Poverty is about more than a lack of money

When I moved to Edinburgh, I was surprised that most street beggers were ethnic Scots. Although Glasgow is a multi-racial city, the face of abject poverty in Edinburgh is white. In Edinburgh, poverty does not go hand-in-hand with race. It goes hand-in-hand with class. And to protect myself from poverty’s more public and violent manifestations, I have had to learn to discern class indicators, like accents and clothing.

As a Canadian, I find this outrageous and sad, but as someone who shares public spaces with the poor, I also find it necessary. Because my husband and I do not have a car, we are not insulated from others too poor to run a car. Because my husband and I live near a slum, we are not insulated from the slums. We cannot pretend the poor do not exist, or that the poor live elsewhere, or that the poor have no influence over our lives. We are too poor to avoid the poor; the best interests of the poor are in our best interests, too.

The father of a friend of mine is in his 90s; he remembers a time when all that stood between a poor urban Scottish child and starvation was his mother’s knowledge of how to make soup from bones. Those days are over, thank heavens, but instead of nourishing soup, the poor urban Scottish child eats ready-meals and American fast food. This man remembers also that poor urban Scottish teenagers left school for work at 14. That too is over, but excelling at school is now often denigrated as “posh.” This man married his wife shortly after she became pregnant — “I was going to anyway,” he mutters. Today this would be considered an extraordinary thing to do. Low-income single mothers in the UK are given, among other things, priorty for public housing and £500 to offset the costs of baby supplies. That the state has replaced fathers is a cliché.