Teaching students to critically analyze unjust and inequitable conditions in their lives means having hard but necessary conversations about poverty, race, trauma, and oppression in their lives and the actions needed to change them. However, talking about poverty as a structural problem of policy and discrimination goes against stereotypes about poor people held by those more privileged, as well as by working-class and poor people themselves, that blame the poor for their condition and stigmatize them as lazy and undeserving of our help. Poor people are particularly stigmatized when the source of disadvantage is perceived as controllable, as compared with an uncontrollable cause of poverty such as natural disasters (Williams, 2009). As educators, we too carry our own assumptions and implicit biases about race and poverty that impact our teaching. As Paul Gorski (2013) writes, “What we believe about poverty and why it exists even affects our expectations of and attitudes toward low-income students…. [W]e need to challenge common myths about poverty and develop robust understandings of the experiences of poor and working-class families both in and out of school” (p. 27). 

-S. Goodman, It’s Not About Grit 

I took an intro to sociology class in undergrad and one of the topics that we spoke about that most stuck with me was the idea of the “deserving poor”, that there are a group of people that someone wants to help because they feel like they can’t help the fact that they’re poor and therefore have merited the chance to be helped. Comments like “Don’t waste food, there are starving children in Africa” show ideas of a deserving poor because it neither actually helps the starving children elsewhere but also fails to recognize that there may be starving children in their county or city. But, the difference here lies in that the children in Africa deserve our help (see also the Savior Complex) but the children in urban areas don’t because if only those people would work harder, get a higher paying job, or go to college, they wouldn’t be poor. 

The idea of controllable or uncontrollable poverty, as this passage states, is the deciding factor behind who we as a society deem is deserving or undeserving of being in that socioeconomic situation.

Leaving behind those categorizations is essential to our work as educators because how can we give all of our students an equal chance at excelling in our classes if we, from the beginning, push the finish line further away from certain students. By recognizing and understanding our students better, we can even out the playing field in our classroom and inspire students that will even it out in the “real world”.