The Upper-Class Bias of the 2016 Election Issues | C. Nicole Mason

source: Big Think    2016年9月30日
Has the oldest problem in the book become taboo again? C. Nicole Mason expresses concern over a nation-wide moral failure that is leaving the U.S.'s most vulnerable to struggle in silence. Mason's latest book is "Born Bright: A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America" (http://goo.gl/AOsgVz).
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/c-nicole-m...

Transcript - The issue I see in the election right now is that we’re not having the conversations that matter to people and families across the country. We have moved so far away from the bread and butter issues that families want to talk about. So we haven’t heard a lot about poverty. We haven’t heard a lot in this election about bringing and making sure that we have a strong social safety net not only for low income families but for middle class families who are still fragile or straddling between being financially secure and close to the edge in terms of falling into poverty. And we’re just not having those conversations. We’re talking about things that matter but when we talk about building a society where all people have a fair shot we’re not talking about the issues that will make the difference for them.
We don’t talk a lot about white poverty and I think we should because I think if we talked a lot more about the way poverty impacts different groups I think we would not see it as an issue that’s out there and doesn’t impact me or it’s a black issue or a Latino issue. We would see it as an issue of lack and people not having the resources that they need to be able to live a quality and a productive life. What we know though is that black and Latino people are more likely to live in poverty and white people are also poor. But we’re not, again we’re not talking about those conversations. And we’re not even writing about those conversations so when we’re not talking about rural communities and rural whites. Those people are invisible in media and culture when we talk about poverty. And so until we can really wrap our minds around the magnitude of who’s living in poverty and what poverty – the face of poverty and what it really looks like we’re not really going to be able to make policies that will reach the people who are really impacted or affected by it. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/E6IFzK.