Joshua Hunt explains that for him, lying was part of the "etiquette of poverty."
 | By Rachel Poser Sunday Review Editor, Opinion |
The top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent of American households hold close to the same amount of wealth. |
I bet you've read that somewhere before. It's one of the statistics most frequently cited to describe the problem of economic inequality in the United States today. Here are some others: Nearly two-thirds of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. An estimated 41 percent — 135 million people — are considered either poor or low-income. Eighteen percent of households earn less than $25,000 a year. Even before the pandemic hit, one in four Black families had a net worth of zero. |
But numbers, no matter how shocking, are abstract. They cannot speak to the texture of experience. That's why Times Opinion is launching Fortunes, a new series about the psychology of class. I asked each of the contributors to write a personal essay about an activity or phenomenon that shaped their understanding of class. In the coming months, you'll see essays about binge eating, plasma donation, the tradition of "vex money" among Caribbean American women, the act of butchering and more. Several of them, though not all, deal with the marks that poverty leaves on the body and mind, even after material circumstances have changed. |
One of the marks that poverty left on Joshua Hunt was that it made him a liar. Hunt writes in a Fortunes essay published today that, growing up in southeastern Alaska, lying was part of what he calls the "etiquette of poverty" — a code that was "not so much learned but imposed." "Lying to the landlord keeps a roof over our head," he writes. "Lying to the social worker keeps our family together." But Hunt describes how, as he got older, his lies of survival became something more pathological: "Instead of easing my passage through reality, lying became a way of denying it altogether." |
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