Invisibility Of Poverty In America

In this paper, I am going to discuss the invisibility of poverty. Many of us know what poverty looks like. We’ve seen the massive cultivating images from foreign countries of starving children living on their own without a single support system in place for them. Stuff like this always seems to hit close to the heart for most people, including myself; but what about the poverty happening right before our very own eyes? What about the millions of American’s who are struggling on a daily basis to find a single meal? Why aren’t we so ambitious to help are own neighbors? The invisibility of poverty is a massive issue in America that deserves to be brought up and discussed everywhere around the nation. This complex issue can be discussed from many …show more content…
This is when banks and mortgage lenders take high-risk neighborhoods, typically poor segregated communities, and they do one or more things. They either refuse their mortgages, or offer loans to them at extremely high rates. This practice is technically illegal, yet it is still evidently being used today (Ferris). This is an extreme issue that takes a high toll on these communities. When you make it nearly impossible for these people to pay their mortgages and such forth, you make it impossible for them to enquire assets. This makes it immensely difficult for them to rise up and move out of their neighborhoods, and move into more affluent neighborhoods. And in the worst case, they are forced to foreclose. The foreclosure rate in these communities has been extremely high from these redlining tactics. “We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates (Hall)”. This issue creates a whole range of new issues when you consider these communities being predominantly black communities, and you factor in everything discussed above, you can see that this issue puts black people in this perpetual state of poverty and violence that is nearly impossible for them to escape. Which creates this negative stereotype that most people associate with black people today. When in fact, our …show more content…
Although they may not be completely homeless or starving, they deserve to be treated better than they have been. But this issue might just remain invisible to the larger society, considering their lack of political power. Which is the next issue I want to talk about, political disenfranchisement. Disenfranchisement is defined as “The removal of the rights of citizenship through economic, political, or legal means. (Ferris)” This correlates with poverty in the sense that with all of the time and struggle it takes just to get by everyday, it is unlikely that they will have any time or energy left to make political change. And without them going after the political change, who is going to make the change for them? Which is why this is such a large issue. And is also another reason why this issue stays under the radar, because not many people are fighting for them. Politicians have little interest in them because they wield such minimal power for them. And with the government not wanting anything to do with them, they get offended, considering the way their treated, and causes them to lose even more interest in trying to make political change. The government won’t listen to them, and they don’t want to. This clearly puts a grinding halt for change in these communities, and worsens the issue of anyone getting out of these poor