The poor are fat
Five myths about the poor that are poisoning public policy.

By Annalee Newitz

POVERTY MAKES US irrational. Although politicians and analysts rarely admit it, public policies that affect the poor are often crafted under the influence of emotions rather than hard data. The public may have access to unbiased studies on poverty, but when it comes time to vote, they're motivated by a visceral response to stereotypes. It's not that they don't have sympathy for low-income workers, the unemployed, and the homeless. But, like children at a monster movie, they yearn for a magic solution that will make the big, bad nasties go away.

Why do the poor make us so muzzy-minded? Why are we allowed to insult people by calling them cheap trash or street scum when we would never dream of calling them niggers or bitches? Perhaps it's because we realize nothing but luck separates us from the homeless. Anyone can become poor. And to forget that, to dispel our nightmares of falling from economic grace, we invent myths to explain why poverty is the fault of the poor.

1. The poor are fat

Three years ago, Greg Critser wrote an article for Harper's that could be summed up as an exegesis on what makes the poor ugly. Luridly describing the french fries, doughnuts, and soft drinks consumed by impoverished Latinos in Los Angeles, his critique of the fast-food industry read more like a condemnation of the bloated, greasy, diabetes-ridden lower class. Since then several studies linking obesity and poverty have given other writers like Critser license to confuse their horror at fat bodies with their fear of the poor.

In her book Bound and Gagged, Laura Kipnis points out that Americans connect fat bodies with economic incontinence. Immersed in a pop morality that dictates that the poor are lazy and defective, people condemn the lower classes by saying they have no impulse control and therefore spend their entire puny salaries on hamburgers slathered with mayonnaise. In fact, argue the authors of several articles on obesity published in Science earlier this year, if the poor are fat, it's because they are saving their money by buying cheaper food, which is often higher in fat. Moreover, staying in shape requires time and money. Most low-income workers cannot afford to join a gym or spend their spare hours riding a bike and jogging.

But let's not forget that calling the poor fat is also a way of saying they are disgusting. Of course, sexy fat people from activist Marilyn Wann to actor John Goodman make it obvious that chubbiness does not equal ugliness. But people who do not conform to mainstream standards of beauty are still treated as outcasts, still find themselves the butt of jokes and insults. The poor face a form of double discrimination: condemned as financial failures, they are often stereotyped as physical failures, too.

Economic analyst Doug Henwood points out that the U.S. government's current definition of poverty is intimately connected to food. In his latest book, After the New Economy, he describes how a Social Security Administration staffer named Mollie Orshansky created the "poverty line" in 1963 by using a U.S. Department of Agriculture measure of the minimum food budget required to keep a family from starving to death. She multiplied the number by three and called that the poverty line. Henwood notes that this "insane level" is "the same today, adjusted only for inflation."

2. The poor are not white

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between racism and classism.

When then-president Ronald Reagan gutted welfare spending in the early 1980s, he leveraged voter support for his policies by using the stereotype of the "welfare queen," an unmarried black woman who pumps out baby after baby in order to get more state assistance. Citing the work of conservative sociologists like Charles Murray (who later coauthored The Bell Curve), Reagan claimed a scientific basis for eliminating Aid for Families with Dependent Children. If impoverished women of color were given money to raise their kids, he argued, they would never get off their fat asses and go to work.

Today the welfare queen is as dead as the AFDC. So asserts Steve Williams, director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights, a Bay Area group devoted to political organizing among no-wage and low-wage workers. He believes the new racist stereotype haunting the imaginations of policy makers – especially in San Francisco – is the "panhandler king, a lazy, drug-addicted African American man." He points out that Sup. Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash campaign included commercials featuring men of color who were depicted as being responsible for their own poverty. "Care Not Cash is economic and racial cleansing," Williams argues.

