They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. Now the bottle must be heated. In the dim chaos of Room 449, she struggles to find Lee-Lees formula, which is donated by the shelter but often expired. And it is something that I think about a lot, obviously, because I'm a practitioner as well. Why Is This Happening? is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and features music by Eddie Cooper. Massive gentrification occurs in this first decade. 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. A movie has scenes. Every once in a while, it would. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New And she was actually living in the very building where her own grandmother had been born back when it was Cumberland Hospital, which was a public hospital. She would just look through the window. And demographers have studied this and I think that we still don't really know ultimately. The citys wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. 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. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American Thank you! 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. Invisible Child We just had all these meetings in the newsroom about what to do because the story was unfolding and it was gripping. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. Used purple Uggs and Patagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans. When Dasani Left Home - The New York Times And by the way, at that time this was one of the richest cities in the world. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. Like, these are--. And the more that readers engage with her, the clearer it becomes that every single one of these stories is worthy of attention., After nearly a decade of reporting, Elliott wants readers to remember the girl at her windowsill every morning who believed something better was out there waiting for her.. PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A "vivid and devastating" ( The New York Times ) portrait of an indomitable girl--from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott "From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering By the time Dasani came into the world, on 26 May 2001, the old Brooklyn was vanishing. Lee-Lees cry was something else. Radiating out from them in all directions are the eight children they share: two boys and five girls whose beds zigzag around the baby, her crib warmed by a hairdryer perched on a milk crate. And I don't think she could ever recover from that. To an outsider, living in Fort Greene, you might think, "Oh, that's the kid that lives at the homeless shelter. Dasani was growing up at a time where, you know, the street was in some ways dangerous depending on what part of Brooklyn you are, but very, very quickly could become exciting. We burn them! Dasani says with none of the tenderness reserved for her turtle. She is tiny for an 11-year-old and quick to startle. 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. All you could buy at the local bodega at that time was Charlie. Serena McMahon Twitter Digital ProducerSerena McMahon was a digital producer for Here & Now. And I'm also, by the way, donating a portion of the proceeds of this book to the family, to benefit Dasani and her siblings and parents. We rarely look at all of the children who don't, who are just as capable. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and And I'll get to that in a second. She changed diapers, fed them and took them to school. This is an extract And a lot of things then happen after that. She never even went inside. I have a lot of things to say.. You get birthday presents. So Chanel is in Bed-Stuy. Invisible Child You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. 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. What's interesting about that compared to Dasani, just in terms of what, sort of, concentrated poverty is like in the 1980s, I think, when that book is being reported in her is that proximity question. And there's so much to say about it. 16K views, 545 likes, 471 loves, 3K comments, 251 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from EWTN: Starting at 8 a.m. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. Yes. It was a constant struggle. And then their cover got blown and that was after the series ran. And I consider family to be Dasani's ultimate, sort of, system of survival. More often she is running to the monkey bars, to the library, to the A train that her grandmother cleaned for a living. She is forever in motion, doing backflips at the bus stop, dancing at the welfare office. IE 11 is not supported. And, of course, not. (LAUGH) I don't know what got lost in translation there. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. It was in Brooklyn that Chanel was also named after a fancy-sounding bottle, spotted in a magazine in 1978. But the other part is agency. She's had major ups and major downs. Andrea Elliott: Okay. 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. We have a period where basically from the New Deal to 1980, inequality in the country shrinks and then the story, as you well know, from 1980 to now is just skyrocketing inequality. Dasani is not an anomaly. Dasani would call it my spy pen. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. There was no sign announcing the shelter, which rises over the neighbouring projects like an accidental fortress. It's, sort of, prismatic because, as you're talking about the separation of a nation in terms of its level of material comfort or discomfort, right, or material want, there's a million different stories to tell of what that looks like. Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. So civic equality is often honored in the breach, but there is the fact that early on, there is a degree of material equality in the U.S. that is quite different from what you find in Europe. But she told me, and she has told me many times since, that she loves the book. Chris Hayes: --to dealing with those. Chapter 1. Elliott first met Dasani, her parents and her siblings in Brooklyns Fort Greene neighborhood in 2012. I got rice, chicken, macaroni. The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni her siblings - except for Baby Lee-Lee, who is a plump chicken breast. She ends up there. In 2012, there were 22,000 homeless children in New York City. And I did some quick research and I saw that, in fact, the child poverty rate remained one in five. It was just the most devastating thing to have happened to her family. Children are not the face of New Yorks homeless. We're gonna both pretend we've seen movies. She was often tired. We're in a new century. 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. We break their necks. Whether they are riding the bus, switching trains, climbing steps or jumping puddles, they always move as one. 