A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
“This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.” (Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted)
Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.
This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, poring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse.
The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.
A sweeping and surprising new understanding of America's places of most extreme poverty, drawn from original data-driven research, from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
"This book challenges and enrages, humbles and indicts?and forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.? ? Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Evicted
Three of the nation's top researchers known for taking on key mysteries about poverty deliver a new, multi-dimensional way of measuring deep disadvantage in every county in the nation as well as in its 500 most-populated cities. By turning the lens of disadvantage from the individual to the community, the authors uncover a surprising picture. Among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged places in the U.S., the majority are rural, many of them rarely if ever researched; only 12 are cities.
Through engaged ethnographic research, deep historical understanding, and riveting storytelling, the authors paint portraits of places within the three regions of America they identify as actual ?internal colonies? within our nation. In rural Leflore County, MS, in the Cotton Belt of the Deep South, we see residents living?and dying?with homicide rates as high as anywhere else in the nation. In Clay County, KY, where Big Coal once ruled, the social infrastructure is so eroded that residents say ?there's nothing to do but drugs.? In Crystal City in South Texas, a town still proud to be known as the ?spinach capital of the world,? cheerleaders revolt in response to white quotas and a legacy of unequal schools. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is what these regions have in common?a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations are facts, these acclaimed and engaged public scholars convince, that must shape a new War on Poverty, 60 years after LBJ's unfinished first one.
