She saw this ad in a glossy magazine while she was, I believe, at a medical clinic. You know, that's part of it. She fixes her gaze on that distant temple, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise. Right? And I think what I would say is that there are no easy answers to this. And a lot of the reporting was, "But tell me how you reacted to this. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. But nonetheless, my proposal was to focus on Dasani and on her siblings, on children. WebInvisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. The2009 financial crisis taught us hard lessons. ANDREA ELLIOTT, It was a high poverty neighborhood to a school where every need is taken care of. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count. Public assistance. I mean, that is one of many issues. So I think that is what's so interesting is you rightly point out that we are in this fractured country now. 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. But you know what a movie is. It's something that I have wrestled with from the very beginning and continue to throughout. But the spacial separation of Chicago means that they're not really cheek and jowl next to, you know, $3 million town homes or anything like that. This is an extract 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." We could have a whole podcast about this one (LAUGH) issue. Thats a lot on my plate.. Now you fast forward to 2001. She will tell them to shut up. And you didn't really have firsthand access to what it looks like, what it smells like to be wealthy. It's still too new of a field of research to say authoritatively what the impact is, good or bad, of gentrification on long term residents who are lower income. 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. Her parents were struggling with a host of problems. Her siblings, she was informed, were placed in foster care. She never even went inside. She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. In New York, I feel proud. And I understand the reporters who, sort of, just stop there and they describe these conditions and they're so horrifying. I took 14 trips to see her at Hershey. And that gets us to 2014. But, of course, there's also the story of poverty, which has been a durable feature of American life for a very long time. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. Dasanis room was where they put the crazies, she says, citing as proof the broken intercom on the wall. They just don't have a steady roof over their head. And they agreed to allow me to write a book and to continue to stay in their lives. This is the type of fact that nobody can know. Some donations came in. And part of the reason I think that is important is because the nature of the fracturing (LAUGH) of American society is such that as we become increasingly balkanized, there's a kind of spacial separation that happens along class lines. Her body is still small enough to warm with a hairdryer. Clothing donations. Chris Hayes: Yeah. Her city is paved over theirs. Homeless services. A changing table for babies hangs off its hinge. And this book really avoids it. Chris Hayes: Her parents, Supreme and Chanel, you've, sort of, made allusion to this, but they both struggle with substance abuse. East New York still is to a certain degree, but Bed-Stuy has completely changed now. But she was not at all that way with the mice. And I said, "Yes." (LAUGH) Like those kinds of, like, cheap colognes. So at the time, you know, I was at The New York Times and we wrestled with this a lot. She doesn't want to get out. She's a hilarious (LAUGH) person. And her first thought was, "Who would ever pay for water?" I mean, I think everyone knows there are a lot of poor people, particularly a lot of poor people in urban centers, although there are a lot of poor people in rural areas. But every once in a while, when by some miracle she scores a pair of Michael Jordans, she finds herself succumbing to the same exercise: she wears them sparingly, and only indoors, hoping to keep them spotless. And in the very beginning, I was like, "Oh, I don't think I can hear this." A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. (LAUGH) She would try to kill them every week. Born at And which she fixed. After that, about six months after the series ran, I continued to follow them all throughout. WebA work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott's Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. And that's just the truth. I got a fork and a spoon. She is sure the place is haunted. The book is called Invisible Child. She has hit a major milestone, though. They loved this pen and they would grab it from me (LAUGH) and they would use it as a microphone and pretend, you know, she was on the news. In one part of the series, journalist Andrea Elliott contrasts the struggle of Dasanis ten member family living at a decrepit shelter to the gentrification and wealth on the other side of Fort We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. Dasani Coates grew up in a family so poor, her stepfather once pawned his gold teeth to get by until their welfare benefits arrived. What's your relationship with her now and what's her reaction to the book? 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. She's seeing all of this is just starting to happen. How you get out isn't the point. So she's taking some strides forward. And that really cracked me up because any true New Yorker likes to brag about the quality of our tap water. So to what extent did Dasani show agency within this horrible setting? Like, you do an incredible job on that. Like, you could tell the story about Jeff Bezos sending himself into space. Mice scurry across the floor. In the book, the major turning points are, first of all, where the series began, that she was in this absolutely horrifying shelter just trying to survive. Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. I don't want to really say what Dasani's reaction is for her. And by the way, at that time this was one of the richest cities in the world. So this was the enemy. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. They have yet to stir. 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. She's had major ups and major downs. She makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. She is in that shelter because of this, kind of, accumulation of, you know, small, fairly common, or banal problems of the poor that had assembled into a catastrophe, had meant not being able to stay in the section eight housing. No, I know. And she tried to stay the path. (LAUGH) I don't know what got lost in translation there. And then, of course, over time, what happens in the United States is that we become less and less materially equal. Try to explain your work as much as you can." Mice scurry across the floor. And it's not because people didn't care or there wasn't the willpower to help Dasani. And her lips are stained with green lollipop. She is the least of Dasanis worries. 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. And she wants to be able to thrive there. Auburn used to be a hospital, back when nurses tended to the dying in open wards. 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 knew she had to help get her siblings fed and dressed. ", And we were working through a translator. And at one level, it's like, "It's our ethical duty to tell stories honestly and forcefully and truthfully." Life has been anything but easy for 20-year-old Dasani Coates. So you mentioned There Are No Children Here. We rarely look at all the children who don't, who are just as capable. 'Cause I think it's such an important point. This book is filled with twists and turns, as is her story. 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 races back upstairs, handing her mother the bottle. And you can't go there unless you're poor. Elliott spent Right? To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. This was and continues to be their entire way of being, their whole reason. She had a drug (INAUDIBLE). She was a single mother. The other thing you asked about were the major turning points. And I met Dasani right in that period, as did the principal. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. A Phil & Teds rain shell, fished from the garbage, protects the babys creaky stroller. Dasani would call it my spy pen. The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. Chris Hayes: Yeah. And she also struggled with having to act differently. Two sweeping sycamores shade the entrance, where smokers linger under brick arches. 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. Taped to the wall is the childrens proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. I have a lot on my plate, she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. 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. 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. Her name was Dasani. I was never allowing myself to get too comfortable. It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" And so they had a choice. The people I hang out with. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the PALS Plus NJ OverDrive Library digital collection. One of the first things Dasani will say is that she was running before she walked. Invisible Child: Dasanis Homeless Life. And, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what that experience is like for her. I saw in Supreme and in Chanel a lot of the signs of someone who is self-medicating. She's studying business administration, which has long been her dream. She's like, "And I smashed their eyes out and I'd do this.". In this moving but occasionally flat narrative, Elliott follows Dasani for eight years, beginning in 2012 when she was 11 years old and living in She is among 432 homeless children and parents living at Auburn. No. And I was so struck by many things about her experience of growing up poor. Over the next year, 911 dispatchers will take some 350 calls from Auburn, logging 24 reports of assault, four reports of child abuse, and one report of rape. She sorts them like laundry. And one thing I found really interesting about your introduction, which so summarizes the reason I feel that this story matters, is this fracturing of America. Chanel always says, "Blood is thicker than water." But especially to someone like her, who she was struggling. You can try, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City., Why the foster care system needs to change as aid expires for thousands of aged-out youth, The Pandemic's Severe Toll On The Already-Strained Foster Care System. Elliott says she was immediately drawn to 11-year-old Dasani not only because of the girls ability to articulate injustices in her life, but how Desani held so much promise for herself. Their sister is always first. And it was an extraordinary experience. Where do you first encounter her in the city? 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. And then their cover got blown and that was after the series ran. Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. It's important to not live in a silo. In 2019, when the school bell rang at the end of the day, more than 100,000 schoolchildren in New York City had no permanent home to return to. But basically, Dasani came to see that money as something for the future, not an escape from poverty. She wanted to create this fortress, in a way. Andrea Elliott: So Milton Hershey School was created by America's chocolate magnate Milton Hershey, who left behind no children. Multiply her story by thousands of children in cities across the U.S. living through the same experiences and the country confronts a crisis. (LAUGH), Chris Hayes: You know? 