Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
-Barack Obama
Imagine if you could see a whole city from your home; it stretches as far as the eye can see and has just house after house. Some houses are white, some are red, some are blue, and so on. This seems fairly normal and you might think I’m describing a housing development or something like it. The only problem is that those houses are not as they appear, they are actually tents and they are being inhabited by the poverty stricken population of your city. These “tent cities” have popped up all over the United States. Many different people live there, and have all have lost their homes some way or another. If Yakima can break down these barriers of poverty, we will never become one of these “tent cities”. We must figure out ways to help the low-income population to get jobs they need to support their families. If you are in some kind of post-high school education you must have some source of money and ambition to do better than your parents before you. According to the story “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide”, by Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, in the book Class Matters; “the economic advantage once believed to last only two or three generations is now believed to last closer to five.” This means that what you decide to do with your life and well off you are determines what other generations of your family will do.
In the story of Angela Whitiker’s Climb by Isabel Wilkerson, from the book Class Matters, she talks about the bullet riddled “housing building” that is run by drug gangs. If kids or peo...
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...d ways to break down all these barriers in Yakima, I think that the children and the families that are in the low to lower-middle class will have a chance for better education, jobs, and family life. With this they can better their own lives and mold the future of the next generations of their family.
Works Cited
Brooks, David. "The New Normal." Nytimes.com. New York Times, 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2012.
Faulk, Mike. "Riding High." Yakimaherald.com. Yakima Herald Republic, 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2012.
Scott, Janny. “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide.” Class Matters. New York, New York: Times Books, 2005. 1-26. Print.
"The Low-Income Single Parent." Joe.org. Web. 10 Mar. 2012.
"Prepared by 20." Preparedby20.com. United Way of Benton and Franklin Counties. Web. 10 Mar. 2012.
"Why Teen Pregnancy Is a Poverty Problem." Change.org. 2 Mar. 2010. Web. 10 Mar. 2012.
Throughout There Are No Children Here, a continuous, powerful tension always lurks in the background. The gangs that are rampant in the housing projects of Chicago cause this tension. In the Henry Horner Homes, according to Kotlowitz, one person is beaten, shot, or stabbed due to gangs every three days. In one week during the author's study of the projects, police confiscated 22 guns and 330 grams of cocaine in Horner alone (Kotlowitz 32).
Egan, Dan. “The Painful Side of Perfection.” Salt Lake City Tribune 22 Feb. 2000: D1.
Connolly, Ceci ?As Teen Pregnancy Dropped, So Did Child Poverty? Washington Post 9 Jan 2014. Web 14 April 2014
John Steinbeck, famous author of The Grapes of Wrath, once said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” This quote, while fairly amusing, brings up a vital subject--class mobility. Can people in poverty still be rags to riches stories? The book Class Matters reports that class mobility has most likely decrease and that it takes five generations for a family class status to change. In Yakima this poses a very grim problem because 34% of Yakima residents line under the poverty line. And of those 55.9% are single mothers, just like Angela Whitiker (Citydata). That is why Angela Whitiker’s story is so central to not only the world but to
Simpson, M. , David. Los Angeles Magazine. N.P.. July 24, 2013. Web. January 30, 2014
Gentrification also typically entails providing services (e.g., good-quality schools) and jobs in these neighborhoods. No family needs to be forced out but encouraged to seek a better life not only for them but their children. As much as many families will love to move from their neighborhoods to seek better life in another area, due to lack of money, many choose to stay and endure. An alternative strategy talked about in the paper is to move non-poor families into poor neighborhoods to change the mix and reduce poverty concentration and
In our current society, it is acceptable to talk about race or gender. However, when it comes to the subject of class, people tend to tense, and are uncertain as to where they stand. At one time in history money afforded prestige and power, however now, money is a large part of our society and tends to rule many peoples lives. In the book Where We Stand: Class Matters, by bell hooks, she describes a life growing up in a family who had nothing, to now becoming one of America’s most admired writers. She wrote this book because she wanted to write about her journey from a working class world to class-consciousness, and how we are challenged everyday with the widening gap between the rich and the poor. In her book, hook’s describes a life dominated by the haunting issues of money, race, and class.
Social class needs to become more recognizable as a growing problem. If the masses understood the real reason why people are in the social class they are then more would fight to buy “American made goods” and fix our crippled social system. In “Lies my teacher taught me”, Loewen compares college level history courses to high school level history courses saying, “History professors in college often put routinely put down high school history courses”. Loewen in both essays shows how textbooks skew adolescent’s view of America’s history leaving out key points like working class strikes and real depictions ...
When lots of people walk down the street and a homeless person is sitting there what do they do? They walk on and mumble something like get a job or try harder. Most poor people can’t do much more to fix their social class. It’s like they are stuck there. In Tammy Crabtree’s story, her family suggests this idea, “I growed up poor, my dad worked hard. He worked 27 years..........and it ain’t easy.” (People Like Us: Social Class in America) Tammy and her family have nothing else to do. They have worked all their life and been smart with their money. They do not have anything else to do to make their life better. People that are poor and don’t look the best can not get a good job either. They are stuck in that one job because no other place wants to hire them.
Miller, Jean Baker. “Domination and Subordination.” Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. Ed. Paula Rothenberg. New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 2010. 108-114. Print.
A social issue that has been going on in the United States for some time now is teen pregnancy and why it occurs. Although pregnancy is such a beautiful experience and an experience a woman cannot wait to have it should be done at the correct time in a women’s life which does not involve the teenage years. The teenage years are like the golden years in adolescent life where school activities take place, memories with friends and family are made but now a day’s teenage girls decide to throw all that away and become a mom. It has been proven many teenagers come out pregnant because of society or they are raised around poverty. In this term project I will be using two articles which will help prove my point in why many teenager girls become pregnant.
Hodges, Michael. New Statesman. 12/14/2009, Vol. 138 Issue 4979, P13-13. 2/5p. 1 Illustration. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Jean Anyon. “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”. “Rereading America”. Bedfords/St.Martin. Boston, New York, 2010. 169-186
There are several theories about the reasons why so many young women in poverty become pregnant and carry to full term. Faced with an unintended pregnancy, many teens living in poverty are likely to view early childbearing as a positive, desirable choice. These teens feel that becoming pregnant may in fact improve their lives. Economics may also be responsible for the lower percentage of poor teens who terminate their pregnancies, since Medicaid policies in most states do not pay for abortions, but do pay for services related to childbirth. In addition, some re...
C. Preview/Thesis: i'd like to explain the consequences of teenage pregnancies and things teens should do to prevent it.