Pueblo has six jails and prisons in its fifty-four square mile area. Neighboring Florence, Colorado has four prisons, including the infamous ADX Supermax facility, which houses many of the country’s most dangerous and high-profile inmates. Incarceration in this part of the country was big business. “There’s just this poverty mindset in Pueblo,” said one local pastor as we walked through town together. He was explaining some of the troubles the town faced. “There’s a generational gang problem here. They think that’s the only thing to do here, and it’s not true.” The pastor himself had once been close to counting himself among the many inmates in Pueblo. “As a child, I was abused sexually, mentally, and physically. My parents divorced. There were things that happened that I didn’t know how to deal with. I started using drugs, alcohol—anything I could get my hands on.” His story of trauma is, unfortunately, all too common across this country. Young people go through devastating experiences and are left to cope with the consequences on their own. Frightened and alone, not
knowing where to turn for help, they resort to substances to numb the pain and seek safety and protection from gangs. “It was just a lot of pain,” he shared, fighting back his tears. Pueblo was originally a steel town that attracted immigrants because of the employment opportunities. The city was diverse, safe, and prosperous. When the steel mill closed, it devastated the local economy. Automation is now a buzzword, with many predicting that millions of jobs will disappear across the country, potentially providing a death blow to the middle-class. Politicians and economists talk about this as if it’s some future dystopia we must prevent. But for Americans in places like Pueblo, Colorado, Gary, Indiana, or Erie, Pennsylvania, automation struck decades ago. Initially, the existing factories got smaller as machines could take on more and more tasks. What once required an entire city now only needed a few hundred employees. Ultimately, the entire factory was shipped off to China or Mexico, but the number of jobs had been declining for years. These rapid changes are difficult for any society to cope with. However, when we allow people to fall to absolutely nothing, giving them no support as they try to learn a new skill, relocate, or shift to a service-based economy, terrible things happen. Pueblo is now often ranked as the most dangerous metro areas in Colorado. Instead of finding ways to revamp the economy, we’ve invested in prisons. Americans somehow believe putting poor people in some of the most appalling cages in the world will somehow make them safe. Those people are subjected to rape, assault, solitary confinement, infestations, disease, murder, and more. We spend billions of dollars to keep people in cages, subjecting them to trauma that would melt the strongest of minds—then let them out. We make it impossible for them to get jobs due to their prior convictions, and we’re surprised when they revert back to crime. We live in a carceral society founded on punishing marginalized groups of people, including the poor and racial minorities. Many of the
CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 109 laws that’ve been invented in our society criminalize behaviors associated with those marginalized groups. The system that exists is biased against poor people. Consider what happens when someone breaks the law. They’re charged a fine or must pay money to resolve the matter. If they’re arrested and given the option of being released on bail, they must also pay a sum of money. If they pay their dues by serving time for an offense and are released from prison, they carry a criminal record, which negatively affects their ability to obtain future employment. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. No country has ever put a larger percentage of its population in cages. There are decades’ worth of research that consistently shows why prison isn’t an effective way to rehabilitate people. So how do we prevent people from ending up in prison? The obvious answer is to invest in people. Educate young people, teach them social and work skills, make them feel loved and help them belong. That’s what the pastor decided to do. “We’ve all gone through something. We’ve all had some kind of pain, some kind of hurt, some kind of habit that was just devastating. But you don’t have to live there. We give the tools to help change mindsets.” His community’s ministry has the slogan: “Hope grows here.” The pastor shared his story of hope with me. While homeless and sleeping on the streets, someone came up to the pastor and asked him if he’d like some help. “What do I have to do for it?” he asked, cold, homeless, and deep into his addiction. “Start building a relationship with Jesus.” He liked how that sounded. At that point, he didn’t have many relationships. And if all he had to do was pretend to have a relationship with someone and that meant getting off the streets, he could handle that. His life didn’t change all at once. He relapsed, he struggled, he cried. But slowly, he started to turn his life around until one day, he was asked to share his story of recovery at one of the local prisons.
