A coalition of activists are calling a statement by McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski "ignorant, racist and unacceptable." That’s an apt description of a text Kempczinski sent about the shooting deaths of two Chicago children in which he said, "the parents failed those kids ... ”
The CEO quickly confessed to displaying “a very narrow world view” when he reacted to the deaths of 7 year old Jaslyn Adams, who was shot at a McDonald’s, and 13 year old Adam Toledo, who was shot by police.
He wrote to employees that:
“I have not walked in the shoes of Adam’s or Jaslyn’s family and so many others who are facing a very different reality.”
Kempczinski leads a major corporation that could address economic suffering with far more ambitious plans than it has released so far to raise wages and improve working conditions. We eagerly await him demonstrating his sincerity by doing just that.
For now, we are struck by his apology, which seemed more self-aware than common corporate spin. What Kempczinksi said does get to the heart of the problem – both with his text and with a country where one in three families cannot afford an adequate supply of diapers. There is a striking national ignorance about what poverty is actually like and why people fall into it.
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Our research shows that a toxic slurry of racism and economic prejudice projects responsibility for human suffering onto the people doing the suffering, while disregarding structural injustices. In the richest society in human history and the one “conceived in Liberty,” poverty and racism endure because we are too busy blaming victims to look for real causes.
A national poll split about evenly on whether poverty was caused more by “people not doing enough to help themselves” or “circumstances beyond their control,” with wealthier respondents more likely to attribute poverty to insufficient effort. This flies in the face of decades of flat wages, skyrocketing housing costs, eroding economic mobility, and an unprecedented transfer of wealth to those already rich. Racial and economic segregation have been so strictly imposed in our housing, education and other systems that people of different means don’t know each other, and the privileged don’t see what a struggle it is for people with low wage jobs to simply survive.
That knowledge could change everything.
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Researching U.S. poverty, we kept meeting people lacking running water in their homes or using tap water that was unsafe. Dotting the country, we discovered towns not much different than Flint. We talked to a woman in a Native Alaskan community where people must transport their own sewage in plastic bags to the dump. Sometimes the contents leak and quickly freeze. When the spring thaw comes, parents don’t want their children to play outside, because human waste runs in the streets. We’ve spent our careers working with and for people in poverty. Yet we were shocked by the prevalence of water poverty in the country.
We were not shocked by how common it is to work two or more jobs, many in fast food and health care. But we continue to be taken aback by the resulting pain. One of the saddest days of our research was spent talking with middle school girls who spoke about how little they saw their hard-working parents. Another day we listened to a nursing home worker blame herself for her teenager’s run-ins with the law. “I wasn’t there!” she confessed. No, she was forced to work double shifts at low wages to keep her family fed.
We saw parenting that could only be described as heroic: a dad who had to take a grueling low-pay farm job because he lacked child care and needed work that matched school hours; a mom who went without period supplies to stretch her budget; and another mom who “eats light” so that her children don’t go to bed hungry.
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It’s no surprise that Kempczinski can’t see these people. He’s in a corporate office, not a drive-thru. He certainly won’t see poverty sufficiently covered in the media, which reduces the economy to the stock market. He is a typical, privileged person whose view of people in poverty is formed by stereotypes. But like all of us who have not walked in the well-worn shoes of the working poor, he has an enormous opportunity to change himself and our society.
It starts with seeing how people actually live.
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Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox are the authors of Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty.