The Injustice of Place

Starred review from June 5, 2023
Edin and Shaefer (coauthors, $2 a Day, and, respectively, a sociologist and University of Michigan public policy professor) team up with public affairs scholar Nelson (Doing the Best I Can) to reframe the history of poverty in the U.S. in this essential study. Ranking communities on the basis of income, birth weights, life expectancy, and intergenerational mobility, they find that the country’s most disadvantaged areas are rural ones—Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Tobacco Belt in South Carolina, and south Texas. The authors argue that from the 18th through the 20th centuries these regions were intentionally treated by government policy as “internal colonies.” With economies based on resource extraction (coal, timber, cotton, etc.) and usually populated by majority people of color, these were places where labor was systematically exploited, elites controlled both local and state governments, and public services were meager. According to the authors, these regions “still retain, to a greater or lesser degree, features of the internal colonies they once were,” because of inherited problems such as local government corruption, lack of social infrastructure, and structural racism. This eye-opening account provides a powerful lens with which to view contemporary inequality in America.

July 1, 2023
In this innovative study of American poverty, a team of sociologists and public policy experts relay their data-driven approach to assessing the poorest places (as opposed to people) in the United States. Comparing poverty rates, health indicators (low birth weight, life expectancy), and intergenerational movement in 3,000 counties and 500 cities, they report that the most disadvantaged places today (including Native American tribal land) are the product of historic structural inequity and exploitation. They use statistics, anecdotes, personal profiles, family histories, and accessible analysis to relay their findings. Some are deeply disturbing: current high poverty areas overlap with those on ninteenth-century maps showing large concentrations of enslaved persons. Research shows formerly thriving communities negatively affected by automation and inexpensive imports from overseas, and areas suffering long-term damage from the Civil War, forced Native American resettlement, WWII internment camps, and NAFTA. Proposed solutions include expanding access to education and mobility, strengthening social infrastructure, reinvesting in local manufacturing, and eliminating local political corruption. Ultimately, their research shows that any plan to remedy financial inequity must involve eradicating racial injustice.

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August 4, 2023

In this well-researched title, authors Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, and Timothy J. Nelson, all top experts on the subject of poverty, find that the most economically disadvantaged populations in the U.S. are in the areas of Appalachia, the Hispanic districts in South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt. Of the 100 most impoverished places in the country, only 12 are cities, while the majority are rural. This book indicates that the poorest communities all suffer from separate and highly unequal schooling and crumbling physical and social infrastructures. Further exasperating this situation is a wide swath of entrenched political corruption in these places, which has prevented any remedial legislation from being enacted, and a backlash, sometimes violent, against basic civil rights. Revolts against these conditions began in the early years of the Great Depression. The battle continued and finally inspired Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, a set of programs designed to help impoverished Americans. Edin, Shaefer, and Nelson offer an eye-opening view of the deeply entrenched status of poverty today. VERDICT One of the most thoroughly researched portraits to date of poverty in often forgotten and neglected areas of the United States. Purchase for behavioral and social science collections.--Claude Ury

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2023
Disturbing analysis of the persistent, surprising connection between poverty and place. Edin, Shaefer, and Nelson developed this ambitious, revealing project in a roundabout way, following a prior collaboration examining family-centered poverty (Edin and Shaefer's $2.00 a Day): "We wondered: Why were so few of our colleagues studying whole communities? Why weren't we?" In 2019, they started embedding researchers to conduct immersive interviews in "Appalachia, South Texas, and the vast southern Cotton Belt running across seven states." The isolation of the pandemic also turned the authors toward historical research, and a post-pandemic, 14-state "road trip" to see these places underscored the complexity encoded in unraveling narratives of "place-based disadvantage." The problem persists, they argue, because of long-term, secretive webs of corporate control, rooted in sudden innovations in resource extraction that immediately require exploitation of mass human labor. "In place after place," they write, "we discovered astonishing stories about the industries that fueled the rise of our nation, the workers who sustained them, and the histories of human suffering they wrought." Unsurprisingly, "while some of these were majority-white, many, indeed most, were rural communities of color." The authors vividly establish narrative and place by organizing the discussion into key subtopics, including the persistence of violence and political corruption. Despite this bleak focus on the human consequences in lived environments, they muster some optimism, talking to activist residents and offering suggestions, including an end to separate but unequal schooling and a recommitment to addressing violence and isolation via social mobility and restoration of public spaces. The collaborative writing is polished and clear, blending dynamic narrative detail and well-organized argument along with the plaintive voices of interviewees. "Great wealth was extracted from these regions in the form of raw materials that fueled not only national but global markets," write the authors. "Yet from the start, these were also the places in the nation with the most inequality, severe poverty, ill health, and limited mobility." A powerful, alarming portrayal of how poverty remains entrenched in unfairly forgotten places across America.

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