•What is something you’d like to learn more about? Make a conscious goal to learn more about it this week. Do the same the following week until indulging your curiosities has become a habit.
•Identify one way you’d like to participate in your democracy. You don’t have to run for office, and there are things you can do even on those occasions when there aren’t any marches. Find one that has meaning for you, and commit to following through with action.
But Poverty Sure Can Rain on Your Parade
One in three women lives in or on the brink of poverty.
We have now learned that money isn’t the key to happiness, but let’s not get too blasé about it. Because remember, if you’re living below that $105,000 annual income level, more money is going to improve your lot in life.
This is an especially important fact for women. According to The Shriver Report, one in three American women live in or on the brink of poverty. In this same report, we learn that two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women who often operate without sick days, and two-thirds of American women are the primary or co-breadwinners for their families. Twenty-five percent of native women live in poverty—more than any other racial group. These same women are increasingly becoming the breadwinners in their families as they attain higher education levels and pursue managerial positions at a higher rate. In Canada, 10 percent of women live in poverty, and 1.5 million women live on a low income.
This systemic problem is complex, and it is likely best addressed at the systemic level. However, if we’re going to fix this issue as a society, we have to recognize it exists and recognize the unfounded prejudices towards the poor in an individualistic society.
Nicole Lynn Perry, an activist in Seattle, Washington, has struggled greatly with poverty and has seen these prejudices firsthand. Her financial situation led her and her then-wife to make some risky financial decisions. Perry had just separated from the military and was having trouble finding work back in her hometown of Dallas, Texas, despite her best efforts. The only income she was bringing in was a little bit of money from the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
Without a steady income, banks wouldn’t lend the couple the money they needed to get by, so they turned to payday loans, which they took out under Perry’s name. They were never able to pay off these predatory loans. This is extremely common and should serve as a warning to all to stay away from these loans if at all humanly possible. The payday loans ultimately ended up being one of the biggest negative line items on her credit report.
It wasn’t just the payday loans, though. Perry and her ex were so desperate for money to get by that they used even more unconventional methods to get cash for the bills through their credit union.
“If you had a fraudulent charge on your card, you could claim it and they’d temporarily give you the money,” Perry explains. “If the claim was legit, you got to keep the money. If they found out your claim was a bad one and you had actually made the purchase, you’d have to pay the money back.”
Perry and her wife made somewhere between five and ten claims, knowing that the charges weren’t fraudulent. They needed the money to survive. But when the credit union came knocking, wanting their money back for the legitimate charges, Perry didn’t have it. She lost her account, and her credit took another hit.
Later, her poor credit history would prevent her from renting an apartment. A poor credit score can make it extremely difficult to get by in many areas. You might not be able to get an auto loan for that vehicle you desperately need in order to drive to work. You’re more likely to get turned down for a mortgage, and some employers will even refuse to hire you if your score is too low or your credit history is too spotty.
Perry knows she made mistakes. But she was also doing the best she could at the time with the extremely limited resources she had available to her.
“Just because we’re low- or middle-income doesn’t mean we’re trying to stay here,” she reminds us. “Some of it is what’s put upon us. Some of it is the actions of others. Some fall down there and stay down there because of the simple fact that they don’t know anything else.”
Some Solutions
Choncé Maddox Rhea is a freelance writer based out of Chicago, Illinois. Like Perry, she has also seen a great deal of poverty in her life.
“My family fell into poverty when my parents separated and my mom became a single mom,” says Rhea. “She had her Certified Nurse’s Assistant (CNA) license and worked a job making $11 per hour, but somehow still took care of my siblings and I. Money was always tight, and we lived on food stamps and received medical benefits for some time.”
When Rhea was a sophomore in high school, her mother broke the news to her children that she could no longer afford their rent. They were going to have to move, but in order to do that she had to save up money for the new place.
Her mother and brother stayed with one of her nursing patients so she could rack up overtime as she was saving for the new apartment. Rhea and her sisters stayed at her uncle’s house over the summer. She watched as her peers enjoyed the warm weather with friends and started their first jobs. Meanwhile, she was providing childcare for her sisters, enabling her mother to earn the money they so desperately needed to reestablish some stability.
A few years later, Rhea became a teen mom.
“I entered my own state of poverty since I wasn’t able to provide financially for my son,” she says. “I went to college and juggled part-time jobs but still relied on government benefits to help me get by as I worked on my education and developed more marketable skills.”
These programs—combined with some serious hard work—helped Rhea get ahead in life. She used government programs, food pantries, clothes closets, nonprofit organizations, low-income housing, and sometimes even soup kitchens to get what she and her family needed as she strove towards the higher education which would allow her to propel herself to the next level.
Our society judges people severely when they utilize support programs or safety nets. This particularly bothers Perry as a woman of color because even the welfare system in our country has been racist since the beginning. When the New Deal was enacted, Social Security benefits were not extended to domestic and agricultural workers—who were primarily black at that time. Once the system started becoming gradually more—but never close to completely—fair, white people started loudly complaining that they were supporting people of color, completely ignoring the fact that systemic poverty purposefully and disproportionately affects minorities.
“If we’re on Medicaid and/or food stamps, we’re trying to game the system. We’re welfare queens,” says Perry, citing the judgements welfare recipients commonly face—especially welfare recipients who are women of color. “Are there women who take advantage of these programs? Yes. Are they all women of color? No. For some of us, that’s all we’ve got. Right now, I just moved up here [to Seattle] from Texas going on two months ago. [Perry moved for safety reasons.] For right now, I have a part-time job with Amazon. I don’t get insurance there. My alternative is getting on Medicaid. Before I had a job, I got a food stamp card because I couldn’t afford groceries during my job hunt.”
Rhea encourages people to ignore these judgements, put their pride away, and seek out the same help she and
