Book - Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

In the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.

I was constantly overanalyzing things. A buzzing inner monologue would often draw me inward, hindering my ability to remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of me. It’s safer that way. Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories. As Susan Sontag has warned, this comfort can “deplete the world” and get in the way of seeing.

Under conditions of scarcity, people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost. From “How the Other Half Lives”, published over a century ago: “There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort… The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come … it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.

Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience - this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.” This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances - the postwar housing shortage, say - profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things.