It is 3:15pm, school is out for the day. The streets in DC are littered with pubescent ruckus and juvenile-chatter. The bus-stops become transportation totem poles for all to hail, for the Gods of the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority will make miracles where suburban yellow school buses cannot.

As I sit aboard the A8, a bus-line that travels one of the toughest routes in some of DC’s most impoverished neighborhoods, I prepare myself for the usual; an after-school incident carried over from a dispute in the girls’ bathroom; a handful of pumpkin seeds, huggie fruit punch juice, and hot sausage wrappers that will each find their way in the pit of a bus-seat instead of a trash can; and an assembly-line of grammatically-disturbing sentences, all complete with their own unique expletives and mispronounced adjectives in prepositional disguise. Us adults on the bus know that this is typical at the end of a 7-hour day of DC Public School education—an uninvited lesson into all the youth have learned today.

Like many avenues, streets, and boulevards named after the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, the one the A8 travels visually bemoans of disrepair and municipal neglect. The curbs are lined with empty potato chip bags, glass-beer bottles, and candy wrappers. Every homeless and drunk Vietnam Veteran in a wheel-chair wears the government’s subsidized shame on their sleeves, as they verbally harass 16-year-old women for their spare change and phone numbers. They pass-up the ones ushering little siblings to the bus-stop with student passes and tokens in their hands.

As the A8 pulls up to a stop located just a block away from the infamous Ballou Senior High School, several students are making fun of a lone-student—a tall languid young man with disinterest in his face. From the intensity of the laughter, and the ab-wrenching display of cruel humor in their eyes, I can tell that the teasing is about something he is wearing. He wears the same mandated uniform as his peers—his diamond earrings bearing no difference to their aesthetic. But as he boards the bus, the difference between him and his peers is no more than 5 inches from the ground—his shoes.

A run-down pair of Reeboks brings the unforgiving scrutiny of his classmates, as they all sport the latest Air Jordans or Black and Brown Timberland boots. The young man disappears into a loud rendezvous with T-Pain on his I-Pod. The subject of his shoes remain the talk of his peers until we arrive at the end of the line—Anacostia Station. Hearing this, the bus-driver does not intervene, afraid of what the consequences might be for daring to speak forcefully to young urban mischief instead of minding his business.

The young man exits the bus without incident, spatially distancing himself from his peers. It is a peaceful ending, one that could have gone by the inner Southside of his pants, where we would all be prisoners of our witness—his trigger finger being our warden. It is also a daunting display of inner-class isolation, where the poor and disadvantaged chastise their own for being poor and disadvantaged.

A tour of DC’s poorest communities, and those like it all over the United States would yield one many memories of social paradoxes. It is not uncommon to find that a single mom with 5 young children will see that all 5 are wearing expensive Air Jordans, while she scrounges around for bus-fare in the depths of her expensive Gucci bag. It is also not uncommon to find Direct TV dishes mounted outside the steel bars of a window A/C unit of a Section 8 Housing Project, owned by the DC Housing Authority. Not to mention that one might find a Cadillac Escalade, Lexus, and a Mercedes parked on the poorly lit- drug infested streets of these communities.

It leaves one to wonder how a poor, black, single family on food-stamps can afford shoes costing more than $100 a pair; or how a single family on Medicaid, living in subsidized housing can afford the triple digit car-note of a Cadillac Escalade. Perhaps this is some miscalculated phenomenon in Oscar Lewis’ “culture of poverty”—a phenomenon that negates that poverty in America comes complete with a Comcast remote control, hundreds of cable channels, all brought to you by undisclosed child-support payments, forgiving relatives, and a bit of sold addiction on the side.

“We try our hardest to make sure our children don’t feel like they’re poor,” says Ms. Parker, the resourceful mother from my previous article who successfully made sure her daughter gets free breakfast and lunch everyday. “We sacrifice to make sure our children have the best clothes and shoes. We’ll do without so that our children can have.”

No doubt poverty carries a stigma—one that can be barely masked by a false appearance and a familiar expensive brand name.

Popularity: 1% [?]