“I started telling those guys what I’d gone through,” the pastor said. He’d been invited to participate in a program designed to help inmates avoid falling back into a life of crime. “My story was similar to the stories of many others in that prison. I couldn’t understand how I wasn’t in prison with them.” When you grow up in poor neighborhoods, luck is often the only difference between ending up dead, in jail, or somehow making it out. “When I left the prison that day, I just started balling. Crying like a baby,” he went on. “I realized why I’d gone through all the pain and suffering I’d been through. It was for that moment. It was so I could help other people see that there is hope.” I knew exactly what he meant. There’s a spiritual lightbulb that goes on when you finally see your life’s work in front of you. For me, that moment happened on Skid Row. I saw exactly how I’d be able to help the world end poverty, and I knew why I’d gone through all that I had in my life. Ifelt my divine calling. My life’s experiences had shaped me in a way that made me perfect for this role; it was no coincidence. “That’s what we want to give the people of Pueblo. We want them to know there’s hope, and his name is Jesus Christ,” the pastor said. Our pain doesn’t have to happen in vain. If we turn our suffering into strength for others, we have the power to heal. I’m not one to argue with people about the name or nature of God. When I met people like this pastor, I knew we were both following our intuitive guides. For some things in life, there’s no explaining it with words. You have to feel the thing to know it, but once you do, you’ll know. America is changing, and in no place is that more evident than in Maine. Statistically speaking, it’s the whitest state in the country. However, the US census data shows that this is rapidly changing. Immigrants don’t typically have much of a choice about where they
CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 111 end up when they’re allowed into the US. They’re assigned to places and accept what they get. Eventually, as more immigrants end up in a particular area, more permanent communities start to form. “Why do you think a nation of immigrants now hates immigrants?” I asked a young valedictorian whose parents immigrated to America from Vietnam when she was five. “That’s a hard question,” she answered. Her father worked two jobs, one in delivery, a second making glass. Her mother worked in the nail salon industry. Although she lived in the whitest state, she attended one of the most diverse schools in the northeast, and it showed. She launched an anti- racism website to help people learn about generational wealth, systemic racism, voting, policy, and other ways to reframe the narrative around immigrants and their stories. “One of the best ways to learn is through talking to people,” she said. She shared the stories of her classmates on her website. She humanized the immigrant struggle, noting that, “It comes back to education and integrating people more.” Despite being a brilliant student and winning the Maine State Science Fair for her work on removing arsenic from drinking water using carbon nanotubes, she feels hate from fellow Americans. “There are people who don’t want me here, and people who don’t want other people like me here.” I wondered, if we don’t want her in our country, then who do we want here? She was on her way to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall. “I saw a sign on the train station that said, ‘Fuck Asians,’ and it was a really scary moment.” The hatred is about fear. As much as America likes to talk about being number one, we feel threatened and afraid of hard-working immigrants. We all want to have some kind of guarantee that we get to stay where we are on the economic ladder. We worry about if, as the world becomes more globalized, we’ll still be able to compete. Will ‘my group’ still be on top? If a new group takes over, will they treat us as badly as we treated
them? That change is inevitable. Maine went from being over ninty-five percent white in 2010 down to ninty percent in 2020. That trend will continue. White Americans have gone from eighty percent of the population in 1980 down to sixty percent today. The racial identity that the American system of economic oppression was built upon is dying. People are migrating, and people are having mixed-race children. That’s likely the best thing that could happen for poor white Americans. Race has kept them poor for hundreds of years, as they accepted much less than would be expected for individuals living in a wealthy nation, all because they wanted nothing more than to be ranked above people of color. They were kept poor because of this promise, and now, even the promise of white supremacy has been taken away. That can be scary. But it doesn’t have to be. People like the young lady from Maine show that the next generation has no desire to recreate the injustices of the past. Students from her high school speak fifty different maternal languages and come from more than thirty countries on five different continents. They have their issues, but they all live together peacefully. We fear diversity and change because most of us have grown up in a system based on the exploitation and abuse of those at the bottom. We say we hate the poor, but what we really fear is the possibility that we may one day become that bottom group ourselves. There’s no need to fear that anymore—because it has already happened. The middle-class in America has collapsed, and it’s up to us what kind of new system we build. “Why is there such segregation? Why is there such hatred from a country that’s supposed to celebrate diversity? I think it stems from this idea of wanting power,” she finally replied. Wealth is power in a capitalist society. We dance around the topic to placate the huddled masses, inappropriately fixating on race, religion, and national origin to distract us from the inexplicable injustices of poverty. The only group that benefits from a system without economic mobility,
CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 113 is the tiny group that has fixed itself at the top. Race has been such a useful tool of oppression because it fooled white Americans into thinking they were a part of the elite. In reality, the elite view them as trash. “Where is my white privilege?” asked one poor Mainer. Where indeed, I thought. Contrary to popular belief, racism in America was designed to keep the white man down. The horrific effects of racism on people of color remain an intentional side-effect. Many of the pilgrims were “poor vagrants, criminals, and rebels against the state,” forced to migrate to the Americas and work for free. Poor children found living on the streets of England were regularly rounded up, forced into slavery, and shipped over to the colonies in America. The ruling classes referred to these poor white citizens as masterless men and waste persons, complaining of the crime and filth caused by these so-called worthless human beings. The Elizabethan Poor Laws made it illegal to be poor and unemployed, so any child could be captured from the slums and enslaved as an “apprentice” or “indentured servant.” They were beaten, raped, forced to work, and murdered without consequence. When those poor whites arrived in the Americas, their masters continued those ruthless traditions. Whenever they got the chance, the white slaves and their non-white counterparts would run away. The vast size of the Americas, combined with the extreme ethnic and linguistic diversity, made it impossible to tell who was a runaway slave and who wasn’t. Prosperous communities of former slaves of all ethnic and religious backgrounds emerged across the New World. It was a great thing for runaway slaves, but not so great for the “landowners” hoping to benefit from forced labor. After yet another rebellion where a coalition of ethnic groups fought to toss off the chains of colonial oppression, the ruling elite invented race to stabilize the system. Skin color of course existed before that, but there were no ideas of united races. An individual was Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Akan, Mohawk, Yoruba, etc. In the new system, however, those of African descent were placed at the very bottom of society to pacify
