After Donald Trump’s election to the White House in 2016, left-wing American journalists dwelled on their inability to accurately chronicle the lives of “left behind” in the deindustrialized states of the Rust Belt [“Ceinture de la rouille”] – those regions that had brought Trump to power. One book offers a stark example of reporting that had been overlooked: that of Princeton professor Matthew Desmond published in 2016 and titled Notice of eviction. Urban exploitation of poverty [Lux Éditeur, traduction de Paulin Dardel].
For two years, starting in 2008, Matthew Desmond lived among the most deprived populations of American society. He moved first to a trailer park, then to the poorest neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He befriended families who were struggling to pay their bills and who, in desperation, had moved from one dwelling to another, but he also met landlords who exploited them and put them on the streets. The result has been striking and heartbreaking portraits of people drowned in a system that overwhelms the most vulnerable.
At the time, he had drawn terrible conclusions: not only was the constant threat and reality of expulsion the number one factor that perpetuated poverty, but many people got rich by keeping their neighbor in this miserable situation and traumatic.
“A cordial man of quiet indignation”
In an interview sometime in March, Matthew Desmond, a cordial man of quiet indignation, described to me the aftermath ofNotice of eviction. His new essay, titled Poverty, by America [“La Pauvreté made in America”, inédit en français], is very different from his previous book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Essay in 2017. It is the lucid account of all he has learned and the things that could change. The lessons he describes seem readily applicable to US and UK contexts.
“I’ve spent most of my adult life on this, he says, giving lessons on poverty and spending a lot of time in the field. I still wondered what I would answer if someone approached me on the street and asked me why there is so much poverty in such a rich country. It begins by unrolling some data.
“If the poor of the United States founded a new country, they would outnumber the population of Australia. More than 1 million Americans do not have running water or sewage in their homes… More than 38 million cannot afford basic necessities. More than 1 million children are homeless and live in motels, cars, shelters.”
But the book is not only about this scandalous poverty. It is a book about “lives that we diminish so that others can unfold”, on the unspoken contract between the rich and the poor, those who expel and those who are expelled.
“Poverty is rarely presented as a situation that benefits some of us”, he points out. “It is of course common to blame the poor for their misfortunes”, more “nothing obliges us to leave a tiny tip to the waiter or to vote against social housing in our neighborhood”.
A systemic vision of poverty
According to Matthew Desmond, the better-off keep the poor in misery in three ways: we exploit them, we elect politicians who prefer to subsidize wealth rather than alleviate poverty, and we create prosperous and protected neighborhoods that entrench these inequality.
“When I started this job in Milwaukee, he details, I really wondered what could motivate anyone to become a mobile home park owner. At the end, I said to myself: ‘Why do without it?’ I had access to the owner’s accounts, and his profits were impressive. By my calculations, he was making over $400,000 net a year. It was then that it really struck me: we often speak of poverty as an isolated phenomenon, when it should be seen in relation to other elements. In my book, I quote novelist Tommy Orange, who wrote: ‘Young people jump from windows of burning buildings and die. And we think the problem is that they jump.’ [Ici n’est plus ici, Éditions Albin Michel, traduction de Stéphane Roques.] Reading this, I made it my goal to write about flames instead.”
Matthew Desmond is acutely aware of the ethical dilemmas his work poses. In the epilogue ofBird of prey
