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Chris Arnade - Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

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Chris Arnade Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

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Candid, empathetic portraits of silenced men, women, and children. --Kirkus
Widely acclaimed photographer and writer Chris Arnade shines new light on Americas poor, drug-addicted, and forgotten--both urban and rural, blue state and red state--and indicts the elitists whove left them behind.
Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, Walker Evans in the 1930s, or Michael Harrington in the 1960s, Chris Arnade bares the reality of our current class divide in stark pictures and unforgettable true stories. Arnades raw, deeply reported accounts cut through todays clickbait media headlines and indict the elitists who misunderstood poverty and addiction in America for decades.
After abandoning his Wall Street career, Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonalds. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography.
The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls Americas Back Row--those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Rows values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as nave.
As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God. This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people whove been left behind.

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Dignity Seeking Respect in Back Row America - photo 1
SENTINEL An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom - photo 2
SENTINEL An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom - photo 3

SENTINEL An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom - photo 4

SENTINEL

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright 2019 by Chris Arnade Penguin supports copyright Copyright fuels - photo 5

Copyright 2019 by Chris Arnade

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 9780525534730 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780525534747 (ebook)

CREATIVE DIRECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY CHAPTERS BY CHRISTOPHER SERGIO

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Cover design: Christopher Sergio

Cover photograph: Chris Arnade

Version_2

To Marjorie and Wolfgang

CONTENTS
AUTHORS NOTE

When interviewing people for this book, I took notes on paper but did not record the conversations. How exact the notes were depended on the situation. On the streets, I jotted down what I could on the spot and filled in the rest later, usually just moments after while my memory was fresh. Inside churches or McDonalds or peoples homes, I was able to take more extensive immediate notes.

I tried to record as accurately as possible each persons words, and if they said something particularly important, I asked them to repeat it to make sure I got the exact phrasing. At the end of each day I typed my notes into my computer, expanding on them and recording my own observations.

Conversations re-created here in the book are quoted as exactly as possible, though they may not be verbatim, since I edited them for clarity.

Due to the sensitive nature of many of the conversations or the precariousness of interviewees circumstances, I have changed the names and identifying details of some of the people I interviewed. For those in Hunts Point about whom Ive already written, I use the street names I used in those pieces.

When those I interviewed requested assistance, I did my best to provide it. Usually this meant buying them a meal at McDonalds, a few cigarettes, or a sandwich at the deli. If they asked instead for outright cash, I either declined or gave them five or ten dollars. In extreme cases, I offered to bring someone to detox or rehab. My rule was to help people I was writing about the same way I would have helped them had I not been writing about them.

The people in this book deserve more than a meal at McDonalds or a fiver or an hour using my computer, though. I am donating part of my proceeds from this book to groups working with addiction and homelessness, as well as setting aside money, to be administered by a third party, to help with housing, food, or medicine for those featured in the book and those I met during my trips.

Introduction

I first walked into the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx because I was told not to. I was told it was too dangerous, too poor, and that I was too white. I was told nobody goes there for anything other than drugs and prostitutes. The people directly telling me this were my colleagues (other bankers), my neighbors (other wealthy Brooklynites), and my friends (other academics). All, like me, successful, well-educated people who had opinions on the Bronx but had never really been there.

It was 2011, and I was in my eighteenth year as a Wall Street bond trader. My workdays were spent sitting behind a wall of computers, gambling on flashing numbers, in a downtown Manhattan trading floor filled with hundreds of others doing exactly the same thing. My home life was spent in a large Brooklyn apartment, in a neighborhood filled with other successful people.

I wasnt in the mood for listening to anyone, especially other bankers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadnt been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending the company I worked for, Citibank, into a spiral stopped only by a government bailout. I had just seen where ourmy own includedhubris had taken us and what it had cost the country. Not that it had actually cost us bankers, or my neighbors, much of anything.

I had always taken long walks, sometimes as long as fifteen miles, to explore and reduce stress, but now the walks began to evolve. Rather than walk with some plan to walk the entire length of Broadway, or along the length of a subway line, I started walking the less seen parts of New York City, the parts people claimed were unsafe or uninteresting, walking with no goal other than eventually getting home. Along the walk I talked to whoever talked to me, and I let their suggestions, not my instincts and maps, navigate me. I also used my camera to take portraits of those I met, and I became more and more drawn to the stories people inevitably wanted to share about their life.

The walks, the portraits, the stories I heard, the places they took me, became a process of learning in a different kind of way. Not from textbooks, or statistics, or spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations, or classrooms, or speeches, or documentariesbut from people.

What I started seeing, and learning, was just how cloistered and privileged my world was and how narrow and selfish I was. Not just in how I lived but in what and how I thought.

This was a slow and shocking revelation to me, one I kept trying to fight. I certainly already knew I was privileged. I had a PhD in theoretical physics. I worked as a bond trader at a big Wall Street firm. I lived in the best part of Brooklyn. I sent my kids to private school. But like most successful and well-educated people, especially those in NYC, I considered myself open-minded, considered, and reflective about my privilege. I read three papers daily, I watched documentaries on our social problems, and I voted for and supported policies that I felt recognized and addressed my privilege. I gave money and time to charities that focused on poverty and injustice. I understood I was selfish, but I rationalized. Arent we all selfish? Besides, I am far less selfish than others, look at how I vote (progressive), what I believe in (equality), and who my colleagues are (people of all races from all places).

I also considered myself to be different from those immediately around me. I hadnt grown up wealthy. I had grown up in a tiny working-class southern town. Sure, my father was a professor of international relations, my mother a librarian, but we didnt have much money, certainly not by the standards of the NYC I was now part of. I hadnt gone to boarding schools, or private high schools, and then to Harvard or Yale. I went to the local public high school, and then to the state college, paid for by money I had made working jobs since I was thirteen. Of course, I had ended up getting a PhD in theoretical physics from Johns Hopkins. But, I told myself, that is physicsit is rational and erudite. That is different. It isnt Harvard Business School.

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