Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art, I was reminded of a conversation (argument) I had with my best friend one day about welfare, poverty, and institutional racism in the United States.
Obviously, my friend is not alone in her thinking. While it's true that the current forms of assistance programming are inefficient and sometimes manipulated, I wonder how it can be so easy for our society to blame the victims of economic downfall, political manipulation, and systemic oppression. How is it so easy to ignore the fact that education level, class, race, gender, job status, geographic location, culture, and violence (etc, etc) are all related?
Maybe it's the Western world's obsession with the Self rather than Community that causes us to feel such disdain for those who would take away from our own resources, time, and money. Maybe it's our lust for the "American Dream" that fuels our hatred for those who have failed to achieve it (or those whose dreams are different from ours in the first place).
I would like to think that humans are basically good, but sometimes I get so discouraged. Maybe I'll be more optimistic once I get to the end of Kester's paper, but I kinda doubt it.
Thanks for your post Chance. I can see both sides of this argument. In undergrad I took a women gender study class and my professor showed us a documentary about a black, single mother on welfare working full time as well as being a full time student, taking classes towards her associates degree. Her son had asthma and had to be on medications and often had doctor appointments. On welfare she was able to take him to all of his appointments as well as provide him with all of his medications. She was also able to keep him in daycare. Once she earned her associates degree, her hourly wage went from $8.50 to $12 an hour. Now with her new wage she did not qualify for the welfare programs she was on before. She could no longer afford her sons medications, could not keep him in daycare and was having a hard time keeping up with her bills in general. So basically even though she was struggling on welfare, she was almost better off. So what does this tell us about the system? This is a woman who was working so hard to better herself, but ended up worse off. So my question is, where is the incentive to get off of this program, which leads me into my next point.
ReplyDeleteWhile doing AmeriCorps, I worked at a non profit which had Emergency Services, which provided food, furniture, assistance with bills, etc. I have never seen so many people take advantage of a system that was trying to support people in NEED. We were allowed to give out huge food bags (that would last a person a month worth of groceries) once a month per person. Numerous people would come in every single week getting food bags and throwing half of the food out in the garbage outside. The organization also had furniture donated for people that really needed it, on the days it was given away we had the same people come in and hoard tons of stuff that was later found out to be sold at a flee market. These are just a couple of examples. I finally put a simple system in place with the food pantry that kept track of how many times people came in a month.
So this is why I can see both sides of the argument. There are people that really need the help, but the system we have in place is not working.