We have a period where basically from the New Deal to 1980, inequality in the country shrinks and then the story, as you well know, from 1980 to now is just skyrocketing inequality. And at first, she thrived. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. Chanel. How you get out isn't the point. And a lot of the reporting was, "But tell me how you reacted to this. I just find them to be some of the most interesting people I've ever met. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child. Andrea Elliott: Okay. She spent eight years falling the story of Dasani Coates. Elliott hopes Invisible Child readers see people beyond the limiting labels of homeless and poor and address the deep historical context that are part of these complicated problems, she says. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. And I met Dasani right in that period, as did the principal. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. Sometimes she doesnt have to blink. Right? To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. Chris Hayes: We don't have to go through all of the crises and challenges and brutal things that this family has to face and overcome and struggled through. Chris Hayes: That is such a profound point about the structure of American life and the aspirations for it. Thank you! Dasani is not an anomaly. And they did attend rehab at times. It's on the west side just west of downtown. She is sure the place is haunted. They are true New Yorkers. Web2 In an instant, she is midair, pulling and twisting acrobatically as the audience gasps at the might of this 12-year-old girl. This was and continues to be their entire way of being, their whole reason. We just had all these meetings in the newsroom about what to do because the story was unfolding and it was gripping. And through the years of American journalism, and some of the best journalism that has been produced, is about talking about what that looks like at the ground level. And you just have to know that going in and never kid yourself that it has shifted. She saw this ad in a glossy magazine while she was, I believe, at a medical clinic. It's painful. Right? This week, an expansion of her reporting comes out within the pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.. And you didn't really have firsthand access to what it looks like, what it smells like to be wealthy. ANDREA ELLIOTT, All you could buy at the local bodega at that time was Charlie. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. Chris Hayes: Yeah. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count. There are a lot of different gradations of what that poverty looks like. (modern). It wasn't just that she was this victim of the setting. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. I can read you the quote. She had a lot of issues. All rights reserved. Like, these two things that I think we tend to associate with poverty and, particularly, homelessness, which is mental illness and substance abuse, which I think get--, Chris Hayes: --very much, particularly in the way that in an urban environment, get codified in your head of, like, people who were out and, you know, they're dealing with those two issues and this is concentrated. Offering a rare look into how homelessness directs the course of a life, New York Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott was allowed to follow Dasani's family for almost 10 years. Nuh-uh. She's seeing all of this is just starting to happen. Different noises mean different things. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequalitytold through the crucible of one remarkable girl. Chris Hayes: So she's back in the city. And a lot of things then happen after that. I saw in Supreme and in Chanel a lot of the signs of someone who is self-medicating. And, really, the difference is, like, the kind of safety nets, the kind of resources, the kind of access people have--. They would look at them and say, "How could they have eight children? Before that, she had been in and out of shelters with her family. But when you remove her from the family system, this was predictable that the family would struggle, because she was so essential to that. Dasani gazes out of the window from the one room her family of 10 shared in the Brooklyn homeless shelter where they lived for almost four years. I mean, that is one of many issues. She spent eight years falling the story Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. And about 2,000 kids go there. And we can talk about that more. I nvisible Child is a 2021 work of nonfiction by Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative journalist Andrea Elliott. Hidden in a box is Dasanis pet turtle, kept alive with bits of baloney and the occasional Dorito. And her first thought was, "Who would ever pay for water?" Chanel always says, "Blood is thicker than water." I want people to read the book, which is gonna do a better job of this all because it's so, sort of, like, finely crafted. In this moving but occasionally flat narrative, Elliott follows Dasani for eight years, beginning in 2012 when she was 11 years old and living in But with Shaka Ritashata (PH), I remember using all of the, sort of, typical things that we say as journalists. She didn't know what it smelled like, but she just loved the sound of it. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. And even as you move into the 1820s and '30s when you have fights over, sort of, Jacksonian democracy and, kind of, popular sovereignty and will, you're still just talking about essentially white men with some kind of land, some kind of ownership and property rights. So by the time I got to Dasani's family, this was a very different situation. She changed diapers, fed them and took them to school. She is 20 years old. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. Dasani was growing up at a time where, you know, the street was in some ways dangerous depending on what part of Brooklyn you are, but very, very quickly could become exciting. It, sort of, conjured this new life as this new life was arriving. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. Dasani squints to check the date. The journalist will never forget the first time she saw the family unit traveling in a single file line, with mother Chanel Sykes leading the way as she pushed a stroller. Why Is This Happening? And this ultimately wound up in the children being removed in October of 2015, about ten months into Dasani's time at Hershey. They wound up being placed at Auburn. Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. In this extract from her new book, Invisible Child, we meet Dasani Coates in 2012, aged 11 and living in a shelter, Read an interview with Andrea Elliott here. Still, the baby howls. Her siblings will soon be scrambling to get dressed and make their beds before running to the cafeteria to beat the line. But she saw an ad for Chanel perfume. This is typical of Dasani. By the time I got to Dasani's family, I had that stack and I gave it to them. The citys wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. And that really cracked me up because any true New Yorker likes to brag about the quality of our tap water. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. I mean, whether you're poor--, Andrea Elliott: --or you're wealthy, (LAUGH) like, you know. If you use the word homeless, usually the image that comes to mind is of a panhandler or someone sleeping on subway grates. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about your subjective perspective and your experience as this observer and the ethical complications (LAUGH) of that and talk a little bit about how you dealt with that right after we take this quick break. At Hershey, I feel like a stranger, like I really don't belong. The people I grew up with. WebInvisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. They were in drug treatment programs for most of the time that I was with them, mostly just trying to stay sober and often succeeding at it. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. A stunning debut, the book covers eight formative years in the life of an intelligent and imaginative young girl in a Brooklyn homeless shelter as she balances poverty, family, and opportunity. She actually did a whole newscast for me, which I videotaped, about Barack Obama becoming the first Black president. Either give up your public assistance and you can have this money or not. They follow media carefully. It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. She irons her clothes with a hair straightener. She has a full wardrobe provided to her. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. Section eight, of course, is the federal rental voucher system for low income people to be able to afford housing. And so I have seen my siblings struggle for decades with it and have periods of sobriety and then relapse. She was a single mother. And at that time, I just had my second child and I was on leave at home in Washington, D.C. where I had grown up. Chris Hayes: Dasani is 11 years old. Andrea Elliott: I met Dasani while I was standing outside of Auburn Family Residence, which is a city run, decrepit shelter, one of two city run shelters that were notorious for the conditions that children were forced to live in with their families. They cough or sometimes mutter in the throes of a dream. Dasani tells herself that brand names dont matter. But every once in a while, when by some miracle she scores a pair of Michael Jordans, she finds herself succumbing to the same exercise: she wears them sparingly, and only indoors, hoping to keep them spotless. And she tried to stay the path. Email withpod@gmail.com. If she cries, others answer. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. Mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the buildings predators. Andrea Elliott: --it (LAUGH) because she was trying to show me how relieved she was that our brutal fact check process was over and that she didn't have to listen to me say one more line. Now you fast forward to 2001. Dasani slips down three flights of stairs, passing a fire escape where drugs and weapons are smuggled in. The ground beneath her feet once belonged to them. Andrea Elliott: Absolutely. And, of course, not. Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. Chris Hayes: Hello. And that carries a huge ethical quandary because you don't know, "Will they come to regret this later on?" We take the sticks and smash they eyes out! Roaches crawl to the ceiling. And obviously, you know, one of the things I think is interesting and comes through here is, and I don't know the data on this, but I have found in my life as a reporter and as a human being along various parts of the Titanic ship that is the United States of America that there's a lot of substance abuse at every level. This family is a family that prides itself on so many things about its system as a family, including its orderliness. I live in Harlem. And so they had a choice. And at the same time, what if these kids ten years from now regret it? Chris Hayes speaks with Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott about her book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City., Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City. She loves being first the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to win a fight, the first to make the honour roll. And there's a amazing, amazing book called Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc which takes place in the Bronx, which is in a somewhat similar genre. I mean, I think everyone knows there are a lot of poor people, particularly a lot of poor people in urban centers, although there are a lot of poor people in rural areas. Clothing donations. And that didn't go over well because he just came (LAUGH) years ago from Egypt. And, you know, this was a new school. About six months after the series ran, we're talking June of 2014, Dasani by then had missed 52 days of the school year, which was typical, 'cause chronic absenteeism is very, very normal among homeless children. We suffocate them with the salt!. They did go through plenty of cycles of trying to fix themselves. It's massively oversubscribed. Jane Clayson Guest Host, Here & NowJane Clayson is Here & Now's guest host. Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Andrea Elliott. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. There are several things that are important to know about this neighborhood and what it represents. We rarely look at all the children who don't, who are just as capable. And she jumped on top of my dining room table and started dancing. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America. Andrea Elliott: I didn't really have a beat. She liked the sound of it. She lasted more than another year. And so putting that aside, what really changed? Its the point Elliott says she wants to get across in Invisible Child: We need to focus less on escaping problems of poverty and pivot attention to finding the causes and solutions to those problems. She would wake up. Journalist Andrea Elliott followed a homeless child named Dasani for almost a decade, as she navigated family trauma and a system stacked against her. Shes In October of 2012, I was on the investigative desk of The New York Times. How did you respond? Try to explain your work as much as you can." Lee-Lees cry was something else. But she told me, and she has told me many times since, that she loves the book. And then, of course, over time, what happens in the United States is that we become less and less materially equal. I focused on doing projects, long form narrative pieces that required a lot of time and patience on the part of my editors and a lot of swinging for the fences in terms of you don't ever know how a story is going to pan out. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth Fremson , it sparked direct action from incoming Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who had Dasani on the stage at his administrations inauguration in January 2014. And she'd go to her window, and she talked about this a lot. Shes not alone. So let's start with what was your beat at the time when you wrote the first story? INVISIBLE CHILD POVERTY, SURVIVAL & HOPE IN AN AMERICAN CITY. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. Slipping out from her covers, Dasani goes to the window. She wants to stay in her neighborhood and with her family. Back then, from the ghettos isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. Had been the subject of tremendous amounts of redlining and disinvestment and panic peddling that had essentially chased white homeowners out. Webwhat kind of cancer did nancy kulp have; nickname for someone with a short attention span; costa rican spanish accent; nitric acid and potassium hydroxide exothermic or endothermic They have learned to sleep through anything. Her hope for herself is to keep, as she's put it to me, her family and her culture close to her while also being able to excel.. And one thing this book's gotten me to see is how the word homeless really is a misnomer, because these people have such a sense of belonging, especially in New York City. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. Sleek braids fall to one side of Dasanis face, clipped by yellow bows. But at that time, just like it was at the time that There Are No Children Here came out, it's the highest child poverty rate of almost any wealthy nation. WebRT @usaunify: When Dasani Left Home. She will tell them to shut up. And then I was like, "I need to hear this. asani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. She just thought, "Who could afford that?". Chris Hayes: I want to, sort of, take a step back because I want to continue with what you talk about as, sort of, these forces and the disintegration of the family and also track through where Dasani goes from where she was when she's 11. Except for Baby Lee-Lee, who wails like a siren. This is the type of fact that nobody can know. Chris Hayes: Her parents, Supreme and Chanel, you've, sort of, made allusion to this, but they both struggle with substance abuse. Andrea Elliott: And I think the middle ground we found was to protect them by not putting their last names in and refer to most of them by their nicknames. The light noises bring no harm the colicky cries of an infant down the hall, the hungry barks of the Puerto Rican ladys chihuahuas, the addicts who wander the projects, hitting some crazy high. You have a greater likelihood of meeting someone who might know of a job or, "Hey, there's someone in my building who needs a such." And there was a lot of complicated feelings about that book, as you might imagine. Her siblings are her greatest solace; their separation her greatest fear. So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. And that was a new thing for me. And she talked about them brutally. I got a fork and a spoon. And I pulled off from my shelf this old copy of Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, which is a classic incredible book about two brothers in the Chicago housing projects in the 1980s. It was a constant struggle. Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. And her principal had this idea that she should apply to a school that I had never heard of called the Milton Hershey School, which is a school in Hershey, Pennsylvania that tries to reform poor children. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. Multiply her story by thousands of children in cities across the U.S. living through the same experiences and the country confronts a crisis. Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. Every once in a while, it would. She fixes her gaze on that distant temple, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise. Elliott says she was immediately drawn to 11-year-old Dasani not only because of the girls ability to articulate injustices in her life, but how Desani held so much promise for herself. Elliott first met Dasani, her parents and her siblings in Brooklyns Fort Greene neighborhood in 2012. The 10-year-olds next: Avianna, who snores the loudest, and Nana, who is going blind. But she was not at all that way with the mice. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and She doesn't want to have to leave. She is the least of Dasanis worries. This was north of Fort Greene park. So this was the enemy. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. She's had major ups and major downs. This is the type of fact that she recites in a singsong, look-what-I-know way. Nonetheless, she landed on the honor roll that fall. But I would say that at the time, the parents saw that trust as an obstacle to any kind of real improvement because they couldn't access it because donors didn't want money going into the hands of parents with a drug history and also because they did continue to receive public assistance. A movie has characters." That, to be honest, is really home. And I had an experience where someone I knew and was quite close to is actually an anthropologist doing field work in Henry Horner Homes after There Are No Children Here. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. Day after day, they step through a metal detector as security guards search their bags, taking anything that could be used as a weapon a bottle of bleach, a can of Campbells soup. It's, sort of, prismatic because, as you're talking about the separation of a nation in terms of its level of material comfort or discomfort, right, or material want, there's a million different stories to tell of what that looks like. But the spacial separation of Chicago means that they're not really cheek and jowl next to, you know, $3 million town homes or anything like that. She was the second oldest, but technically, as far as they were all concerned, she was the boss of the siblings and a third parent, in a sense. Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. And my process involved them. So to what extent did Dasani show agency within this horrible setting? I think she feels that the book was able to go to much deeper places and that that's a good thing. They just don't have a steady roof over their head. It's still too new of a field of research to say authoritatively what the impact is, good or bad, of gentrification on long term residents who are lower income. So in There Are No Children Here, you know, if you go over there to the Henry Horner Homes on the west side, you do have the United Center. She held the Bible for Tish James, the incoming then-public advocate who held Dasani's fist up in the air and described her to the entire world as, "My new BFF.". They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. (LAUGH) I don't know what got lost in translation there. After Dasanis family left the homeless shelter, she was accepted to the Milton Hershey School, a tuition-free boarding school for low-income children in Pennsylvania. Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. It's why do so many not? Her polo shirt and khakis have been pressed with a hair straightener, because irons are forbidden at the Auburn shelter. Andrea, thank you so much. But basically, Dasani came to see that money as something for the future, not an escape from poverty. Sometimes it'll say, like, "Happy birthday, Jay Z," or, you know. It's called Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. Her parents are avid readers. So it was strange to her. And I said, "Yes." WebInvisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. By Ryan Chittum. But you know what a movie is. Dasani opens a heavy metal door, stepping into the dark corridor. Come on, says her mother, Chanel, who stands next to Dasani. And she wants to be able to thrive there. In 2013, the story of a young girl named Dasani Coates took up five front pages in The New York Times. I do, though. I think what she has expressed to me, I can certainly repeat. She has hit a major milestone, though. In New York, I feel proud. I took 14 trips to see her at Hershey. And so I also will say that people would look at Dasani's family from the outside, her parents, and they might write them off as, you know, folks with a criminal record. WebInvisible Child, highlights the life struggles of eleven-year-old Dasani Coates, a homeless child living with her family in Brooklyn, New York. And one of the things that I found interesting is that one of the advantages to being within such close proximity to wealthy people is that people would drop off donations at the shelter. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. The turtle they had snuck into the shelter. Two sweeping sycamores shade the entrance, where smokers linger under brick arches. Random House, 2021. But it remains the case that a shocking percentage of Americans live below the poverty line. We're gonna both pretend we've seen movies. There definitely are upsides. It makes me feel like theres something going on out there, she says. She's transient." And they were things that I talked about with the family a lot. Mice scurry across the floor. Invisible Child emerged from a series on poverty Elliott wrote for the New York Times in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement. You can tell that story, as we have on the podcast, about the, sort of, crunched middle class, folks who want to afford college and can't. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. The Child Protection Agency began monitoring Dasanis parents on suspicion of parental neglect, Elliott says. ", I think if we look at Dasani's trajectory, we see a different kind of story. She felt that the streets became her family because she had such a rocky childhood. But at the end of the day, they are stronger than anything you throw at them. And I had read it in high school. Chris Hayes: Yeah. Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. She was invited to be a part of Bill de Blasio's inaugural ceremony. He said, "Yes. And it really was for that clientele, I believe. People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. And there's some poverty reporting where, like, it feels, you know, a little gross or it feels a little, like, you know, alien gaze-y (LAUGH) for lack of a better word. It was just the most devastating thing to have happened to her family. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. Well, every once in a while, a roach here and there in New York. Her name was Dasani. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. She would change her diaper. At that time when Chanel was born in '78, her mother was living in a place where it was rare to encounter a white person. (LAUGH), Chris Hayes: You know? 4 Dasani blinks, looking out at And those questions just remained constantly on my mind. Part of the government. Then Jim Ester and the photographer (LAUGH) who was working with me said, "We just want to shadow you.". Criminal justice. You know, that's part of it. Despite the circumstances, Dasani radiated with potential. Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. So I think that is what's so interesting is you rightly point out that we are in this fractured country now. Elliott writes that few children have both the depth of dishonest troubles and the height of her promise., But Dasanis story isnt about an extraordinary child who made it out of poverty. And that's really true of the poor. And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. It has more than a $17 billion endowment. Hershey likes to say that it wants to be the opposite of a legacy school, that if your kids qualify, that means that the school hasn't done its job, 'cause its whole purpose is to lift children out of poverty. It wasn't a safe thing.