While poor whites outnumber impoverished people of color in the United States, people of color are statistically overrepresented under the poverty line. Many analysts trace this problem back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when wealth in the United States was concentrated in the hands of whites who exploited and enslaved people of color to reap greater profits. From the underpaid, ill-treated Asian American railroad workers to the enslaved African American population, people of color have suffered historically from economic deprivations whose effects persist into the present. "Oftentimes, in an attempt to mask the racism that exists, people cover up by talking about class," Williams says. "In San Francisco you can say that it's inappropriate to offer assistance to the poor on the street, but it would be difficult to say we shouldn't offer economic development assistance to Bayview-Hunters Point."

3. The poor are having fun

Indie press scenester Lisa Carver thinks all this talk of the downtrodden poor is just a bunch of complaints by middle-class people who don't understand that living in a trailer is fun. In her popular zine Rollerderby and her book Dancing Queen, Carver elaborates on her love of white-trash pop ephemera like monster trucks and processed cheese products. For her, economic deprivation is cultural plenitude. She laments that now it's hip to wear dirty baseball hats and carefully explains that she was white trash before it was cool.

Even Eminem, today's reigning white-trash king, doesn't go that far. In the rapper's semiautobiographical movie, 8 Mile, and his songs, Slim Shady makes it clear that being poor sucks. It means not having a car that works and having a shitty job you can't afford to lose; being poor filled him with rage and a soul-eating sense of hopelessness.

Nevertheless, Carver's point of view comes from a powerful myth that refuses to die. Ironically glamorizing the lives of poor, rural people, she makes it seem that the difference between the middle class and the poor is cultural rather than financial. It's like the difference between reading V.C. Andrews and reading Homer. By treating poverty like a culture, pundits like Carver feed into the most corrosive lie about it: that the poor are enjoying themselves and don't want to change.

4. The poor are that way by choice

"I think the idea that poor people are responsible for their own poverty still drives federal policy," Williams says. Henwood agrees: "There's this good old American individualist moral idea that says you're poor because you're a lazy fucker. Or you haven't kept your skill set up to date."

A side effect of this kind of thinking is internalized classism among the poor. Just as people of color and homosexuals have to fight feelings of depression or worthlessness in a world where they are often told they're defective, the poor have to struggle to gain a sense of self-confidence in the face of prejudice. Shelley Pepper, a San Francisco nursing student, grew up poor in Missouri. "My mom was a single parent, and there were five kids," she recalls. "We moved around a lot and usually lived in a trailer. I remember one Christmas when my mom didn't give us presents. She couldn't afford it. It wasn't a big deal until we were at my grandma's house and my aunt talked about it in a way that made me feel really ashamed."

When she got to junior high, Pepper says, she realized she couldn't have the Nike shoes and other things her classmates had, but she learned to stop caring. "I veered in the direction of punk rock and just dressing weird," she says. But she never stopped struggling with the feeling that her mother was poor because she was "bad with money." She felt as if her mother didn't provide a positive financial role model, and she thought of her as irresponsible. But, she says, "I also feel like if you don't have enough money, you can't talk about being responsible. It's going to look irresponsible if you don't pay rent, but if you don't have the money, you don't have a choice."

Pepper says she also became convinced she was bad with money. As a young adult she never had enough and never saved it. But when she moved to San Francisco with her husband and they both got jobs, she discovered that "when I had more money, I did save it." Even today, she says, "If I don't have money, it stresses me out. But now, knowing that we have a steady income and career goals, I doubt if I'll feel worried again."

Still, she continues to be concerned that her mother isn't being responsible. "I know it's a catch-22 situation, because she didn't have a lot of money, but I still feel like she did stupid shit with it. I'm sure she's not saving money now. It makes me feel like she's not too smart about that, although she's very smart about other things."

The social forces that undermined Pepper's faith in her mother's intelligence have also driven the latest round of what Williams calls "welfare deform."

Placing a five-year limit on state assistance to the unemployed is supposed to push them back into the workforce – and, implicitly, correct for impoverished people's irresponsible desire to sit around and get paid to do nothing. But unemployment continues to rise, which means that even if the poor want to work, there may be literally no jobs for them. Indeed, the free market cannot function unless some workers are always unemployed or poor. "It doesn't matter if they're smart or dumb or whether they have substance-abuse issues," Williams says. "There are always going to be millions of people who have to be poor or unemployed for the system to operate."

