Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. So she would talk about this. Chris Hayes: Dasani is 11 years old. And, you know, this was a new school. Their sister is always first. Invisible Child And in the very beginning, I was like, "Oh, I don't think I can hear this." East New York still is to a certain degree, but Bed-Stuy has completely changed now. Nuh-uh. Random House, 2021. Chris Hayes: That is such a profound point about the structure of American life and the aspirations for it. She's been through this a little bit before, right, with the series. That, to be honest, is really home. She's studying business administration, which has long been her dream. And so they had a choice. And to each of those, sort of, judgments, Dasani's mother has an answer. 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. Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. Dasani described the familys living quarters as so cramped, it was like 10 people trying to breathe in the same room and they only give you five windows, Elliott recalls. 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. And it's a great pleasure to welcome Andrea to the show now. And There Are No Children Here, which takes place in what's called Henry Horner Homes, which is in the west side of Chicago right by what is now called the United Center, which is where the Bulls play. She wanted to create this fortress, in a way. And I think that that's what Dasani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how. So I think that is what's so interesting is you rightly point out that we are in this fractured country now. 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. A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. It's on the west side just west of downtown. It was a high poverty neighborhood to a school where every need is taken care of. Dasani is not an anomaly. It has more than a $17 billion endowment. And in my local bodega, they suddenly recently added, I just noticed this last night, organic milk. And that's just the truth. I had been there for a while. Mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the buildings predators. I just find them to be some of the most interesting people I've ever met. 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. She will tell them to shut up. The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. Chris Hayes: --to dealing with those. And it wasn't a huge amount of money as far as I know, although Legal Aid's never told me (LAUGH) exactly how much is in it. Today, Dasani lives surrounded by wealth, whether she is peering into the boho chic shops near her shelter or surfing the internet on Auburns shared computer. I was never allowing myself to get too comfortable. 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. They wound up being placed at Auburn. Born at She wants to stay in her neighborhood and with her family. 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. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. Theres nothing to be scared about.. 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. Rarely does that happen for children living in poverty like Dasani who are willing and capable but who are inundated with problems not of their own making, she says. 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. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. The book takes on poverty, homelessness, racism, addiction, hunger, and more as they shape the lives of one remarkable girl and her family. 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. 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. And about 2,000 kids go there. In the dim chaos of Room 449, she struggles to find Lee-Lees formula, which is donated by the shelter but often expired. But at the end of the day, they are stronger than anything you throw at them. It's massively oversubscribed. Chris Hayes: Yeah. This is the place where people go to be free. We get the robber barons and the Industrial Revolution. And there was this, sort of, sudden public awakening around inequality. And I had an experience where someone I knew and was quite close to is actually an anthropologist doing field work in Henry Horner Homes after There Are No Children Here. Hidden in a box is Dasanis pet turtle, kept alive with bits of baloney and the occasional Dorito. It was incredibly confusing as a human being to go from their world back into mine on the Upper West Side in my rental with my kids who didn't have to worry about roaches. Invisible Child: the Life of a Homeless Family in NYC Invisible Child 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. And I had read it in high school. And what really got me interested, I think, in shifting gears was in the end of 2011, Occupy Wall Street happened. And her lips are stained with green lollipop. 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. And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. Until then, Dasani considered herself a baby expert. Her mother, Chanel Sykes, went as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh to escape the influence of a crack-addicted parent. "This is so and so." Theres nearly 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the U.S. About one in 12 live in New York City. 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. She says, "I would love to meet," you know, anyone who accuses her of being a quote, unquote welfare queen. I had spent years as a journalist entering into communities where I did not immediately belong or seem to belong as an outsider. She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. Family wasn't an accident. Thats a lot on my plate.. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the MontanaLibrary2Go digital collection. They follow media carefully. Invisible Child She sees out to a world that rarely sees her. Almost half of New Yorks 8.3 million residents are living near or below the poverty line. She lives in a house run by a married couple. I never stopped reporting on her life. This is a pivotal, pivotal decade for Brooklyn. And they have 12 kids per home. And we're gonna talk a little bit about what that number is and how good that definition is. 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.. It was just the most devastating thing to have happened to her family. I had an early experience of this with Muslim immigrant communities in the United States that I reported on for years. You have to be from a low income family. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. And the reporter who wrote that, Andrea Elliott, wrote a series of stories about Dasani. But she saw an ad for Chanel perfume. Child Andrea Elliott: So Milton Hershey School was created by America's chocolate magnate Milton Hershey, who left behind no children. And these bubbles get, sort of, smaller and smaller, in which people are increasingly removed from these different strata of American life. St. Patty's Day, green and white. I think about it every day. Andrea Elliotts story of American poverty is non-fiction writing at Poverty Isnt the Problem - Naomi Schaefer Riley, I think she feels that the book was able to go to much deeper places and that that's a good thing. Andrea Elliott: And I think the middle ground we found was to protect them by not putting their last names in and refer to most of them by their nicknames. Chris Hayes: Hello. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. 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. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. The familys room at the Brooklyn shelter, with Dasani, right, sitting on the bed. Dasani's family of ten lives in one room of the Auburn Family Residence, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Now the bottle must be heated. This is according to her sister, because Joanie has since passed. She counts her siblings in pairs, just like her mother said. She was invited to be a part of Bill de Blasio's inaugural ceremony. