Through several texts to include Bell Hooks’ articles Narratives of Struggle and Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor, Natasha Tretheway’s memoir High Rollers, and the film Trouble the Water directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal illustrate how the poor are often dehumanized by a higher dominating structure of power that belittles the poor because of preconceived notions from several forms of media and experiences. Many of the underclass were overlooked for service and stability because of the idea of civilians having preset ranks of class and agency or even the treatment, depiction, and resistance of poverty that was branded as impoverishment and acts of dehumanizing the ones most in need. Each of the sources express their concern with the idea of poverty and how society tends to embody the agreement and depiction of key issues that are raised when understanding poverty, and what the meaning of poor is in the country. Hooks, Trethewey, Lessin and Deal, also express the idea of resistance towards poverty and what society sets poverty to be, including class and agency. Also, these writers explain how stereotypical views of poverty typically come from dominant media, to include commercials, movies, TV shows, etc.
Bell Hooks’ article Narratives of Struggle and Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor both support and offer an explanation about how the poor and the categorized underclass people have no power, and the many struggles faced by the “economically disenfranchised”. Also, Natasha Trethewey’s High Rollers and the film Trouble the Water directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, further exemplifies how civilization was either dehumanized or neglected of aid through first hand encounters and experiences.
Narrati...
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... has so much control over impoverishment and its sufferers, leading them to believe that how the government is treating, depicting, and resisting the poor is the right thing, due to the lack of their own self-knowledge.
Works Cited
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Hooks pointed out that many of his professors insinuated that there were negative stereotypes of being poor. Moreover, that self-esteem is linked to financial wealth; women he met with were on government assistance, but chose to get further in debt to appear to have money, never wanting to be labeled poor. Hooks was raised to believe that morals and values made one rich; that one could have all the money in the world but still be poor because of their attitude. Who’s accountable for why people in our society are poor? It’s seems a vicious circle that is hard for poor kids to escape. Many people with low incomes are “intelligent, critical thinkers struggling to transform their circumstances” (Hooks, p. 488) There are many resources, such as theaters that are empty all day, to pay it forward and help the less fortunate gain skills from college students and professors sharing their knowledge. Barbara Ehrenreich’s “How I Discovered the Truth About Poverty” questions why negative stereotypes of untrustworthiness in poor people. Because of this mistrust, the introduction of drug testing for government aid was passed. Why are those negative connotations associated with poverty? “Poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.”
Donald Worster introduces a framework for analyzing environmental history along the three dimensions of culture, social organization, and nature, which can be used to investigate how the ‘levees only’ approach to managing the waters of the Mississippi River set the scene for the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana (4-5). The ‘levees only’ approach grew from and promoted certain cultural, social, and natural conditions in New Orleans, and each of these elements critically interacted to contribute to the human and environmental destruction unleashed by Katrina. Cultural, social, and natural elements of Worster’s framework individually shaped the essential preconditions of the Katrina disaster. Culturally, New Orleans’s
The idea of this essay is to explain how poverty is being represented the wrong way by nonprofit organizations here at home. The author uses the title to explain to the readers that poverty is not being represented the correct way. The way organizations represent poverty is by using images from a third world country instead of using pictures of people that live here at home that are living at poverty. The author explains how there are children here in America that need help just to get their basic needs, she explains “There are so many children like her – children that are deprived of their basic necessities right here in America” (George 668). The author is referring to “Mandy”. The picture of the girl on the Children Inc. flyer. She looks normal but she is need of help. The title gives an understanding to the reader about what is about to be
A storm such as Katrina undoubtedly ruined homes and lives with its destructive path. Chris Rose touches upon these instances of brokenness to elicit sympathy from his audience. Throughout the novel, mental illness rears its ugly head. Tales such as “Despair” reveal heart-wrenching stories emerging from a cycle of loss. This particular article is concerned with the pull of New Orleans, its whisper in your ear when you’ve departed that drags you home. Not home as a house, because everything physical associated with home has been swept away by the storm and is now gone. Rather, it is concerned with home as a feeling, that concept that there is none other than New Orleans. Even when there is nothing reminiscent of what you once knew, a true New Orleanian will seek a fresh start atop the foundation of rubbish. This is a foreign concept for those not native to New Orleans, and a New Orleanian girl married to a man from Atlanta found her relationship split as a result of flooding waters. She was adamant about staying, and he returned to where he was from. When he came back to New Orleans for her to try and make it work, they shared grim feelings and alcohol, the result of which was the emergence of a pact reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. This couple decided they would kill themselves because they could see no light amongst the garbage and rot, and failure was draining them of any sense of optimism. She realized the fault in this agreement,
hooks recalls from personal experience the lessons she learned when she was growing up in a poor family. She says that in her household, no one was ashamed of living in poverty; instead, it was a “breeding ground of moral integrity” (hooks 433). hooks remembers her parents and grandparents teaching her about the value and the worth of a person. She grew up knowing that a person’s value was worth more than their material possessions (433). In addition, her grandparents informed her that no matter how many degrees a person may have, it did not prove their intelligence nor integrity (433).
Edelstein, David. "'Trouble The Water' Captures Katrina On Camcorder." NPR. NPR, 29 Aug. 2008. Web. 30 Nov. 2013.
On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive hurricane in American history, made landfall in Louisiana with winds of one hundred and twenty-seven miles per hour (“Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts”). The sheer magnitude of the amount of lives and property lost was enormous, and it was triggered simply by warm ocean waters near the Bahamas ("How Hurricane Katrina Formed"). Nature was indifferent to whether the raging winds and rain would die off in the ocean or wipe out cities; it only follows the rules of physics. A multitude of American authors has attempted to give accounts and interpretations of their encounters with the disinterested machine that is nature. Two authors, Stephen Crane and Henry David Thoreau, had rather contrasting and conflicting interpretations of their own interactions with nature. Crane’s work, “The Open Boat,” is story based on his experience as a survivor
Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 33-50.
News of the devastating hurricane Katrina and its economic, political, social, and humanitarian consequences dominated global headlines in an unprecedented manner when this natural catastrophe struck the region of New Orleans in mid August 2005 (Katrinacoverage.com). As a tradition, large-scale disasters like Katrina, inevitably, bring out a combination of the best and the worst news media instincts. As such, during the height of Hurricane Katrina’s rage, many journalists for once located their gag reflex and refused to swallow shallow and misleading excuses and explanations from public officials. Nevertheless, the media’s eagerness to report thinly substantiated rumors may have played a key role in bringing about cultural wreckage that may take the American society years to clean up.
America and Haiti’s social system works by everyone belonging into a different category of class. Few people belong to the 1 percent, some in the middle and the rest live in poverty. Some people many argue that poverty doesn’t exist in United States because it is one of the richest countries, but poverty seems to be hidden. Meanwhile in Haiti, poverty is every visible because natural disasters and the people on top have caused it. In both countries, poverty turns into misogyny because people view women as object. Therefore, the system of social class in America is similar to other countries in their problems, although the main difference is that poverty in America can be invisible.
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Throughout Society, many families have seen struggle and lived through poverty. The economy is not always thriving which takes a toll on people who suffer through unemployment or low wage jobs. The Frontline documentary, “Two American Families”, is the perfect example of struggle in the United States. It shows the lives of two struggling families and their efforts to survive. Two essays, “The Sociological Imagination” by C. Wright Mills, and “The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All” by Herbert J. Hans, support the analysis of the video strongly. They express many ideas that relate to the world and struggle throughout society. Also, there are many sociological terms that depict the events that occurred in the documentary.