And he didn't really understand what my purpose was. This is a pivotal, pivotal decade for Brooklyn. That's what we tend to think of the homeless as. So there were more than 22,000 children in homeless shelters at that time in the main system. The ground beneath her feet once belonged to them. Nearly a quarter of Dasanis childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. This is an extract with me, your host, Chris Hayes. They are true New Yorkers. She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. And that carries a huge ethical quandary because you don't know, "Will they come to regret this later on?" Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. Andrea Elliott: So Milton Hershey School was created by America's chocolate magnate Milton Hershey, who left behind no children. And my process involved them. 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. Part of the government. Tempers explode. How you get out isn't the point. And then I wanted to find a target in New York, a good focal point in New York. Then the series ran at the end of 2013. It's a really, really great piece of work. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. What was striking to me was how little changed. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. And she sees a curious thing on the shelf of her local bodega. It's helping them all get through college. So it was strange to her. This is Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. The people I hang out with. Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. I would be off in the woods somewhere writing and I would call her. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and seven siblings in one of New York City's 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. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about your subjective perspective and your experience as this observer and the ethical complications (LAUGH) of that and talk a little bit about how you dealt with that right after we take this quick break. "What's Chanel perfume? WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the MontanaLibrary2Go digital collection. 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. She said, "Home is the people. For nine years, New York Times journalist Andrea Elliott followed the fortunes of one family living in poverty. 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. 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. It's in resources. I think she feels that the book was able to go to much deeper places and that that's a good thing. The brothers last: five-year-old Papa and 11-year-old Khaliq, who have converted their metal bunk into a boys-only fort. They have yet to stir. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. We're in a new century. Tweet us at the hashtag #WITHPod. The bodegas were starting. Dasani would call it my spy pen. This focus on language, this focus on speaking a certain way and dressing a certain way made her feel like her own family culture home was being rejected. First of all, I don't rely on my own memory. What's also true, though, is that as places like New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco and even Detroit and Washington, D.C. have increasingly gentrified, the experience of growing up poor is one of being in really close proximity with people who have money. So she knows what it's like to suddenly be the subject of a lot of people's attention. Chanel always says, "Blood is thicker than water." Her name was Dasani. But I would say that at the time, the parents saw that trust as an obstacle to any kind of real improvement because they couldn't access it because donors didn't want money going into the hands of parents with a drug history and also because they did continue to receive public assistance. I mean, whether you're poor--, Andrea Elliott: --or you're wealthy, (LAUGH) like, you know. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. 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. Theres nothing to be scared about.. Their sister is always first. She knows such yearnings will go unanswered. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. Now the bottle must be heated. And, actually, sometimes those stories are important because they raise alarms that are needed. One in five kids. Dasani landed at 39 Auburn Place more than two years ago. We just had all these meetings in the newsroom about what to do because the story was unfolding and it was gripping. She's transient." 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. That's so irresponsible." (LAUGH) She would try to kill them every week. Only together have they learned to navigate povertys systems ones with names suggesting help. "I just want to be a fly on the wall. 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. Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. I do, though. The people I grew up with. The turtle they had snuck into the shelter. 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. Their fleeting triumphs and deepest sorrows are, in Dasanis words, my heart. And demographers have studied this and I think that we still don't really know ultimately. Right? And I have this pen that's called live scribe and it records sound while I'm writing. Andrea joins to talk about her expanded coverage of the Coates family story, which is told in her new book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City.. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. All she has to do is climb the school steps. It comes loud and fast, with a staccato rhythm. And what was happening in New York was that we were reaching a kind of new level. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. And it was an extraordinary experience. And I just wonder, like, how you thought about it as you went through this project. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. Andrea Elliott: Absolutely. I mean, I have a lot of deep familiarity with the struggle of substance abuse in my own family. Still, the baby howls. She is tiny for an 11-year-old and quick to startle. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. I nvisible Child is a 2021 work of nonfiction by Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative journalist Andrea Elliott. 16K views, 545 likes, 471 loves, 3K comments, 251 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from EWTN: Starting at 8 a.m. Anyway, and I said, "Imagine I'm making a movie about your life. The other thing I would say is that we love the story of the kid who made it out. Andrea Elliott: This is a work in progress. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. Like, "Why do I have to say, 'Isn't,' instead of, 'Ain't'?" But with Shaka Ritashata (PH), I remember using all of the, sort of, typical things that we say as journalists. Thank you! Chapter 1. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. 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. Elliott spent The mice used to terrorise Dasani, leaving pellets and bite marks. And at that time in my career, it was 2006. And she became, for a moment, I wouldn't say celebrity, but a child who was being celebrated widely. 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. 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. And for most of us, I would say, family is so important. I had been there for a while. It never works. 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. Mice scurry across the floor. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" We break their necks. The movies." You have to be from a low income family. They can screech like alley cats, but no one is listening. I have a lot on my plate, she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth Fremson , it sparked direct action from incoming Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who had Dasani on the stage at his administrations inauguration in January 2014. Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. The Milton Hershey School is an incredible, incredible place. 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.. I was around a lot of folks like Lee Ann Fujii, who passed away. 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. I think what she has expressed to me, I can certainly repeat. 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. And at that time, I just had my second child and I was on leave at home in Washington, D.C. where I had grown up. There are parts of it that are painful. 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. You are seeing the other. You're not supposed to be watching movies. Shes Together with her siblings, Dasani has had to persevere in an environment riddled with stark inequality, hunger, violence, drug addiction and homelessness. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shes creating life on her own terms, Elliott says. I had not ever written a book. And I could never see what the next turn would be. She was unemployed. When she left New York City, her loved ones lost a crucial member of the family, and in her absence, things fell apart. No, I know. 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. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. The difference is in resources. And it's not because people didn't care or there wasn't the willpower to help Dasani. And even as you move into the 1820s and '30s when you have fights over, sort of, Jacksonian democracy and, kind of, popular sovereignty and will, you're still just talking about essentially white men with some kind of land, some kind of ownership and property rights. Nonetheless, she landed on the honor roll that fall. It's painful. Public assistance. 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. Dasani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. At that time when I met her when she was 11, Dasani would wake around 5 a.m. and the first thing she did, she always woke before all of her other siblings. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. 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. What did you think then?" She's a hilarious (LAUGH) person. She loved to sit on her windowsill. She doesn't want to get out. She will be sure to take a circuitous route home, traipsing two extra blocks to keep her address hidden. So I work very closely with audio and video tools. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. 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. Chris Hayes: Hello. Try to explain your work as much as you can." They will drop to the floor in silence. And so she wanted a strong army of siblings. And then their cover got blown and that was after the series ran. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. Named after the bottled water that signaled Brooklyns gentrification, her story has been featured in five front pages of the New York Times.
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