings.  "Poverty" on its own is actually the biggest topic after immigration.  But the more one encloses parameters around poverty, adding "America" or "domestic" or "United States", the more the web and image results shrink.  "Poverty in America" is one of the smallest.

I'm pleased that this blog is in the top 20 Google results for "poverty in America" (3), "poverty" + "America" (6), and "domestic poverty" (14).   I really believe a renewed anti-poverty movement is afoot in this country, but it's not going to look like the War on Poverty of years past, but more likely will grow hand-in-hand with rights-based movements for workers, immigrants, women, and as part of racial justice, environmental justice and economic human rights movements.  Social justice is not neatly packaged nor successfully achieved within single-issue activist frames.  The beauty of Change.org is its aggregation of a multiplicity of social causes in one place.  But we must work together and learn from one another to make our world a more just and equitable place.

You want to know more about Poverty in America?  Believe me,  have we got it covered here at Change.org.

(Top photo from Newark, NJ by Tony the Misfit; bottom photo of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign's March for Our Lives at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN by Andrew Ciscel)