(LAUGH) She would try to kill them every week. Andrea Elliott: Can I delve into that for a second? Her city is paved over theirs. Two sweeping sycamores shade the entrance, where smokers linger under brick arches. She is a child of New York City. How did you feel, you know, about the pipe that's leaking?" Life has been anything but easy for 20-year-old Dasani Coates. So to what extent did Dasani show agency within this horrible setting? In Fort Greene alone, in that first decade, we saw the portion of white residents jump up by 80%. But the other part is agency. This week, an expansion of her reporting comes out within the pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.. Despite the circumstances, Dasani radiated with potential. And welcome to Why Is This Happening? And There Are No Children Here, which takes place in what's called Henry Horner Homes, which is in the west side of Chicago right by what is now called the United Center, which is where the Bulls play. IE 11 is not supported. Chris Hayes: You know, the U.S., if you go back to de Tocqueville and before that, the Declaration and the founders, you know, they're very big (LAUGH) on civic equality. You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. And that's just the truth. Slipping out from her covers, Dasani goes to the window. St. Patty's Day, green and white. Day after day, they step through a metal detector as security guards search their bags, taking anything that could be used as a weapon a bottle of bleach, a can of Campbells soup. Offering a rare look into how homelessness directs the course of a life, New York Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott was allowed to follow Dasani's family for almost 10 years. Invisible Child They did go through plenty of cycles of trying to fix themselves. A fascinating, sort of, strange (UNINTEL) generous institution in a lot of ways. This is the place where people go to be free. I was comfortable with that as a general notion of what I should be doing with my work, because I think that is our job as journalists. And this ultimately wound up in the children being removed in October of 2015, about ten months into Dasani's time at Hershey. It happens because there's a lot of thought and even theory, I think, put into the practice. They follow media carefully. The difference is in resources. How an immersionist held up the story of one homeless Chris Hayes: I want to, sort of, take a step back because I want to continue with what you talk about as, sort of, these forces and the disintegration of the family and also track through where Dasani goes from where she was when she's 11. Family was everything for them. It's why do so many not? Dasani's family of ten lives in one room of the Auburn Family Residence, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. You find her outside this shelter. And these bubbles get, sort of, smaller and smaller, in which people are increasingly removed from these different strata of American life. There definitely are upsides. Right outside is a communal bathroom with a large industrial tub. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. You can tell that story, as we have on the podcast, about the, sort of, crunched middle class, folks who want to afford college and can't. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. She wanted to create this fortress, in a way. Used purple Uggs and Patagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans. She calls him Daddy. Dasani opens a heavy metal door, stepping into the dark corridor. Now the bottle must be heated. I want people to read the book, which is gonna do a better job of this all because it's so, sort of, like, finely crafted. You know, she just knew this other world was there and it existed and it did not include her. Chanel. And it also made her indispensable to her parents, which this was a real tension from the very beginning. Dasani Coates photographed in September last year. We suffocate them with the salt!. She was 11 years old. And a lot of things then happen after that. This focus on language, this focus on speaking a certain way and dressing a certain way made her feel like her own family culture home was being rejected. She will focus in class and mind her manners in the schoolyard. The west side of Chicago is predominantly Black and Latino and very poor. Some places are more felt than seen the place of homelessness, the place of sisterhood, the place of a mother-child bond that nothing can break. Her siblings will soon be scrambling to get dressed and make their beds before running to the cafeteria to beat the line. Andrea Elliott: This is a work in progress. No one on the block can outpace Dasani. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. (LAUGH) And the market produces massively too little affordable housing, which is in some ways part of the story of Dasani and her family, which is the city doesn't have enough affordable housing. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. Then they will head outside, into the bright light of morning. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and And I just spent so much time with this family and that continues to be the case. Actually, I'd had some opportunities, but I was never in love with a story like this one. She had seven siblings. But, of course, there's also the story of poverty, which has been a durable feature of American life for a very long time. The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. Child Where is Dasani now? She was an amazing ethnographer and she and I had many conversations about what she called the asymmetry of power, that is this natural asymmetry that's built into any academic subject, reporter subject relationship. When braces are the stuff of fantasy, straight teeth are a lottery win. What happens when trying to escape poverty means separating from your family at 13? She says, "I would love to meet," you know, anyone who accuses her of being a quote, unquote welfare queen. And that would chase off the hunger faster. She loves being first the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to win a fight, the first to make the honour roll. And one of the things that I found interesting is that one of the advantages to being within such close proximity to wealthy people is that people would drop off donations at the shelter. And I think showing the dignity within these conditions is part of that other lens. Andrea Elliott: I met Dasani while I was standing outside of Auburn Family Residence, which is a city run, decrepit shelter, one of two city run shelters that were notorious for the conditions that children were forced to live in with their families. She doesn't want to have to leave. It's, first of all, the trust, which continues to exist and is something I think people should support. Sometimes it'll say, like, "Happy birthday, Jay Z," or, you know. She knew she had to help get her siblings fed and dressed. She was invited to be a part of Bill de Blasio's inaugural ceremony. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. It starts as a investigation into what basically the lives of New York City's homeless school children look like, which is a shockingly large population, which we will talk about, and then migrates into a kind of ground level view of what being a poor kid in New York City looks like. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Dasani The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. But when you remove her from the family system, this was predictable that the family would struggle, because she was so essential to that. And I consider family to be Dasani's ultimate, sort of, system of survival. So she's taking some strides forward. He said, "Yes. I think that when you get deeper inside and when you start to really try your best to understand on a more intimate level what those conditions mean for the person that you're writing about, so you stop imposing your outsider lens, although it's always gonna be there and you must be aware of it, and you try to allow for a different perspective. Right? Yeah. Serena McMahonadapted it for the web. She was the second oldest, but technically, as far as they were all concerned, she was the boss of the siblings and a third parent, in a sense. And so she wanted a strong army of siblings. She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. Her eyes can travel into Manhattan, to the top of the Empire State Building, the first New York skyscraper to reach a hundred floors. She would help in all kinds of ways. But she was not at all that way with the mice. And then you have to think about how to address it. If danger comes, Dasani knows what to do. And so I did what I often do as a journalist is I thought, "You know, let me find a universal point of connection. How did you respond? Every once in a while, it would. And when she left, the family began to struggle, and for a variety of reasons, came under the scrutiny of the city's child protection agency. Random House, 2021. Serena McMahon Twitter Digital ProducerSerena McMahon was a digital producer for Here & Now. WebInvisible Child, highlights the life struggles of eleven-year-old Dasani Coates, a homeless child living with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Email withpod@gmail.com. And I could never see what the next turn would be. This family is a proud family. She likes being small because I can slip through things. She imagines herself with supergirl powers. You're gonna get out of your own lane and go into other worlds. They were-- they were eating the family's food and biting. She made leaps ahead in math. Had been the subject of tremendous amounts of redlining and disinvestment and panic peddling that had essentially chased white homeowners out. Only together have they learned to navigate povertys systems ones with names suggesting help. And yet, in cities, the fracturing happens within really close range. They just don't have a steady roof over their head. But I think she just experienced such an identity crisis and she felt so much guilt. Like, I would love to meet a woman who's willing to go through childbirth for just a few extra dollars on your food stamp benefits (LAUGH) that's not even gonna last the end of the month." And as prosperity rose for one group of people, poverty deepened for another, leaving Dasani to grow up true to her name in a novel kind of place. Andrea Elliott: We love the story of the kid who made it out. And the translator would translate and was actually showing this fly. It was incredibly confusing as a human being to go from their world back into mine on the Upper West Side in my rental with my kids who didn't have to worry about roaches. It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. This is typical of Dasani. Dasani would call it my spy pen. But I know that I tried very, very hard at every step to make sure it felt as authentic as possible to her, because there's a lot of descriptions of how she's thinking about things. Dasani hugs her mother Chanel, with her sister Nana on the left, 2013. o know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates to follow this childs life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. As Dasani grows up, she must contend with them all. So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. They wound up being placed at Auburn. 6. Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows reportedly was the longest ever published in the newspaper up to that time. To see Dasani is to see all the places of her life, from the corridors of school to the emergency rooms of hospitals to the crowded vestibules of family court and welfare. They will drop to the floor in silence. And in the very beginning, I was like, "Oh, I don't think I can hear this." In October of 2012, I was on the investigative desk of The New York Times. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. And even up until 2018 was the last study that I saw that looked at this, that looked at the city's own poverty measure, which takes into account things like food stamps and stuff, nearly half of New York City residents, even as late as 2018, were living near or below the poverty line in a city that is so defined by wealth. But nonetheless, my proposal was to focus on Dasani and on her siblings, on children. Nine years ago, my colleague Andrea Elliott set out to report a series of stories about what it was like to be a homeless child in New York City. Her siblings, she was informed, were placed in foster care. To know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates to follow this childs life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. So let's start with what was your beat at the time when you wrote the first story? It has more than a $17 billion endowment. And to her, that means doing both things keeping her family in her life while also taking strides forward, the journalist says. And about 2,000 kids go there. Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. So she knows what it's like to suddenly be the subject of a lot of people's attention. I wanted to, kind of, follow up (LAUGH) the book that I loved so much in the '80s by looking once again at the story of poor urban America through one child. She irons her clothes with a hair straightener. Her mother had grown up in a very different time. And, really, the difference is, like, the kind of safety nets, the kind of resources, the kind of access people have--. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. Invisible Child: the Life of a Homeless Family in NYC She lasted more than another year. It was in Brooklyn that Chanel was also named after a fancy-sounding bottle, spotted in a magazine in 1978. Not much. There's a huge separation that happens in terms of the culture that people consume, the podcasts they listen to or don't listen to, the shows they watch. The children are ultimately placed in foster care, and Dasani blames herself for it. Children are not the face of New Yorks homeless. And what was happening in New York was that we were reaching a kind of new level. It was a constant struggle. Invisible Child She spent eight years falling the story of Dasani Coates. Whenever I'm with Chanel, Dasani, Supreme, any of the kids, I'm captivated by them. And even as you move into the 1820s and '30s when you have fights over, sort of, Jacksonian democracy and, kind of, popular sovereignty and will, you're still just talking about essentially white men with some kind of land, some kind of ownership and property rights. This is an extract from Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City by Andrea Elliott (Hutchinson Heinemann, 16.99). Elliott first met Dasani, her parents and her siblings in Brooklyns Fort Greene neighborhood in 2012. Elliotts book follows eight years in the life of By the time, I would say, a lot of school kids were waking up, just waking up in New York City to go to school, Dasani had been working for two hours. Dasani feels her way across the room that she calls the house a 520 sq ft space containing her family and all their possessions. The people I grew up with. Chris Hayes: Yeah. The light noises bring no harm the colicky cries of an infant down the hall, the hungry barks of the Puerto Rican ladys chihuahuas, the addicts who wander the projects, hitting some crazy high. She will tell them to shut up. Don't their future adult selves have a right to privacy (LAUGH) in a sense? You know, that's part of it. Nearly a quarter of Dasanis childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and INVISIBLE CHILD | Kirkus Reviews The street was a dangerous place. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control hunger, violence, unstable parenting, homelessness, drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. And I remember the imam's face was just, like, horrified. Their sister is always first. Now And I understand the reporters who, sort of, just stop there and they describe these conditions and they're so horrifying. This harsh routine gives Auburn the feel of a rootless, transient place. Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. This is Entire neighbourhoods would be remade, their families displaced, their businesses shuttered, their histories erased by a gentrification so vast and meteoric that no brand of bottled water could have signalled it. Her parents survived major childhood traumas. I mean, I have a lot of deep familiarity with the struggle of substance abuse in my own family. Andrea Elliotts story of American poverty is non-fiction writing at What is crossing the line? And that carries a huge ethical quandary because you don't know, "Will they come to regret this later on?" And so I also will say that people would look at Dasani's family from the outside, her parents, and they might write them off as, you know, folks with a criminal record. You're not supposed to be watching movies. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. Her name was Dasani. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. In New York, I feel proud. This is usually the sound that breaks Dasanis trance, causing her to leave the window and fetch Lee-Lees bottle. And we can talk about that more. She is sure the place is haunted. I think about it every day. She's passing through. Invisible Child Her siblings are her greatest solace; their separation her greatest fear. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. I have a lot on my plate, she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. Dasani keeps forgetting to count the newest child. Section eight, of course, is the federal rental voucher system for low income people to be able to afford housing. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. 16K views, 545 likes, 471 loves, 3K comments, 251 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from EWTN: Starting at 8 a.m. I live in Harlem. And I had read it in high school. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. Mice were running everywhere. Theres nearly 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the U.S. About one in 12 live in New York City. Try to explain your work as much as you can." ANDREA ELLIOTT, Nonetheless, she landed on the honor roll that fall. And her first thought was, "Who would ever pay for water?" (LAUGH), Chris Hayes: You know? They're quite spatially separated from it. Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. Invisible Child Dasani This is an extract And demographers have studied this and I think that we still don't really know ultimately. And you just have to know that going in and never kid yourself that it has shifted. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. They cough or sometimes mutter in the throes of a dream. I still am always. I have a lot of things to say: one girls life growing up homeless in But especially to someone like her, who she was struggling. And to each of those, sort of, judgments, Dasani's mother has an answer. And I found greater clarity after I left the newsroom and was more in an academic setting as I was researching this book. You know? But at that time, just like it was at the time that There Are No Children Here came out, it's the highest child poverty rate of almost any wealthy nation. There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. Some donations came in. And I don't think she could ever recover from that. Sort of, peak of the homeless crisis. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. Book Review: Invisible Child, by Andrea Elliott - The New York Elliott says those are the types of stories society tends to glorify because it allows us to say, if you work hard enough, if you are gifted enough, then you can beat this.. After that, about six months after the series ran, I continued to follow them all throughout. Now Chanel is back, her custodial rights restored. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. And, of course, the obvious thing that many people at the time noted was that, you know, there were over a million people in bondage at the same time they were saying this. Delivery charges may apply, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. If she cries, others answer. A Phil & Teds rain shell, fished from the garbage, protects the babys creaky stroller. 'Invisible Child' chronicles how homelessness shaped Back then, from the ghettos isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. Ethical issues. Dasani landed at 39 Auburn Place more than two years ago. That image has stayed with me ever since because it was so striking the discipline that they showed to just walk in single file the unity, the strength of that bond, Elliott says. Who paid for water in a bottle? Shes not alone. 11:12 - You know, it was low rise projects. I focused on doing projects, long form narrative pieces that required a lot of time and patience on the part of my editors and a lot of swinging for the fences in terms of you don't ever know how a story is going to pan out. (LAUGH) Because they ate so much candy, often because they didn't have proper food. I feel good. Dasani tells herself that brand names dont matter. I mean, this was a kid who had been, sort of, suddenly catapulted on to the front page of The New York Times for five days. She will be sure to take a circuitous route home, traipsing two extra blocks to keep her address hidden. They have learned to sleep through anything. She doesn't want to get out. Dasani is not an anomaly. And a lot of that time was spent together. And one of the striking elements of the story you tell is that that's not the case in the case of the title character of Dasani. She was often tired. She fixes her gaze on that distant temple, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise. And she sees a curious thing on the shelf of her local bodega. I had not ever written a book. We're in a new century. The problems of poverty are so much greater, so much more overwhelming than the power of being on the front page of The New York Times. It's told in her newest book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. And she tried to stay the path. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. And so I have seen my siblings struggle for decades with it and have periods of sobriety and then relapse. Her mother, Chanel Sykes, went as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh to escape the influence of a crack-addicted parent. Multiply her story by thousands of children in cities across the U.S. living through the same experiences and the country confronts a crisis. So Chanel is in Bed-Stuy. How an "immersionist" held up the story Like, you could tell the story about Jeff Bezos sending himself into space. I never stopped reporting on her life. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. It's available wherever you get your books. A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. (BACKGROUND MUSIC) It is an incredible feat of reporting and writing. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. On one side are the children, on the other the rodents their carcasses numbering up to a dozen per week. And by the time she got her youngest siblings to school and got to her own school, usually late, she had missed the free breakfast at the shelter and the free breakfast at her school. The people I hang out with. You get birthday presents. How you get out isn't the point. The mouse-infested shelter didnt deter Dasani from peeking out her windowsill every morning to catch a glimpse of the Empire State Building. I had been there for a while. If they are seen at all, it is only in glimpses pulling an overstuffed suitcase in the shadow of a tired parent, passing for a tourist rather than a local without a home. Auburn used to be a hospital, back when nurses tended to the dying in open wards. All you could buy at the local bodega at that time was Charlie. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. Andrea Elliott: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. Poverty Isnt the Problem | American Enterprise Institute I mean, that is one of many issues. What's also true, though, is that as places like New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco and even Detroit and Washington, D.C. have increasingly gentrified, the experience of growing up poor is one of being in really close proximity with people who have money. In the dim chaos of Room 449, she struggles to find Lee-Lees formula, which is donated by the shelter but often expired. At that time when I met her when she was 11, Dasani would wake around 5 a.m. and the first thing she did, she always woke before all of her other siblings. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. Dasani described the familys living quarters as so cramped, it was like 10 people trying to breathe in the same room and they only give you five windows, Elliott recalls. So it's interesting how, you know, you always see what's happening on the street first before you see it 10,000 feet above the ground in terms of policy or other things. There's so much upheaval. I felt that it was really, really important to explain my process to this imam, in particular, who I spent six months with, who had come from Egypt and had a very different sense of the press, which was actually a tool of oppression.
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