Evicted by Matthew Desmond

I read Evicted by Matthew Desmond for a book club at the wonderful Mercantile Library.

It’s astounding how much work went into this book, evident in book itself but especially after reading the epilogue and acknowledgements. I am impressed by how thorough and exact his reporting is—always precise quotes, digitally recorded or transcribed; delivered as factually as possible; empathetic but without having to convince you to be. You’d be cold to not be touched and saddened by the book. A lot of it is plainly depressing. Which is probably a good and necessary starting point. It’s heavily researched and ethnographic, not ivory tower research nor only anecdotes and hunches.

I feel that I’m doing a disservice to this book by only quoting from the epilogue here, but I did a poor job note-taking while reading, and the meat of the book is best read directly. Anyhoo, I found the experience of reading the book to be a micro version of how Desmond describes he felt writing it:

I am frequently asked how I “handled” this research, by which people mean: How did seeing this level of poverty and suffering affect you, personally? I don’t think people realize how raw and intimate a question this is, so I’ve developed several dishonest responses which I drop like those smoke bomb magicians use when they want to glide offstage, unseen. The honest answer is that the work was heartbreaking and left me depressed for years. You do learn how to cope from those who are coping. After several people told me, “stop looking at me like that,” I learned to suppress my shock at traumatic things. I learned to tell a real crisis from mere poverty. I learned that behavior that looks lazy or withdrawn to someone perched far above the poverty line can actually be a pacing technique. People like Crystal or Larraine cannot afford to give all their energy to today’s emergency only to have none left over for tomorrow’s. I saw in the trailer park and inner city resilience and spunk and brilliance. I heard a lot of laughter. But I also saw a lot of pain. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I wrote in my journal, “I feel dirty collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.” The guilt I felt during my fieldwork only intensified after I left. I felt like a phony and like a traitor, ready to confess to some unnamed accusation. I couldn’t help but translate a bottle of wine placed in front of me at a university function or my monthly daycare bill into rent payments or bail money back in Milwaukee. It leaves an impression, this kind of work. Now imagine it’s your life.

Desmond went against the grain in not using the first person singular, discussed at length in the epilogue. I’m quoting his rationale here in full (1) because I think it’s quite interesting, and (2) because I think it’s well written, meaning hopefully it’ll convince you to read the book.

Ethnography recently has come to be written almost exclusively in the first person. It is a straightforward way of writing and an effective one. If ethnographers want people to take what they say seriously, the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed, they have to convince readers that they have “been there.” “And that,” Geertz said, “persuading us that this offstage miracle has occurred, is where the writing comes in.” The first person has become the chosen mule for this task. I was there. I saw it happen. And because I saw it happen, you can believe it happened. Ethnographers shrink themselves in the field but enlarge themselves on the page because first-person accounts convey experience, and experience authority.

But first-person narration is not the only technique available to us. In fact, it may be the least well-suited vehicle for capturing the essence of a social world because the “I” filters all. With first narration the subjects and the author are each always held in view resulting in every observation being trailed by a reaction to the observer. No matter how much care the author takes the first ethnography becomes just as much about the fieldworker as it is about anything she or he saw. I’ve been asked questions like, “how did you feel when you saw that?” “How did you gain this sort of access?” These are fine questions, but there is a bigger game afoot. There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land. At a time of rampant inequality and widespread hardship, when hunger and homelessness are found throughout America, I am interested in a different, more urgent conversation. “I” don’t matter. I hope that when you talk about this book, you talk first about Sherrena and Tobin, Arleen and Jori, and the fact that somewhere in your city, a family has just been evicted from their home, their things piled high on the sidewalk.

Evicted was published in 2016, then in 2023 Desmond published Poverty, by America, which I’ve checked out at my local library. If you want to get a sense for him and his work before reading either book, he’s all over the podcast circuit.