white slaves who made up the majority of the forced laborers. White slaves continued living in horrid conditions but had someone to look down upon. Those ruling classes went on to build incredible wealth while white laborers remained, and still remain, extremely poor. Rather than improving life for poor white laborers, all the ruling classes had to do to keep poor white people pacified and working hard was treat black people worse and worse. That sadistic “schadenfreude” is all poor white Americans have to show for their complicity in systemic racism. By shifting the narrative to race, wealthy whites successfully convinced poor whites that so long as the people at the top of society were exclusively white, then life was good. That, of course, wasn’t true. Poor white Americans toiled right next to slaves for hundreds of years. As industrial towns began to emerge, poor white laborers lived in the same dilapidated shacks as poor blacks. Whites were given preferential treatment but remained extremely poor relative to the wealth that existed in the United States. White Americans remain some of the poorest people in the rich world. Twenty million non-Hispanic white Americans live in poverty, making up more than half of the poor population in the country. Adult white Americans have an incarceration rate of six hundred seventy-eight per one hundred thousand. That means if white American men were their own country, they’d have the highest percentage of their population in cages compared to any other country in the world. A white man in America is four point five times more likely to be in jail than a man in the United Kingdom, and ten times more likely to be in jail than a man in Japan. Poor white Americans even get shot and killed by the police officers they love so much. Those officers then get no prison time and keep their pension because no one cares if you kill a poor white person. How could American white men, who absolutely love freedom, be okay with being incarcerated this much? Racism. Black and Hispanic Americans are incarcerated even more, therefore pulling the wool over the eyes of white
CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 115 men about their gross lack of freedom. A white child in the United States is four times more likely to live in poverty than a child in Denmark. How could Americans be okay with this? Again, racism. They aren’t as poor as black and Hispanic Americans, so they’re happy with their poverty. It’s poor white Americans that’ve been had, took, hoodwinked, and bamboozled. Race was not, and is not, designed to oppress poor minorities. No, minorities are just collateral damage in the war by rich white people on poor white people. Poor white people are openly called deplorables, white trash, and hillbillies. They’re publicly ridiculed as “poor, illiterate, and strung out.” “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes. You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.” —REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. The real struggle is for money. So many white Americans truly believe we’re in a post-racial society because they can’t imagine how the lives they’re living can be called “privileged.” The white privilege they’ve been promised is a centuries-old lie. They’ll remain poor and oppressed until they wake up and realize who is keeping them down. White privilege is an economic toll on an increasingly poor white society. The identifying feature of a billionaire is wealth, not whiteness. Until working-class white Americans realize this, they’ll sheepishly continue oppressing themselves with racism. We can easily eliminate poverty in the United States as soon as we help poor white America take the shackles off their minds.
The poverty that exists in the United States, the richest country the world has ever seen, is devastating. We have large numbers of families living without access to clean water, indoor plumbing, or electricity. We have people living in the streets, or close to it, in just about every state. The poor are criminalized and incarcerated. The school systems are underfunded. They work two or three jobs and still don’t make enough money to afford the basics. Yet everywhere I went, I still saw brilliance. Someone would always take me on a tour of their community and point out all the opportunities. Where I saw a lack of healthy food options, they saw a new food truck business that focused on selling healthy, delicious meals. In environments with fifty percent poverty rates, I met successful entrepreneurs. With pride, they’d show me their new tire business or their booming tipi company. Then, after showing me what they’d already accomplished, they’d walk me through their plans for the ten other businesses they were ready to start but didn’t have the capital to launch. I met children who wanted to be doctors, teachers, police officers, and singers. When I became old enough, I left my community as fast as I could. On my tour across the country, I met a sampling of all the people who stayed. Some never left, some explored the world and came back. They were all starving for change, they were all overworked, but they were all alive with hope. They refused to let the people in their communities be tossed aside, so they woke up every single day and fought. And they mostly do it with a smile. The problems that exist in poor communities are problems we’ve already solved, from a technical perspective, as a species. The talent is there, the will to work is too, so all we need to add is the capital and resources. In business, we talk about the low-hanging fruit principle. The term is used to describe the most attainable goals and objectives. Ending
CHAPTER 9: THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN | 117 poverty is not some impossible ideal—it’s the very definition of low- hanging fruit. There will be challenges for sure. In the tech world, it’s now a regular occurrence to see a twenty-something CEO with no real-world experience receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Investors aren’t afraid because they know that with the right advisors, team members, and general support, inexperienced leaders can still build billion-dollar businesses. If we can do that, we can take entrepreneurs in low-income communities and give them the guidance and assistance they need to build thriving companies in their neighborhoods, too.