America's Shame: Women and Children in Shelter and the Degradation of Family Roles
America's Shame: Women and Children in Shelter and the Degradation of Family Roles
Synopsis
Excerpt
This book is written with what Max Weber called verstehen; that is, with a Weberian understanding or empathy, especially for children living in poverty. It is written for children who live in unstable economic circumstances and cannot rely on overwhelmed parents for physical safety and emotional security. It is written for children who cannot trust a system that declares the family to be sacrosanct and yet continues to erode efforts to save children. Children are betrayed twice in this society--first by their primary caretakers and then by policy makers. Despite an emerging consciousness that children whose primary needs go unmet are likely to repeat the cycle of poverty, societal responses to the children are becoming weaker. Yet what happens to poor children eventually affects all children.
Nowhere in this book will the reader find the word homeless (except in works cited). The term denies collective responsibility for the lack of affordable housing and for the lack of employment that pays sufficiently for a family to afford housing. If I could hope to accomplish one thing with this book, it would be to abolish the classification or labeling as homeless of those who are without homes. The use of labels depersonalizes a heterogeneous popula-