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. And she sees a curious thing on the shelf of her local bodega. Delivery charges may apply, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Email withpod@gmail.com. Chapter 42 Now a sophomore, Dasani believes that her family is desperately fractured. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. The book is called Invisible Child. And you can't go there unless you're poor. And I could never see what the next turn would be. Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. We take the sticks and smash they eyes out! She would just look through the window. And a lot of the reporting was, "But tell me how you reacted to this. How you get out isn't the point. 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. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. (LAUGH) Because they ate so much candy, often because they didn't have proper food. And I just wonder, like, how you thought about it as you went through this project. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. In this extract from her new book, Invisible Child, we meet Dasani Coates in 2012, aged 11 and living in a shelter, Read an interview with Andrea Elliott here. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. She doesn't want to get out. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. And she became, for a moment, I wouldn't say celebrity, but a child who was being celebrated widely. IE 11 is not supported. 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. 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. And it's, I think, a social good to do so. Journalist Andrea Elliott followed a homeless child named Dasani for almost a decade, as she navigated family trauma and a system stacked against her. Now you fast forward to 2001. Multiply her story by thousands of children in cities across the U.S. living through the same experiences and the country confronts a crisis. They have learned to sleep through anything. Like, you do an incredible job on that. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. She has hit a major milestone, though. And he didn't really understand what my purpose was. In the city, I mean, I have a 132 hours of audio recorded of all my reporting adventures. Andrea Elliott: This is a work in progress. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. And, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what that experience is like for her. It was really tough: Andrea Elliott on writing about New Yorks homeless children. She attacked the mice. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American How an immersionist held up the story of one homeless (LAUGH) Like those kinds of, like, cheap colognes. For a time, she thrived there. How an "immersionist" held up the story Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. Web2 In an instant, she is midair, pulling and twisting acrobatically as the audience gasps at the might of this 12-year-old girl. So to what extent did Dasani show agency within this horrible setting? In the blur of the citys streets, Dasani is just another face. When she left New York City, her loved ones lost a crucial member of the family, and in her absence, things fell apart. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. And it's a little bit like her own mother had thought. I live in Harlem. Invisible Child CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, we move to New York. Elliott Invisible Child emerged from a series on poverty Elliott wrote for the New York Times in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement. And at that time in my career, it was 2006. And at first, she thrived. And she'd go to her window, and she talked about this a lot. But what about the ones who dont? They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. We could have a whole podcast about this one (LAUGH) issue. She's had major ups and major downs. Invisible Child It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. And for most of us, I would say, family is so important. She didn't know what it smelled like, but she just loved the sound of it. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. 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. Poverty and homelessness in the details: Dasani One of the first things Dasani will say is that she was running before she walked. They will drop to the floor in silence. She would wake up. But, of course, there's also the story of poverty, which has been a durable feature of American life for a very long time. The popping of gunshots. Shes Invisible Child I want people to read the book, which is gonna do a better job of this all because it's so, sort of, like, finely crafted. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Dasani's 20. A fascinating, sort of, strange (UNINTEL) generous institution in a lot of ways. And welcome to Why Is This Happening? And that's impossible to do without the person being involved and opening up and transparent. And I just spent so much time with this family and that continues to be the case. And then I wanted to find a target in New York, a good focal point in New York. And now, on this bright September morning, Dasani will take her grandmothers path once again, to the promising middle school two blocks away. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. I mean, I called her every day almost for years. (LAUGH) And the market produces massively too little affordable housing, which is in some ways part of the story of Dasani and her family, which is the city doesn't have enough affordable housing. And she said that best in her own words. Just a few blocks from townhouses that were worth millions of dollars. Webwhat kind of cancer did nancy kulp have; nickname for someone with a short attention span; costa rican spanish accent; nitric acid and potassium hydroxide exothermic or endothermic And I was so struck by many things about her experience of growing up poor. Her parents are avid readers. Lee-Lees cry was something else. 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. And I did some quick research and I saw that, in fact, the child poverty rate remained one in five. Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. 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. She is 20 years old. An interview with Andrea Elliott, author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. Her husband also had a drug history. he wakes to the sound of breathing. I have a lot of possibility. And then they tried to assert control. It's unpredictable. She will be sure to take a circuitous route home, traipsing two extra blocks to keep her address hidden. Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on May 16, 2022. Its stately neo-Georgian exterior dates back nearly a century, to when the building opened as a public hospital serving the poor. Family was everything for them. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. She was an amazing ethnographer and she and I had many conversations about what she called the asymmetry of power, that is this natural asymmetry that's built into any academic subject, reporter subject relationship. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. It's a really, really great piece of work. 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. You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. But nothing like this. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child. (BACKGROUND MUSIC) It is an incredible feat of reporting and writing. I do, though. So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. Like, "Why do I have to say, 'Isn't,' instead of, 'Ain't'?" Hershey likes to say that it wants to be the opposite of a legacy school, that if your kids qualify, that means that the school hasn't done its job, 'cause its whole purpose is to lift children out of poverty. 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.

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