Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
4 - Lights, Camera, Vilification: the Narrative in Action
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I The Inconvenient Truth: Poverty is Real
- PART II Turning the screw on poor people: shame, stigma and cementing of a toxic poverty narrative
- PART III Flipping the Script: Challenging the Narrative war on the Poor
- Notes
- Selected Further Reading
- Index
Summary
“There was a time when our nation fought a War on Poverty; now, it seems, we are waging a war on the poor.”
Institute for Policy Studies, ‘The Souls of Poor Folk’ report, ‘auditing’ 50 years of poverty in America“Your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No, let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote – yeah, it must be their fucking fault.”
Iain Banks, novelist, 2013In 2015, the American satirist Stephen Colbert had a segment in his TV show, The Colbert Report, in response to a ‘study’ from the US-based right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation. It was a master class in exposing and simultaneously skewering the common narrative such think tanks propagate and which America's poorest must contend with day in, day out: that they are a throng of grubby layabouts living it large off the state in a house full of luxury goods.
Even without the comic visual devices, the script stands up as a lesson in how the ideological emperor behind the stereotypes of poorer people has no clothes. It went like this:
Colbert:
Jesus said the poor would always be with us. Well, it turns out Jesus does not know everything.
For more, Fox News's Stu Varney makes words come out of his mouth.
Varney:
When you picture poverty, you picture this: [Cut to video of people in a soup kitchen].
But what if I told you it really looks like – this: [Cut to a visual of a line of flat screen televisions].
A new report shows poor families in the United States are not what they used to be.
I’m just gonna give our viewers a quick run through of what items poor families in America have.
• 99 per cent of them have a refrigerator;
• 81 per cent have a microwave.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Shame GameOverturning the Toxic Poverty Narrative, pp. 129 - 150Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020