This November, our Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit will feature Andrea Elliott, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Invisible Child, as one of our keynote speakers. Our staff has been reading (or re-reading) Invisible Child in preparation, and we are excited to delve deeper into the book and the implications of Dasani’s story. Today our Communications Manager, Jet McDonald, is sharing their insights from the book so far, and some questions we hope you’ll join us in exploring this fall.
Without effective storytelling, the push for change could not be grounded in the reality of lived experiences. To that end, journalist Andrea Elliott published a series of five articles for the New York Times in 2013 that provided a window into the life of Dasani Coates, a child attending middle school while living in the city-run Auburn Family Residence shelter with her mother Chanel, her stepfather Supreme, and her siblings. Elliott then expanded the project into the book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, which follows Dasani over the span of eight years. Many readers may find their beliefs about U.S. poverty to be radically challenged by Elliott’s portrait of Dasani.
The ‘American city’ in question is New York, though the labyrinth of barriers faced by Dasani’s family can be found all over the U.S.: waves of gentrification accompanied by an extreme lack of affordable housing, inconsistent food access, social safety nets with significant holes, mass incarceration fueled by criminalization in place of support, generational trauma, persistent race and class-based hierarchies, and public policy that fails to create real pathways out of poverty in the face of unchecked capitalism. Elliott’s lens periodically zooms out to illustrate connections between systems and individual lives:
With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline.
But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani’s found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered ‘a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.’
The idea of a ‘pleasurable shelter experience’ is maddeningly inaccurate in light of Dasani’s day-to-day encounters with pests like mice, nonfunctioning utilities, cramped living quarters, frightening interactions, regular surveillance and restrictions, and health hazards. The ‘pleasurable shelter experience’ claim further implies that residents like Dasani and her family are actively choosing Auburn over other options, perhaps even as a personal failure.
The truth of course is much more nuanced and uncomfortable, as Elliott describes years of attempts by Dasani’s parents to navigate a maze of disjointed social services, cope with addiction, and find and maintain opportunities (even when it means shoveling snow for money while injured, for example). Above all, Chanel, Supreme, Dasani, and her siblings value the unity of the family and maintain it as long as they can: Dasani learns, understandably, to lie to government workers instead of risking the possibility of herself and the other children being removed from her parents’ care. Dasani is parentified beyond her years, caring for her siblings and keeping a hyperaware eye on her mother and stepfather’s emotions. As a result she finds herself exhausted and angry at school and struggles to stay out of trouble, in spite of her fondness for both learning and her school. She is periodically uprooted, which brings with it the re-organization of strategies and resources each time. Her experiences demonstrate the deeply interconnected nature of education, housing, food security, and other human needs (and therefore the deeply interconnected nature of these factors as policy areas in need of major rethinking).
Part of what makes Invisible Child so compelling is Elliott’s inclusion of herself as a factor in the family’s story, an acknowledgement that no writer is a totally objective fly-on-the-wall. Total objectivity is of course an impossible myth, and Elliott’s synthesis of her own humanity and emotional investment is far more trustworthy than a false claim of distance. As a writer and communications professional myself, I am very interested in Elliott’s process, which included hundreds of interviews. As with any instance in which one is conveying a story that is not primarily one’s own, there may be no flawless approach. Yet the endeavor to collaboratively generate awareness remains worthwhile.
Dasani is the focal point of Invisible Child, but Elliott braids together the stories of Chanel and Supreme as well—individuals who were influenced by the presence of addiction and trauma in their own childhoods. In this way, Elliott’s work reaches beyond a common, but incomplete conclusion—that children, unlike adults, are of course deserving of grace and resources (as Elliott points out, the needs of children specifically “gave rise to Americas’ modern welfare program”). The book encourages a more universal understanding, as no outcome occurs in a vacuum.
Elliott’s exploration of Dasani’s family history reaches back through prior generations’ experiences, including slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and the exclusion of Black people from programs meant to give individuals and families an economic jumpstart. Such history points to the bitter irony of ideas like pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Beyond structural barriers, Elliott also points to the social determinants of health, given the physical and psychological impact of poverty. She cites a study on child brain development:
[By] age four, the poor children had developed less “gray matter,” the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional behavior, problem solving, memory, and other skills critical to learning. Chronic stress also produces higher amounts of cortisol, the hormone that promotes survival. To be “soaked in cortisol,” says Pollak, changes the brain’s architecture.
Dasani’s distress persists as she later attends the Milton Hershey School and finds herself conflicted about enjoying this positive next step that no other family member has been granted, and further conflicted about code-switching as she tries to move smoothly between worlds. Though opportunities like this unique school certainly help many students, what does it say about our systems that such access is the exception not the rule?
The book holds multiple truths at once: individual decisions do carry weight but also can never be removed from their context; family connections can be both taxing and nourishing in turn; and any one person contains an entire universe of social identities, struggle, love, grief, trauma, hope, and creative survival.
Readers may be left with several conclusions about the past and present of oppression, as well as ample important questions for further reflection. What systems-level changes would best combat pervasive cycles of marginalization? How are the problems Elliott illustrates relevant in each of our lives, and what biases impact our perceptions of these problems? What makes it possible for someone to be ‘invisible,’ and what would it mean for people not directly impacted by poverty or racism to act in solidarity? What, ultimately, could equity look like, and what do we each owe to the work of getting us there?
Empower Missouri invites you to consider questions like these with us in multiple upcoming events. As noted, Andrea Elliott will be one of the Keynote Speakers at Empower Missouri’s 2024 Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit on November 12th and 13th, in Columbia, Missouri. Early Bird Tickets for this event are available at EmpowerMissouri.org/summit. We will also discuss Invisible Child in our September Advocates Book Club sessions on Zoom on September 24th. We hope you’ll join us for one or both of these events, and thank you for exploring the immeasurable power of storytelling with us.
Spanish 
English