In general, children from low-income families are at risk of being failed by schools because of the erroneous belief that their parents lack ambition for them. A focus on the need for aspirations is widely cited as necessary for closing the achievement gap between marginalized and privileged people. Yet, in environments where students may not see themselves represented in person or on the page, what exactly are they aspiring to? Who sets those standards, and are they achievable in the wider world without culturally sensitive and competent teachers?
It’s not enough for feminism to advocate for educational access; it must also push to make education valuable for all. Quality as well as quantity matter a great deal. It does students no good to be able to go to school if their school is a place where they can be abused and traumatized with impunity by the administration. Challenging the internalized biases that allow the majority white female staff to feel comfortable utilizing police as a weapon against minors in lieu of actual classroom control is necessary to end the school-to-prison pipeline.
We know that sometimes teachers are the bullies; we know that students of color have reported being disciplined for everything from their hairstyles to their accents.
My early home life was tumultuous, and while I certainly never had the middle-class, white picket fence in the suburbs, I was fortunate enough that even when my family situation was deeply unstable, my situation at school was not. When I accidentally set the science lab on fire in eighth grade? Mrs. Archibald made me clean up the mess, but she didn’t call the police. When I cut class in the tenth grade to the point of nearly flunking out, I got lectures and interventions, not a trip to juvie. And later when I hung out in all the wrong places, as you do when you’re on the edge of taking the wrong turn, it was one of my teachers who told me that all I had to do was hang on until eighteen and then I could determine the course of my life. At every turn I was surrounded by Black teachers who saw me not only as someone with potential, but as someone who deserved a second chance. Whatever you may think of the kids you see on those videos of misconduct in schools, you should ask yourself, Why are they loud? Why are they angry? Where is their safe space? How has feminism empowered them or their communities? Has it helped those girls at all? Because ultimately, the ways that we are failing young women of color will come back to haunt their futures and ours.
HOUSING
I’ve talked about hunger in another chapter, but let’s talk for a moment about that other tent peg of poverty, the housing crisis. It’s easier in some ways to break it out into separate topics; the scope is less upsetting that way. But the reality is that rising housing costs and lower wages are pushing marginalized women further and further away from stable housing and from personal safety. Budgeting about 30 percent of your monthly income for rent or mortgage costs, as the prevailing wisdom dictates, sounds reasonable until you compare the housing you can afford for 30 percent of a minimum-wage salary with the housing available at that rate.
In theory, public housing and Section 8 programs should be closing the gap—that is, after all, their purpose. Yet families are back to having to share small units in defiance of occupancy codes because of costs. Tetris is a game meant to be played with blocks, not people. And the affordable housing crisis disproportionately impacts women. With the pay gap, women earn less, so they pay more proportionally, and that in turn means households supported by women are paying larger-than-average proportions of income toward rent. We know that the wage gap breaks down by gender and by race, so that white women earn less than white men, and that Black, Latina, and Indigenous women earn less than white women and men. Across a lifetime, this means much lower disposable income, with a higher proportion of earnings spent on housing and greater difficulty achieving financial security and independence.
This is especially clear when you look at people in abusive relationships. Although my story is that of a woman in a heterosexual relationship, the reality is that the housing crisis could affect anyone in an abusive dynamic. It is simply more likely to affect cis and trans women because, although gender isn’t binary, there is a financial penalty for presenting as feminine, because misogyny is a hell of a drug.
In 2002 as a newly single parent in college, I cried when I realized that I couldn’t afford to keep my apartment. Fortunately, I was able to move into public housing. But government cuts have so negatively impacted funding for housing assistance that Lakeside Terrace, the housing development I lived in for two years post-divorce, is gone now. Section 8 lists in some areas have been closed for decades, and even in areas where those vouchers are available, the rental subsidies for low-income renters have not kept pace with inflation. New properties aren’t being built to replace the old ones at nearly the promised rates, and in cities like Chicago the properties are simply sitting empty for years because of reams of red tape and the reality that the people most impacted don’t have the political power to effect change.
The housing crisis isn’t accidental. It’s a direct result of a series of decisions made in many cases by people who are well aware that marginalized people will bear the consequences of those decisions. I was lucky enough to leave my bad relationship when more of these necessary programs still existed. But for many, even if they can leave safely, they can’t afford to stay gone. Finding affordable housing isn’t just an issue in the hood; even in rural areas, where housing costs are substantially lower than they would be in the nearest urban center, there is a lack of affordable housing. But the sad reality is that lower costs of living go hand in hand with lower income for many in rural areas. Much like conditions for the urban working poor, limited economic opportunities are available for those living and working in depressed areas. For many the housing that they have is unfit for human habitation, but they have no other options. They can complain to absent or nonexistent landlords or the nearest agency, but they run the risk of losing their lease and not being able to secure a new one. Or that landlords will seek an eviction as retaliation. Landlords of that type also continue to let the property deteriorate until it is convenient for them to either make basic repairs or sell the property off.
Low-quality or dangerous housing conditions aren’t an anomaly in urban or rural areas. Those who aren’t able to save their homes or find new affordable homes are often forced to double up with family members in order to avoid outright homelessness. And unlike with those who end up on the street, that level of homelessness is invisible because people with someplace to go (however tenuous) aren’t always counted in the statistics. Many homeless relief programs won’t make someone a priority unless they are living in a car, on the street, or someplace else deemed completely unfit.
Matthew Desmond’s research for his Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the long-term impact of eviction as a cause of poverty, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, showed that eviction cases in 2016 were filed at the rate of four per minute. As a result of his research, he partnered with Princeton University to create the Eviction Lab, the first nationwide database tracking evictions. Using it, we can see how many people are struggling to stay housed, but even that research, as robust as it is, doesn’t allow for a clear picture of how many women have been impacted.