The Mental Inheritance of Being Poor

I spent the first 18 years of my life living in public-housing projects. My childhood was as poor as it gets in America.

I’ve also seen what being poor is like in places like Mexico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. Once, on a volunteer trip to the Dominican Republic, I worked in a neighborhood where the houses didn’t even have floors, just packed dirt that turned to mud during a rainstorm. I’ve ridden through shantytowns outside of Mexico City where there was no plumbing or electricity.

But even in the U.S., growing up so poor that you have to rely on public assistance to survive is not a pleasant experience. We were on food stamps. We relied on a school food bank, the Salvation Army, and free breakfast and lunch at school. When school was out, my mom enrolled us in summer camps funded by HUD and the Housing Authority so that we still had meals.

I spell this out to show that I understand poverty from the inside. And I understand that poverty endures because it creates a mindset—a problem that can’t be fixed by just giving people money.