Struck by the inequalities and isolation thrown onto poor people in America, Matthew Desmond (2016) decided to study poverty. Desmond (2016) understood that poverty was not an occurrence with complete focus on the surrounding poorness, but rather a relationship between the rich and the poor. His desire to understand that relationship drove him to study evictions—a great representation of such. Desmond visits the “Brew City” of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he portrays the hardships of eight families to show how the same issue affects different people in different ways, though all poorly, in his ethnography Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond did an amazingly maintained the focus of his novel on poverty instead of getting …show more content…
Seeing as how the living conditions in the impoverished Milwaukee neighborhoods are not up to par with state code, landlord’s want minimum police, or other officials, presence as possible. But, children do the exact opposite. Caseworkers of families involved with Child Protective Services often inspect residencies for health hazards, which could lead to imposed fines on the landlords or even result in being shut down, as is the case with lead poisoning (Desmond, 2016). Children often are involved in trouble at school that follows them home, like is the reasoning behind one of Arleen’s evictions after one of her sons is involved in violence. This discrimination is rooted in the history of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in which “it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them” (Desmond, 2016, p. 230). The importance of kinship is expressed as a way for families to get by day-to-day though large changes in society, including ‘the crack epidemic’ and ‘the prison boom’ had eventually “frayed the family safety net in poor communities” with the help of welfare guidelines imposed by the state (Desmond, 2016, p. 161). He uses Aid to Families with Dependent Children as an example to show the transformation from receiving support from consanguineal kin to fictive kin, for a larger source of aid was given to those living with nonrelatives or …show more content…
What is imagined as poor living conditions is multiplied immensely. Aid that seems so easy to obtain is obstructed immeasurably. The system is formed again poor Americans at almost every angle, even in how they are viewed in society. However, Desmond poeticizes how rigidly poor Americans work to remove themselves from the harsh conditions instead of subjecting to the lifestyle indefinitely, even when it seems merely impossible. With belief, his own individual encounter with eviction is to praise. Because of his personal experiences, Desmond was able to portray the rough, but true, reality of eviction, the side that media and the government silence with duct tape. He shed light on the corruption of landlords, prejudice and segregation, inhumane living conditions, and economic exploitation, all in which are still present in today’s society though many choose to turn a blind eye. Desmond’s writing stands out because he did not accomplish such through the use of degrading or targeting measures, nor by incorporating personal opinions. He, rather, used his passion to present the facts just as they were revealed to