Photo by Brenda Ann Kenneally from Upstate Girls.
Note: This post contains racial slurs quoted from primary source material.
Anne Kennedy writes movingly today about human care for the other as the cornerstone of democracy:
Day by day, many people pass through the parking lot by my church, grasp their need for something more. They stop in the doorway to ask for prayer before they ask for the pantry. They collapse into the not-very-comfortable chairs in our narthex and admit that they don’t know how to make life work, they are in danger of losing everything, they need help. And so we stand around and pray, and collect clothes, and try to explain about Jesus. And suddenly we glimpse not only the optimistic vision of De Tocqueville, we remember that it is always the care of one person for another that, in the words of these latter days, creates space for spiritual cure and cultural renewal.
A few years ago I read the book Upstate Girls by Brenda Ann Kenneally, the visual social history of a loose network of working-class women in Troy, New York, a crumbling post-industrial city not unlike the one where Anne and I live. Kenneally embedded with her subjects and their children, friends, and partners and documented their lives in a sprawling, disturbing, beautifully produced work of photojournalism. The girls are impoverished single mothers, cobbling together a living from a patchwork of low-skill, low-pay jobs supplemented by an array of social services. The fathers of their kids are absent or in prison. The women’s romantic lives are akin to what the educated classes self-consciously cultivate as polyamory, only distinctly lacking in the freedom and joy that such practices are supposed to confer.
Terri and Big Jessie in Their Home (Brenda Ann Kenneally, from Upstate Girls)
Kenneally explains the disorder of her subjects’ lives by situating them in the context of a once-thriving manufacturing city now fallen on hard times, with the implication that in a more robust industrial economy they might have found stability as mill girls with partners who weren’t in the criminal justice system.
In an article about an exhibit of the photos, the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who wrote the book’s introduction and whose own masterful Random Family is a kind of literary analog to Kenneally’s photos, describes
The show’s artifacts and ephemera [including] letters and art from incarcerated loved ones, receipts for furniture leased from rent-to-own businesses, prescriptions for the medications dispensed—in formidable doses—to the kids . . . .There were also historical pictures of children in orphanages and in the crowded assembly lines on factory floors. A time line hung in the living room, like a monstrous mobile, tracking the decline in public health alongside once-lauded American products—tobacco, high-fructose corn syrup—and their code-switching, class-based marketing campaigns. These products had a particularly ruinous impact when they trickled down to North Troy residents, whose safety nets were being eroded by attacks on public education and other social supports. . . . She obsessively gathered evidence—she calls it “hoarding”—to make us see these lives as she saw them, and to memorialize them as part of our nation’s history. At the Peoples’ Museum, this exhaustive contextualizing made it impossible to treat her subjects with contempt.
I believe without question that the lives of these “Upstate girls,” along with so many others, are buffeted and even dominated by intangible forces outside of their control. On the other hand, I have my doubts that, as Kenneally and LeBlanc argue, the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup and Call of Duty are the culprits lurking behind the chaos of the girls’ lives.
What’s more, I wonder, with JoAnn Wypijewski, writing in a review of LeBlanc’s Random Family:
why the stories of poor people - and not just any poor people but those acquainted with chaos and crime, those the overclass likes to call the underclass - are such valuable raw material, creating a frisson among the literary set and the buyers of books? Why are their lives and private griefs currency for just about anyone but themselves?
And indeed there’s a kind of voyeurism, the lure of “poverty porn,” in the act of reading these books from a safe place. The first time I read Random Family — considered a classic of longform literary journalism — I was pregnant and living in the Bronx just a couple of miles from where its events took place, and I found the proximity so disturbing that I returned it to the library unfinished. It was only when safely ensconced in my own crumbling Upstate city that I could muster the will to finish it, and I highly recommend it.
In a 2011 article in the Journal of Poverty, Thomas Hirschl, Mark Rank, and Dela Kusi-Appouh write about the views on poverty held by groups divided along socioeconomic lines in three high-poverty Upstate New York counties. Their findings show that wealthy, highly educated respondents see poverty as a structural failing. As a member of a focus group in Ithaca explains:
There are lots of reasons for poverty, but I’ll just point to one, which is the political policy that pervades this nation in contrast to other nations. There are other nations, Finland, Denmark, and so forth, [in which the] class structure is greatly mediated by social policy that makes sure people who are poor aren’t going without decent housing, and they have education paid for as far as they want to or are able to go — and the — what I would call the “class war from above” that creates and accentuates poverty in this nation doesn’t exist where you have a very strong policy . . . [and] I would add the word intended policy.
In contrast, respondents who are at risk of poverty or who have been poor themselves tend to see it as the result of poor individual decision making:
It’s just organized chaos . . . it’s the breakdown of a lot of family. [Poor decision making around family formation] puts a lot of women, mostly, I think, into single parenthood. They’re not capable, many of them, in supporting their children in the way that [they might have] when it was mom and dad.
It’s interesting to note that just a few years ago progressives, at least as represented by the focus group in Ithaca, believed that centralized policy decisions made by government entities could alleviate poverty and distress. In contrast, progressives now tend to believe in decentralized forms of collective action and mutual aid to address social ills; in fact, the Ithaca Common Council voted in 2021 to replace the city’s police department with a reimagined social services agency, a plan that was eventually walked back.
Ithaca’s then-mayor Svante Myrick profiled in GQ magazine in 2021.
