Poverty/Privilege A Reader for Writers

Read. Write. Oxford.

In order to understand why people are poor, we must also look at why people are wealthy. Poverty/Privilege: A Reader for Writers examines the social, cultural, and political forces that offer-or deny-opportunities to people based on race, gender, age, and geography. By helping students understand how poverty works, this survey makes them aware of the problem and encourages them to become part of the solution.

Developed for the first-year composition course, Poverty/Privilege: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and cultural reading selections, providing students with the rhetorical knowledge and compositional skills required to participate effectively in discussions about poverty and privilege.

Poverty/Privilege: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives.

About the Author

Connie Snyder Mick is Director of Community-Based Learning and Co-Director of the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor through the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame.

1. Definitions. What Is Poverty?
John Iceland, "Early Views of Poverty in America." Poverty In America: A Handbook
Barbara Ehrenreich, "How We Cured 'The Culture of Poverty,' Not Poverty Itself." Mother Jones
"Penury Portrait." The Economist
Ray Offenheiser, "Poverty at Home." Politico
Vivyan Adair, "Reclaiming the Promise of Higher Education: Poor Single Mothers In Academe." U.S. Senate Committee on Finance
Greg Kauffmann, "U.S. Poverty: By the Numbers." Moyers and Company
"Definition and Resources for Poverty." Census.gov
"About Human Development." Measure of America
Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, "Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?" The Heritage Foundation
Robert Haveman, "What Does It Mean to Be Poor in a Rich Society?" Focus
Charles Kenny, "In Praise of Slums." Foreign Policy

2. Causes. Why Are People Poor?
Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, "Perspectives on Poverty." Creating an Opportunity Society
Charles Murray, "Prologue." Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Sarah Burd-Sharps and Kristen Lewis, "Inequality: Shifting the Spotlight from Wall Street to Your Street." Oxfam America
Jeff Sessions, "Memo on FY14 Budget Process."
Kai Wright, "Young, Black, and Buried in Debt." Salon
Michelle Alexander, "The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent Undercast." Race, Poverty, & the Environment
Joshua DuBois, "The Fight for Black Men." Newsweek
David Ansell, County: "County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital"
"100 Questions About Poverty." Joseph Rowntree Foundation

3. Consequences. Who Is Poor?
Gabriel Thompson, "Could You Survive on $2 a Day?" Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Mary Bauer and Mónica Ramírez, "Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry." Southern Poverty Law Center
"Map the Meal Gap." Feeding America
Monica Potts, "Pressing on the Upward Way." The American Prospect
Bernie Sanders, "Poverty in America: A Death Sentence." Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity
Sonja Livingston, "Shame." Ghostbread
Laura Sullivan-Hackley, "Speech Pathology: The Deflowering of an Accent." Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education
Sherman Alexie, "Why Chicken Means So Much to Me." The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Crystal Gammon, "Pollution, Poverty, and People of Color: Asthma and the Inner City." Environmental Health News
Maria Shriver, "The Female Face of Poverty." The Atlantic
Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson, "The Long Reach of Early Childhood Poverty." Pathways
Roger R. Blunt and Paul D. Monroe, Jr., "We Have a Wealth Gap, and the Military Is Poorer for It." Oxfam America
Maura O'Connor, "Subsidizing Starvation." Foreign Policy
Michael Pharaoh, "The Homeless of L.A."

4. Privilege. Who Isn't Poor?
Courtney Martin, "Moving Past Acknowledging Privilege." The American Prospect
Teju Cole, "The White Savior Industrial Complex." The Atlantic
Gene Marks, "If I Were a Poor Black Kid." Forbes
DNLee, "If I Were a Wealthy Suburbanite." Scientific American
Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Why Do Poor People 'Waste' Money on Luxury Items?" Talking Points Memo
James Webb, "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege." Wall Street Journal
Adam Serwer, "Webb and 'White Privilege'." The American Prospect
"The Rich Are Different from You and Me; Wealth, Poverty, and Compassion." The Economist
Anthony Zurcher, "'Affluenza Defence': Rich, Privileged, and Unaccountable." BBC News, Echo Chambers
Christopher Ingraham, "You Can Never Have Too Much Money, Research Shows." Brookings Institution

5. Rhetoric. How Do the Media Represent Poverty?
Simon Kuper, "Poverty's Poor Show in the Media." Financial Times
Dan Froomkin, "It Can't Happen Here: Why Is There Still So Little Coverage of Americans Who Are Struggling With Poverty?" Nieman Reports
Diana Elizabeth Kendall, "Fragile Frames: The Poor and the Homeless." Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America
Emily Brennan, "Reporting Poverty: Interview with Katherine Boo." Guernica
Rebecca Solnit, "When the Media is the Disaster: Covering Haiti." Huffington Post
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, "'The Crime of Survival': Fraud, Prosecutions, Community Surveillance, and the Original 'Welfare Queen'." Journal of Social History
Noel King, "American Presidents and the Rhetoric of Poverty." Marketplace
Nazneen Mehta, "Opposing Images: 'Third World Women' and 'Welfare Queen'." Women's Policy Journal of Harvard
Meriam Meltzer Olson, Khadijah Muhammad, Laura Rodgers, and Mansura Karim, "Picture This: Images and Realities in Welfare to Work." Affilia: Journal of Women in Social Work
"The United Nations Has Picked a Group of People to Eliminate World Poverty." United Nations Development Programme
"There Are 8 Things Maria Wants to See Happen Before 2015." United Nations Development Programme

6. Solutions. What Should We Do About Poverty?
Dean S. Karlan and Jacob Appel, "Introduction: The Monks and the Fish." More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty
Peter Buffett, "Charitable Industrial Complex." New York Times
Paul Theroux, "Africa's Aid Mess." Barron's
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, "More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World." Foreign Policy
Peter Edelman, "The State of Poverty in America." The American Prospect
Ai-jen Poo, "Building a Caring Economy." Huffington Post
Lori Sanders and Eli Lehrer. "Don't Forget the Poor." The Weekly Standard
Muhammad Yunus, "Muhammad Yunus-Nobel Lecture." Nobelprize.org
Sasha Abramsky, "New Help for the Poor: Cash Grants, Through a Web Site." The New Yorker
Phil Garrity, "Measuring the Immeasurable." Partners in Health
David Bornstein et al., "Ten Questions." Solutions Journalism Network

Appendix: Researching and Writing About Poverty/Privilege