The Injustice of Place
Uncovering the History of America’s Internal Colonies
Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, and Timothy Nelson
More than a half century after the January morning when President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty, scholars and pundits alike are still debating its impact. Yet few, if any, of even the program’s most ardent defenders would claim the war has been won. Even in the years before the pandemic-induced economic crisis of 2020, when poverty was at its lowest level in a generation, hardship remained visible in the swelling demand at food pantries, high rates of eviction, and a sharp increase in child homelessness.
It is beyond time for a new way to measure poverty, and to identify and put in place new strategies to confront it. The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the History of America’s Internal Colonies harnesses the immense growth in the nation’s data infrastructure to propose a far more nuanced way to measure well-being than has ever before been possible. Our method reveals that the pockets of the nation where deep disadvantage is most keenly felt today are those in which poverty and other social ills have persisted for generations. With big data as our starting point, yet knowing it could only take us so far, we became students of the histories of these regions. Through embedded ethnographic research, we engaged intensely with five communities of deep disadvantage that are representative of these regions, observing and gathering stories. These sources reveal how centuries-old exploitation has retained its ugly grip through generations of violence, segregated schools, elite political corruption, and systemic racism embedded in government policy. Each of these mechanisms have mired these places in a structural cycle of poverty, precarious health, and a lack of mobility.