In my own crumbling post-industrial city just down the road from Ithaca there have also been rumblings about police abolition. “We keep us safe” is the chant heard at local rallies, suggesting not only the superfluity of law enforcement, but also of all other government agencies. But I wonder about the effectiveness of this idea for citizens like the Upstate girls.
From The Story of Stagger Lee by Timothy Lane.
Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, dedicated his 1968 book Seize the Time to his then-wife Artie and their son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale. Stagolee (sometimes rendered Staggerlee, Stack-o-Lee, or Stack Lee) is a Black American folk hero who was immortalized in an early twentieth-century country blues song.
Malik's third name, as Seale explains it,
derives from the lumpen proletarian politically unaware brothers in the streets. Stagolee fought his brothers and sisters, and he shouldn't have. The Stagolees of today should take on the messages of Malcolm X as Huey Newton [the co-founder, with Seale, of the Black Panther Party] did, to oppose this racist, capitalist oppression our people and other peoples are subjected to. Malik must not fight his brothers. . . .
When my wife Artie had a baby boy, I said, "The nigger's name is Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale."
"I don't want him named that!" Artie said.
I had read all that book history about Stagolee, that black folkloric history, because I was hung up on that stuff at the time . . . Stagolee was a bad nigger off the block and didn't take shit from nobody. All you had to do was organize him, like Malcolm X, make him politically conscious. . . [Kwame] Nkrumah [the first president of post-colonial Ghana] was a bad motherfucker and Malcolm X was a bad nigger. Huey P. Newton showed me the nigger on the block was [as powerful as] ten motherfuckers when politically educated, and if you got him organized. I said, "Stagolee, put Stagolee on his name," because Stagolee was an unorganized nigger, to me, like a brother on the block. I related to Huey P. Newton because Huey was fighting niggers on the block. Huey was a nigger that came along and he incorporated Malcolm X, he incorporated Stagolee, he incorporated Nkrumah, all of them.
Artie and Malik Seale (photo by Gordon Parks)
There’s a strain of utopianism in the notion that the great mass of this world’s Stagolees and Upstate girls can be politically organized to obviate the need for police or social service agencies. In fact, the very idea of organizing “the lumpen proletarian politically unaware brothers [and sisters] in the streets” implies that someone in a higher position — better off, better educated, generally more on the ball — is doing the organizing. It reminds me of early twentieth-century communist intellectuals taking factory jobs in order to (ultimately unsuccessfully) organize the workers. My grandmother, Josephine Nordstrand, was said to have done the same thing, and my father related to me Josephine’s own description of her failure: “We threw ourselves on the mercy of the American working class, but the American working class has no mercy.”
I have both respect and compassion for the young Americans attempting to fulfill Fidel Castro’s exhortation that “A better world is possible” with their efforts toward collective organizing and mutual aid. But I believe that Anne’s idea is the right one.
I know and have lived around several families who come from "lower class" backgrounds, and it's fascinating to me how different their interactions with eachother are to my normally middle-class milieu. These families come from difficult backgrounds...drug addicted parents, foster care stays, parents who never married and never worked... but one generation was able to financially move up in life due to a combination of military service and steady work. However, they could not seem to shed their lower-class sensibilities or ways of interacting with eachother, and subsequently, their kids and grandkids fell back into lower class, unstable living arrangements. Even if the parents were stably married, the kids and grandkids had strings of bad relationship choices that led to irregular and unfortunate for-the-child situations. If they got married they divorced rather quickly, but most just had strings of baby mamas and daddys.
Some of the common threads I've noticed:
When showing love to children, a phrase such as "you're rotten", said lovingly of course, are not uncommon. Also, there's celebration of sassy attitudes and behaviors, particularly in the little ones, but when they get bigger it's a source of conflict between parents and children.
Confrontational and denigrating language is also used between spouses/significant others. Again, meant to be "loving" mostly I think, but negative nonetheless.
There's no stigma for intimate relations in any possible situation. They're all "fine" or even "good" if in the moment it seems like a good idea, even if the guy/gal you're sleeping with is a deadbeat or baby mama to multiple men already. When a pregnancy or conflict does occur, these partners act in unsurprising ways but somehow, it's still surprising?? Except that there's A LOT of commiseration in being wronged in these circles.
Feelings are king. Whatever makes you "feel" good in the moment is always worthwhile, even if makes no sense in the long run or hurts others. This is especially true of spouses/long term partners who abandon their first families to shack up with others or start new families.
Respect of elders and little children are valued highly in word but not always in deed. (Children seem to be means to an end sometimes... women need them to feel loved by someone, for instance.) Also, the elders are not often worthy of respect, so not sure what they expect but they do expect it from their kids especially... even if they abandoned their kids when they were young and were deadbeats.
Music, artistic sensibilities, and dress are a bit more "trashy" and not particularly uplifting, IMO, and feeds into the "feelings" thing as well.
Anyway, I've just witnessed how difficult some of these cultural attitudes are hard to overcome generationally, even if economics and institutions are there to help. But fundamentally each person is looking to be loved and to have a place in a community. The best thing we can then do is foster healthy communities, rooted in the love of Christ, and that's not a program that can be run by any government agency, only fostered by free and willing people.
Maybe some more Dagger John’s would be useful….
https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-dagger-john-saved-new-yorks-irish