Many thanks to Donna Martinez for bringing P.J. O’Rourke’s essay, They Hate Poor People, to the attention of readers of our Right Angles blog. I agree with her – read the whole thing. Twice.
I wanted to highlight a passage that brought back memories. O’Rourke writes,
Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people—except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English. Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place. And the elites have never been poor themselves. Although there was that time in graduate school, between research grants, when they had to go without sushi for a week.
When I was a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, I observed the hypocrisy described above. In addition to young singles, hipsters, and the like, university faculty, staff, and students never thought twice about expanding the “bubble” by buying relatively inexpensive homes or properties in low-income areas close to downtown C’Ville and sending the previous owners into neighboring counties. It was gentrification by those who claimed to care deeply about the plight of the poor.
Fortunately, I never had to give up sushi as a graduate student.