Fear of poverty is one of the most powerful incentives that drives people to work. The threat of unemployment is what allows employers to keep workers' salaries low enough that businesses can make a profit at the end of the day.

5. The poor have it better now than they used to

Conservative pundits often claim the poor today are living large compared with their 19th-century counterparts, whose lungs were full of coal dust and whose limbs were constantly mutilated by heavy industrial machinery. In the 21st century the poor have TVs, air conditioning, penicillin, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Dinesh D'Souza quotes a recent immigrant from the developing world who marvels that in America "even the poor are fat." And by that, he doesn't mean ugly. He means well fed.

But a close look at the history of a city like San Francisco tells a different story.

Bay Area historian Gray Brechin says the poor were no worse off a century ago than they are today. Up until the 1960s, vagrancy laws gave the police permission to beat up and jail any "bums" who dared cross Market Street. The poor were isolated from the rest of the city. "Laguna Honda used to be a poor farm, and you'd send the poor there, to the edge of the city, to live and work," Brechin says. In the 19th century the sewage situation in San Francisco was hideous. Effluvia and garbage ran down from the wealthy areas in the hills and pooled in the Mission District and SoMa. These areas became hotbeds of cholera and diphtheria.

But today we see similar trends: the poor live near garbage dumps, suffer unequally from environmental cancers and diabetes, and are routinely kicked out of nice neighborhoods like the Castro.

Unlike today, reformers of the early 20th century knew the poor needed cash in order to receive care. When the burgeoning science of epidemiology revealed a connection between sewage and disease, the city worked to change the sewer system. San Francisco mayor "Sunny" Jim Rolph, a progressive whose tenure extended from 1912 to 1932, set up countless programs to aid the poor. He was behind the building of General Hospital, in its day a monument to modern medicine entirely dedicated to providing the public, especially the indigent, with health care. Rolph also persuaded San Franciscans to vote for bond measures that created funding for the fire and police departments, public schools, and the Hetch Hetchy reservoir.

Brechin says the debate about whether the poor are "worthy or unworthy" raged in the last two centuries as much as it does today. But the 19th-century poor had advocates who didn't need to hide behind comedy to criticize the powers that be. They had Henry George, whom Brechin calls "a self-taught economist." George grew up working-class and in 1880 published Progress and Poverty, one of the most scathing and informed critiques of capitalism written in English. Based on his experiences in California and San Francisco, the core of George's argument is that rising land values create poverty. Capitalist progress, he explains, is always linked to the disenfranchisement of the poor. The book became an international bestseller and remains in print more than a century later.

With an articulate, persuasive thinker like George on their side, and the possibility of public assistance aimed at bettering their lot rather than simply eliminating them, the poor of yesterday hardly had it worse than their present-day counterparts.

There is no getting around the cold hard fact that the division between rich and poor has grown dramatically over the past three decades. Henwood writes that "in 1980, the richest fifth of Americans had incomes about ten times those of the poorest fifth; a decade later, that multiple had grown by twelve."

One could argue that the problematic calculation of the poverty line in the United States has also led to greater deprivation among the poor in the present day. For most people, this is common sense. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services researcher Gordon M. Fisher reports that, on average, U.S. citizens believe the amount of money a family needs to get along in their communities is higher than the federal definition of the poverty line. This information is based on evidence gleaned from annual Gallup polls taken since 1946.

How can we know the poverty line is too low and yet do nothing about it?

We look at the poor, but we do not see them. Instead we see myths, fears, and our own self-doubts projected onto people whose lives have been trashed by capitalism. But when we consider how to vote on issues concerning poverty, or simply how to treat panhandlers, it's crucial that we look at the real lives of the poor.

Poverty is not a choice – it is, for many people, inevitable. We have built an economic system wherein there are more people than jobs. The next person to feel the sting of joblessness could be you. What we do to the poor is ultimately what we do to ourselves. How suicidal do we have to get before we change the system?

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