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 mother had grown up in a very different time. I had an early experience of this with Muslim immigrant communities in the United States that I reported on for years. Find that audio here. Her name was Dasani. I mean, whether you're poor--, Andrea Elliott: --or you're wealthy, (LAUGH) like, you know. Still, the baby howls. This is typical of Dasani. The thumb-suckers first: six-year-old Hada and seven-year-old Maya, who share a small mattress. Andrea Elliott: This is a work in progress. Chris Hayes speaks with Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott about her book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City., Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City. We suffocate them with the salt!. The oldest of eight kids, Dasani and her family lived in one room in a dilapidated, city-run homeless shelter in Brooklyn. INVISIBLE CHILD POVERTY, SURVIVAL & HOPE IN AN AMERICAN CITY. And that was not available even a month ago. How an "immersionist" held up the story On a good day, Dasani walks like she is tall, her chin held high. There are several things that are important to know about this neighborhood and what it represents. Theres nothing to be scared about.. Nowadays, Room 449 is a battleground. Dasani gazes out of the window from the one room her family of 10 shared in the Brooklyn homeless shelter where they lived for almost four years. Child Protection Services showed up on 12 occasions. I want to be very clear. Together with her siblings, Dasani has had to persevere in an environment riddled with stark inequality, hunger, violence, drug addiction and homelessness. And it's the richest private school in America. Family wasn't an accident. And for most of us, I would say, family is so important. This is The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. Now She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. I mean, I have a lot of deep familiarity with the struggle of substance abuse in my own family. 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. Andrea Elliott on Twitter WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the Pioneer Library System digital collection. Like, "Why do I have to say, 'Isn't,' instead of, 'Ain't'?" The difference is in resources. I still am always. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. And so it would break the rules. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. 'Invisible Child' chronicles how homelessness shaped I feel good. Email withpod@gmail.com. Ethical issues. And obviously, you know, one of the things I think is interesting and comes through here is, and I don't know the data on this, but I have found in my life as a reporter and as a human being along various parts of the Titanic ship that is the United States of America that there's a lot of substance abuse at every level. Shes I got a fork and a spoon. Dasani can get lost looking out her window, until the sounds of Auburn interrupt. And then I was like, "I need to hear this. People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. It wasn't just that she was this victim of the setting. Chris Hayes: Yeah. How long is she in that shelter? Right? This week, an expansion of her reporting comes out within the pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.. Every inch of the room is claimed. The Milton Hershey School is an incredible, incredible place. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. 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. They're quite spatially separated from it. She didn't know what it smelled like, but she just loved the sound of it. And in my local bodega, they suddenly recently added, I just noticed this last night, organic milk. Only together have they learned to navigate povertys systems ones with names suggesting help. 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. Andrea Elliotts story of American poverty is non-fiction writing at And so she wanted a strong army of siblings. 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. Elliott hopes Invisible Child readers see people beyond the limiting labels of homeless and poor and address the deep historical context that are part of these complicated problems, she says. And at that time in my career, it was 2006. Andrea Elliott: Can I delve into that for a second? Right? You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. You know, it was low rise projects. They cough or sometimes mutter in the throes of a dream. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. 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. 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. Sept. 28, 2021. Have Democrats learned them? (LAUGH) She would try to kill them every week. What was striking to me was how little changed. Chapter 42 Now a sophomore, Dasani believes that her family is desperately fractured. Right? And that's really true of the poor. There definitely are upsides. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. But because of the nature of how spread out Chicago was, the fact that this was not a moment of gentrification in the way that we think about it now, particularly in the, sort of, post-2000 comeback city era and then the post-financial crisis, that the kids in that story are not really cheek by jowl with all of the, kind of, wealth that is in Chicago. Chanel always says, "Blood is thicker than water." Invisible Child They have learned to sleep through anything. (LAUGH) She said to me at one point, "I mean, I want to say to them, especially if it's a man who's saying this, 'Have you ever been through childbirth?'. They dwell within Dasani wherever she goes. There are a lot of different gradations of what that poverty looks like. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. And this book really avoids it. Anyway, and I said, "Imagine I'm making a movie about your life. In order to witness those scenes, I have to be around. What did you think then?" Chris Hayes: That is such a profound point about the structure of American life and the aspirations for it. And they act as their surrogate parents. After Dasanis family left the homeless shelter, she was accepted to the Milton Hershey School, a tuition-free boarding school for low-income children in Pennsylvania. 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. 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. I nvisible Child is a 2021 work of nonfiction by Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative journalist Andrea Elliott. And they have 12 kids per home. Delivery charges may apply, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Chris Hayes: Hello. It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. And she would stare at the Empire State Building at the tower lights because the Empire State Building, as any New Yorker knows, lights up depending on the occasion to reflect the colors of that occasion. And, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what that experience is like for her. So she's taking some strides forward. Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. This was and continues to be their entire way of being, their whole reason. At that time when Chanel was born in '78, her mother was living in a place where it was rare to encounter a white person. She spent eight years falling the story Andrea Elliott: So at the end of the five days that it took for me to read the book to Dasani, when we got to the last line, she said, "That's the last line?" It's helping them all get through college. 'Cause I think it's such an important point. They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. 6. Andrea, thank you so much. Only a mother could answer it, and for a while their mother was gone. WebInvisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. 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. She's been through this a little bit before, right, with the series. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. One in five kids. I live in Harlem. She was such a remarkable and charismatic figure, and also because her story was so compelling. Well, every once in a while, a roach here and there in New York. The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. It's painful. She knows such yearnings will go unanswered. Public assistance. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. Columbias Bill Grueskin tries to explain why the Pulitzer board dismissed The New York Times s Invisible Child series The people I grew up with. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. And you just have to know that going in and never kid yourself that it has shifted. And you got power out of fighting back on some level. 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. And a lot of the reporting was, "But tell me how you reacted to this. Andrea Elliott: We love the story of the kid who made it out. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. Her city is paved over theirs. It is also a story that reaches back in time to one Black family making its way through history, from slavery to the Jim Crow South and then the Great Migrations passage north. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. Elliott spent Invisible Child Invisible Child So I think that is what's so interesting is you rightly point out that we are in this fractured country now. She's a hilarious (LAUGH) person. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos. The other thing you asked about were the major turning points. And they did attend rehab at times. The people I hang out with. And one of the things that I've learned, of course, and this is an obvious point, is that those are very widely distributed through society. Back then, from the ghettos isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. "This is so and so." Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. 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. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" They felt that they had a better handle on my process by then. She said, "Home is the people. Elliotts book follows eight years in the life of And I found greater clarity after I left the newsroom and was more in an academic setting as I was researching this book. And, of course, children aren't the face of the homeless. (LAUGH) You know? Andrea Elliott: --it (LAUGH) because she was trying to show me how relieved she was that our brutal fact check process was over and that she didn't have to listen to me say one more line. And her principal had this idea that she should apply to a school that I had never heard of called the Milton Hershey School, which is a school in Hershey, Pennsylvania that tries to reform poor children. And there's a amazing, amazing book called Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc which takes place in the Bronx, which is in a somewhat similar genre. And I hope that she'll continue to feel that way. People who have had my back since day one. Andrea Elliott: Absolutely. "I just want to be a fly on the wall. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. But nothing like this. This is the type of fact that nobody can know. So this was the enemy. She's transient." Her eyes can travel into Manhattan, to the top of the Empire State Building, the first New York skyscraper to reach a hundred floors. Then she sets about her chores, dumping the mop bucket, tidying her dresser, and wiping down the small fridge. But you know what a movie is. It's now about one in seven. You know, my fridge was always gonna be stocked. And in all these cases, I think, like, you know, there's a duty for a journalist to tell these stories. 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. 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. This is according to her sister, because Joanie has since passed. I don't want to really say what Dasani's reaction is for her. That's so irresponsible." And that really cracked me up because any true New Yorker likes to brag about the quality of our tap water. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. So she knows what it's like to suddenly be the subject of a lot of people's attention. And she tried to stay the path. There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. She calls him Daddy. 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. And, actually, sometimes those stories are important because they raise alarms that are needed. It literally saved us: what the USs new anti-poverty measure means for families, Millions of families receiving tax credit checks in effort to end child poverty, No one knew we were homeless: relief funds hope to reach students missing from virtual classrooms, I knew they were hungry: the stimulus feature that lifts millions of US kids out of poverty, 'Santa, can I have money for the bills?' I still have it. I think that that was a major compass for me was this idea that, "Don't ever get too comfortable that you know your position here or your place. Yeah. And through the years of American journalism, and some of the best journalism that has been produced, is about talking about what that looks like at the ground level. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. She makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. Right? 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. Despite the circumstances, Dasani radiated with potential. And what was happening in New York was that we were reaching a kind of new level. New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott spent nearly a decade following Dasani and her family. But under court supervision, he had remained with the children, staying clean while his wife entered a drug treatment programme. And her lips are stained with green lollipop. She lives in a house run by a married couple. She just thought, "Who could afford that?". She's passing through. But basically, Dasani came to see that money as something for the future, not an escape from poverty. All these things, kind of, coalesced to create a crisis, which is so often the case with being poor is that it's a lot of small things suddenly happening at once that then snowball into something catastrophic. 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. Dasani Coates grew up in a family so poor, her stepfather once pawned his gold teeth to get by until their welfare benefits arrived. The popping of gunshots. Dasani squints to check the date. She knew she had to help get her siblings fed and dressed. And, as she put it, "It makes me feel like something's going on out there." Tweet us at the hashtag #WITHPod. The bodegas were starting. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New 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. Invisible Child: the Life of a Homeless Family in NYC Now you fast forward to 2001. You know? The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. 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 with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. Child protection. Mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the buildings predators. Whenever I'm with Chanel, Dasani, Supreme, any of the kids, I'm captivated by them. Tempers explode. And just exposure to diversity is great for anyone. By Ryan Chittum. 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. If you use the word homeless, usually the image that comes to mind is of a panhandler or someone sleeping on subway grates. "What's Chanel perfume? I had spent years as a journalist entering into communities where I did not immediately belong or seem to belong as an outsider. She's just a visitor. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. And so you can get braces. Just steps away are two housing projects and, tucked among them, a city-run homeless shelter where the heat is off and the food is spoiled.
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