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. I do, though. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering East River. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. The movies." They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. Then she sets about her chores, dumping the mop bucket, tidying her dresser, and wiping down the small fridge. 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. Whenever I'm with Chanel, Dasani, Supreme, any of the kids, I'm captivated by them. 4 Dasani blinks, looking out at And it's, I think, a social good to do so. Then they will head outside, into the bright light of morning. Dasani landed at 39 Auburn Place more than two years ago. She then moved from there to a shelter in Harlem and then to a shelter in the Bronx before finally, once again, landing another section eight voucher and being able to move back into a home with her family. All she has to do is climb the school steps. The sound that matters has a different pitch. Nearly a year ago, the citys child protection agency had separated 34-year-old Chanel Sykes from her children after she got addicted to opioids. Either give up your public assistance and you can have this money or not. There have been a few huge massive interventions that have really altered the picture of what poverty looks like in the U.S., chiefly the Great Society and the New Deal and some other things that have happened since then. She says, "I would love to meet," you know, anyone who accuses her of being a quote, unquote welfare queen. You know, we're very much in one another's lives. Andrea, thank you so much. It's helping them all get through college. Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless Shes creating life on her own terms, Elliott says. And so putting that aside, what really changed? 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. She doesn't want to have to leave. And demographers have studied this and I think that we still don't really know ultimately. I think it's so natural for an outsider to be shocked by the kind of conditions that Dasani was living in. Elliott picks up the story in Invisible Child , a book that goes well beyond her original reporting in both journalistic excellence and depth of insight. No one on the block can outpace Dasani. The bodegas were starting. What I would say is that you just have to keep wrestling with it. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. Bed bugs. What is crossing the line? Parental neglect, failure to provide necessities for ones children like shelter or clothing, is one form of child maltreatment that differs from child abuse, she says. Children are not often the face of homelessness, but their stories are heartbreaking and sobering: childhoods denied spent in and out of shelters, growing up with absent parents and often raising themselves and their siblings. One in five kids. They have yet to stir. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. She counts her siblings in pairs, just like her mother said. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. She would change her diaper. But what about the ones who dont? All you could buy at the local bodega at that time was Charlie. Andrea joins to talk about her expanded coverage of the Coates family story, which is told in her new book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City.. Dasani tells herself that brand names dont matter. They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. Nearly a quarter of her childhood has unfolded at the Auburn Family Residence, where Dasanis family a total of 10 people live in one room. 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. I nvisible Child is a 2021 work of nonfiction by Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative journalist Andrea Elliott. She changed diapers, fed them and took them to school. The pounding of fists. And so she wanted a strong army of siblings. "What's Chanel perfume? 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. Her hope for herself is to keep, as she's put it to me, her family and her culture close to her while also being able to excel.. Laundry piled up. This is a pivotal, pivotal decade for Brooklyn. Chapter 1. First of all, I don't rely on my own memory. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. Nowadays, Room 449 is a battleground. Dasani can get lost looking out her window, until the sounds of Auburn interrupt. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. And she said that best in her own words. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. What did you think then?" And, you know, I think that there's, in the prose itself, tremendous, you know, I think, sort of, ethical clarity and empathy and humanization. They rarely figure among the panhandlers, bag ladies, war vets and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. Nearly a quarter of Dasanis childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and Almost half of New Yorks 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line. And a few years back, there was this piece about a single girl in the New York City public school system in The New York Times that was really I think brought people up shore, 'cause it was so well done. Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. Family was everything for them. Actually, I'd had some opportunities, but I was never in love with a story like this one. By the time I got to Dasani's family, I had that stack and I gave it to them. She sees this bottled water called Dasani and it had just come out. The difference is in resources. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. It was really tough: Andrea Elliott on writing about New Yorks homeless children. A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. And this ultimately wound up in the children being removed in October of 2015, about ten months into Dasani's time at Hershey. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control hunger, violence, unstable parenting, homelessness, drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. Elliott writes that few children have both the depth of dishonest troubles and the height of her promise., But Dasanis story isnt about an extraordinary child who made it out of poverty. Like, she was wearing Uggs at one point and a Patagonia fleece at another point. She's pregnant with Dasani, 2001. She has a delicate oval face and luminous eyes that watch everything, owl-like. 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. But she was so closely involved in my process. So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. Had been the subject of tremendous amounts of redlining and disinvestment and panic peddling that had essentially chased white homeowners out. This is the type of fact that she recites in a singsong, look-what-I-know way. Why Is This Happening? It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. She will be sure to take a circuitous route home, traipsing two extra blocks to keep her address hidden. 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.. 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. Her parents are avid readers. Talk a little bit about where Dasani is now, her age, what she had to, sort of, come through, and also maybe a little bit about the fact that she was written about in The New York Times, like, might have affected that trajectory. Right outside is a communal bathroom with a large industrial tub. But nothing like this. It's something that I talked about a lot with Supreme and Chanel. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. You're gonna get out of your own lane and go into other worlds. A movie has scenes. They were-- they were eating the family's food and biting. WebInvisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. But she saw an ad for Chanel perfume. And what really got me interested, I think, in shifting gears was in the end of 2011, Occupy Wall Street happened. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and I still am always. And, of course, children aren't the face of the homeless. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. Its the point Elliott says she wants to get across in Invisible Child: We need to focus less on escaping problems of poverty and pivot attention to finding the causes and solutions to those problems. WebInvisible Child, highlights the life struggles of eleven-year-old Dasani Coates, a homeless child living with her family in Brooklyn, New York. She's at a community college. And there's so much to say about it. Until then, Dasani considered herself a baby expert. She trots into the cafeteria, where more than a hundred families will soon stand in line to heat their prepackaged breakfast. Now the bottle must be heated. And then I was like, "I need to hear this. She loved to sit on her windowsill. Chris Hayes: So she's back in the city. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. Every once in a while, it would. I mean, I have a lot of deep familiarity with the struggle of substance abuse in my own family. It's painful. She's just a visitor. And how far can I go? The oldest of eight kids, Dasani and her family lived in one room in a dilapidated, city-run homeless shelter in Brooklyn. When she left New York City, her loved ones lost a crucial member of the family, and in her absence, things fell apart. Now Chanel is back, her custodial rights restored. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. Have Democrats learned them? The material reality of Dasani's life her homelessness, her family's lack of money is merely the point of departure for understanding her human condition, she says. They would look at them and say, "How could they have eight children? 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. She would help in all kinds of ways. Luckily, in this predawn hour, the cafeteria is still empty. They think, "All men are created equal," creed is what distinguishes the U.S., what gives it its, sort of, moral force and righteousness in rebelling against the crown. Sort of, peak of the homeless crisis. So in There Are No Children Here, you know, if you go over there to the Henry Horner Homes on the west side, you do have the United Center. (LAUGH) Because they ate so much candy, often because they didn't have proper food. Every morning, Dasani leaves her grandmothers birthplace to wander the same streets where Joanie grew up, playing double Dutch in the same parks, seeking shade in the same library. Her sense of home has always been so profound even though she's homeless. Dasani Coates, the 11-year-old homeless child profiled in Andrea Elliotts highly praised five-part New York Times feature, arrived on stage at Wednesdays inauguration ceremonies to serve as a poignant symbol ofin Mayor de Blasios wordsthe economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. Chris Hayes: Yeah. They were in drug treatment programs for most of the time that I was with them, mostly just trying to stay sober and often succeeding at it.
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