Race, Poverty and the Media

(Audio Post 1)

Kim Pearson: Okay, so we're talking with Roberto Santiago, and you are now an assignment editor at the Miami Herald, is that correct?

Mr. Roberto Santiago: No, I'm a senior staff writer for the Miami Herald.

KP: What are you working on these days?

RS: I'm working actually right now on a very special project. The front story which I'm actually working on this weekend is about a large community of divorced men who live in this run-down trailer park.

KP: Oh, really?

RS: Yeah, I hung around with them for about two days hearing their life stories. And it's a story essentially about poverty, really, about white poverty, white male poverty. How men in their late 40's and 50's and 60's and 70's now all have nothing and are barely, barely making it. It's not without humor, they have a strong sense of pride and a very strong sense of humor which you need in order to survive in that kind of a trailer park. It's also a trailer park which is rather expensive, it's just essentially an empty lot where you put your trailer and the landlord charges you [unintelligible amount] dollars a week, which to me is outrageous.

KP: How did you come across that story?

RS: During one of our more fierce hurricanes here, we had a lot of hurricanes last year, there was a man who was killed in the trailer park. In the midst of the hurricane, he heard loud thumping against his trailer and his roommate told him, don't go outside. But the man was curious about what was going on outside, which was a fatal mistake. He went outside, and that thumping of course was debris, heavy debris hitting the trailer, and a very heavy tree branch smacked him on the head and killed him.

KP: That's a tragic story.

RS: Yeah, so when I hung out there, just getting the story about this guy who everybody loved and he'd lived there forever, found that it was a community of men there. And divorced men, widowed men, and I thought to myself, after the hurricane season is over, I think I'll come back here and get their life stories, because it's fascinating. Issues of poverty really fascinate me because I think people especially down here really [unintelligible].

KP: You talked about the hurricane season and certainly one of the things that got highlighted with all of the horrible weather that happened in the southeast in this past year was that poverty has been relatively invisible in our major media. Why do you think that is?

RS: That's a great question. I don't know why it is. The curious thing, especially about the way poverty is in the media, you would think that the only poor people in America are minorities. There's this huge, huge underclass of white poverty here which people tend to set to the side, or at the worst make the butt of jokes on Jerry Springer or Jeff Foxworthy jokes. But it's a really hopeless situation here, these are good people, who through various misfortunes whether it's disability or divorce or tragedy, now find themselves in the kind of years where you're ready for retirement, just trying to figure out how to survive. And no one really cares about them, they have pejoratives tossed at them, which would not be permitted if you were to use those terms against people of color, but use those terms against white people, and it's a joke, the white trash and the Jerry Springer bits. And what gets me, especially down here in South Florida , unlike in New York where there are very sincere attempts to remedy these situations, here it's kind of shrugged off. If you're poor down here or if you're disabled down here, you're going to have a hard time finding services. When I was at the Daily News social issues were always my passion, and I'm getting back into that down here just because I'm just seeing things down here which are just so distasteful.

(Audio Post 2)

KP: You were starting to talk about some of the areas of focus in your earlier career and I wanted to talk to you about that. It's interesting to me that you're working on this story about this community of poor, southern white men. Since race and poverty has been an area of focus in much of your earlier work, and you yourself are from Harlem and you describe yourself as black and Puerto Rican, and have written about that. You've done some pretty daring things in your work, such as the story you did for the Daily News where you posed as a day laborer. I'm interested in how your identity and your ethnicity and your background have played a role in some of the stories that you've done and the things that you've focused on.

RS: It's at the core. I grew up very, very poor in Spanish Harlem, we grew up in the tenements. I had a set of amazing parents who molded me and my sister. My sister went on to Princeton and then Harvard Law School . I'm a journalist, a graduate of {?} college, worked at various newspapers and magazines. It's at the core, I consider myself, although I'm a middle class homeowner living in the suburbs, it's at the core of my existence, I'm a working class guy. I'm still that New York boy from Spanish Harlem and always will be. I won't take crap from people, and I don't like seeing people taking crap. And down here I just see people surrendering to abuse and afraid to complain and voice their concerns, and you can't do that. You cannot allow anyone to abuse you. You just can't allow that. There are ways to achieve justice and you have to pursue it.

KP: You bring your New York attitude to it.

RS: Right is right, and if you're being put down or being abused, you can't allow that. Unfortunately down here, it happens in all cities, but I guess because I'm an outsider, a New Yorker coming down here, it's a little more pronounced, at least the way I see it. It really just hits you in the face more. Yesterday, just hanging around there, I just became very angry that people have to live like this. There just seems to be this hopelessness, how can a guy who's working a minimum wage job, divorced, in his 50's, has to take the bus two hour to get to work, two hours to get back, and can barely meet his bills or get enough to eat, a guy with no education, how can he step it up a bit? When you don't have that skill step, when you don't have luck even.

KP: There are a lot of folks like that who come to believe that the reason they're in the situation they're in is because people of color have been given, they believe, opportunities that would have gone to them.

RS: Yeah, which is a laugh because… I think one thing with the common denominator is that when you look at {unintelligible} as a whole, what color they are whether it's white or black or Hispanic or whatever category, it's all the same. It's kind of laughable because you would think that this group would be the more privileged, and of course they're not. Neither group are because they're both at the bottom. And they're both struggling at the bottom. One thing that actually irritates me is giving the perception that the minority poor is the standard in America when there's actually a tremendous poverty problem here and all across America and worst of all there's this attitude as if, tough for them, who cares?

Comments

Back to KimPearson.net