5 Lies You’ve Been Told About the Poor

Yesterday, I invited you to read Scary Mommy’s story about a woman who snarkily called people in need “those people“.

“Those people” are distancing words of course. Words that draw lines between an “us” and a “them”. And words that I’m guessing most readers of this blog are smart enough to have stripped from their vocabulary a long time ago.

But something else that might need stripped from our brains, according to Jeff Nall, is the inaccurate picture of the poor that’s been shaped by the media.

The Following Are Five Things Jeff Says AREN’T True:

1. Anyone who works hard enough in America will have a great life. And if you don’t have a great life, then you lack the will, integrity or intelligence to succeed.

2. The poor are unemployed.

3. Poor equals black.

4. The poor refuse to work.

5. Education necessarily remedies poverty.

Any of those challenge the messages you hear circulating in our culture? To break down these ideas further, and explore how some of these ideas might contribute to the ease in which we create “those people” categories in our lives, read Jeff’s recent post, Lies of Plutocracy.