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[“The charity model we live with today has origins in Christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven. It is based on a moral hierarchy of wealth—the idea that rich people are inherently better and more moral than poor people, which is why they deserve to be on top. Not surprisingly, the charity model promotes the idea that most poverty is a result of laziness or immorality and that only the poor people who can prove their moral worth deserve help.
Contemporary charity comes with eligibility requirements such as sobriety, piety, curfews, participation in job training or parenting courses, cooperation with the police, a lawful immigration status, or identifying the paternity of children. In charity programs, social workers, health care providers, teachers, clergy, lawyers, and government workers determine which poor people deserve help. Their methods of deciding who is deserving, and even the rules they enforce, usually promote racist and sexist tropes, such as the idea that poor women of color and immigrant women have too many children, or that Black families are dysfunctional, or that Indigenous children are better off separated from their families and communities, or that people are poor because of drug use.
We can see examples in government policy, like the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs (TANF), which impose “family caps” in fourteen states. These laws restrict poor families from receiving additional benefits when they have a new child. For example, in Massachusetts, a single parent with two children receives a measly $578 in TANF benefits each month. But if a second child is born while the family is already receiving TANF, that child is ineligible, and the family receives $100 less per month, for a grant of $478. This policy emerges from the racist, sexist idea that poor women, especially women of color and immigrant women, should be discouraged from having children, and the faulty assumption that their poverty is somehow a result of being overly reproductive. We can also see harmful, moralizing eligibility requirements when people have to prove they are sober or under psychiatric care to qualify for housing programs.
Charity programs, both those run by the government and those run by nonprofits, are also set up in ways that make it stigmatizing and miserable to receive help. The humiliation and degradation of doing required work assignments to get benefits too small to live off of, or answering endless personal questions that treat the recipient like a fraud and a crook, are designed to make sure that people will accept any work at any exploitative wage or condition to avoid relying on public benefits. Charity makes rich people and corporations look generous while upholding and legitimizing the systems that concentrate wealth.”]
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid
“Around eight o'clock one summer morning I saw a low branch reaching out of the dark wall of buckthorn bushes, reaching into sunlight like a hand. One hand, extending from its dark body, splendid in its isolate illumination. A few minutes later it was in shadow, as if it had withdrawn, retreated into the indistinct tapestry of leaves and branches from which it had come. Of course I knew that it was the sun, not the branch, that moved, but reason does not destroy the image: that great hand dipping into the sunlight as if of its own volition, as if it had a need for warmth and beauty.”
— Lisel Mueller, from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, eds. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, & David Weiss (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995)
ocean beach, san francisco.
i think i’ve dreamt of this place long before i ever ended up here.
