Making visible

THIS from the October 23, 2011 Mpls Strib, an op-ed about poverty and children.  I could not get access to the article she mentions in which there are photos of kids in designer clothes.  She attempts to counter those images of children whose middle-class parents spent significant money on their soon-to-be-outgrown "luxe" outfits with statistics about the increasing number of Twin Cities kids whose parents' income is so low that they qualify for free lunch (35%) and others numbers about the dire situation of children living in poverty whom the rest of us are unlikely to notice.  She suggests that we are unlike to notice them because our daily lives do not intersect: we live and move in different parts of the city.  And, we don't notice them because the media we do see shows us those other kids in fancy, expensive clothing.

We talked about this in class from a couple of angles:
1) How does the situation she describes compare to that documented by Jacob Riis' photos and Hull House reports?

2) How effective is her op-ed in comparison to Riis' photos and Hull House reports?

A very important response to the first required us to move beyond the easy generalization that "the poor you have with you always."  We needed to consider both the degree of economic stratification in the USA at a given time and the actual conditions in which children in those various "classes" lived.  A parallel can be drawn to statistics about literacy.  In that case we must ask both what constitutes literacy and how many people achieve it.  What counted a century and a half ago would not count as literacy today. And today we'd probably need to add consideration of access to information technology to assessment of the ability to read.

Our response to the second seemed, at first, to assume that visibility is necessary if the general public is to respond to the situation of the poor.  We noted that a person or group of people can be invisible because there is no portrayal of their situation or because that portrayal is lost in the blizzard of information.  A variation on the second is that the viewer becomes numb to the images.  The Hull House strategy included both providing decision makers with many reports with many facts and taking up residence in those "congested areas."  At its best this strategy encouraged the residents to consider real people who were neither reduced to aggregated statistics nor to two-dimensional images.  Thus their neighbors were both visible and known in 3-dimensions.