PT: How might we be able to shift the narratives around poverty and wealth and why does it matter?
CC: There is great working going on – like Project Twist-It – to tackle the narratives that perpetuate poverty.
Our part of the work has been to disrupt the mythology of deservedness that binds the whole narrative together – legitimating wealth and justifying inequality and poverty.
One way we have found to disrupt these stories and myths of deservedness is to supplant them with true stories of how wealthy and “successful” people have gotten help – family and government assistance – that has made their own individual wealth and opportunity possibility. This is really part of the work of the Patriotic Millionaires. We have millionaires talking about the importance of taxpayer-funded investments in their own good fortune and opportunity.
As a campaigner, I think the narrative of deservedness is the big boulder in the road to a more equitable society. We know how to rewire the economy to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality. But we lack the political will – and that is because of the narratives that hold us back.
I’m finishing up a book for Routledge with the working title: Disrupting Narratives of Deservedness: Changing the Stories that Justify Economic and Racial Inequality. Hopefully this will add to the work that Project Twist-It is working on.
PT: Do you think we might be at a moment of realization about the narratives on poverty and wealth that could push towards a tipping point for positive change?
CC: Yes. I think the currency of these stories is weakening. Yet they remain incredibly powerful – the stories and narratives that justify inequality. But the more we expose them as fallacies and untrue representations of people’s lives, the less hold they have over our brains.
My personal interest is in getting the “beneficiaries” of our unequal system to expose the myths by telling true stories of help – to lift up the infrastructure of public investments. Those of us who have economic, racial, gender and other forms of advantage need to understand our own personal biographies and the benefits that have accrued to us. Privileged families benefit from parental help, what sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of advantage.” Through storytelling we can demystify how these work.
For example, why do women retire with significantly lower Social Security benefits, after a lifetime of gender prejudiced earnings? I just read Jessicah Bruder’s terrific book Nomadland, about elders who lose or give up their housing and live in mobile homes and vans and do seasonable as “workampers” at national parks, Amazon warehouses and beet harvests. Many of them are women with monthly social security checks of less than $700. If these women had been paid the same amount over their lifetimes as their male cohorts, they wouldn’t be in the same circumstances.
White people need to tell true stories about homeownership – how government homeownership subsidies between 1945 and 1970 went mostly to whites and put millions of people on the wealth-building train. They, in turn, helped their children advance with help to buy homes – contributing to a huge gap between homeownership rates for whites, Blacks and Latinos.
We can focus on individual remedies to poverty or larger system shifts that will build a more just and equitable economy.
Interview originally published by Project Twist-It.