Here’s another story. My friend from across the country was pregnant and already a mother of two when her husband lost his job. She signed up for WIC to receive a monthly ration of brown rice and government cheese, but she was required to take “nutrition classes” before she could get the food.
At the class, a volunteer nutrition teacher held up a banana.
“Do you know what this is?” asked the teacher.
This was not the beginning to a crude joke. The teacher was serious. “This is a banana. Has anyone ever tasted a banana?”
It just went on from there.
Why do so many people presume that the poor are stupid? I think that the people leading these classes have the best of intentions; they want to teach poor people instead of just giving handouts. They want to help break the cycle of poverty by informing while they help. They want to lift us out of the gutter of our ignorance. But why do they think we’re ignorant? And not only ignorant, but stupid?
In an era when it’s common knowledge that so many college educated people are out of jobs and in poverty, why do they presume that a woman applying for WIC doesn’t know what a banana is?
Why would they serve a poor woman a stew they’d never be able to eat themselves– quit school and your job to take classes, in exchange for a used car seat?
The first step towards helping someone is empathy. Empathy means putting yourself in another’s shoes, trying to understand where they’re coming from even if you think they’re wrong. Empathy means recognizing another person as someone different from, but fundamentally similar to, yourself. This isn’t an alien thing in an alien situation, it’s a human like me. Her plight might be my plight, and if it were I’d feel similarly to the way she does, because we are both humans.
I would feel patronized if there was a poster at peeing-eye level in the bathroom, explaining the dangers of premarital sex. After all, I wouldn’t be at the women’s center urinating in a cup, if I didn’t realize there were dangers. I buy bananas at the grocery store because they’re a tasty yet inexpensive fruit and I learned in the first grade that fruit is part of a healthy diet, therefore poor people probably do so as well. I need a resume to get a job, so working on that with a poor person might do him more good than informing him that drugs are illegal.
That’s how empathy works. We don’t begin by presuming a person is stupid; we begin by presuming that they’re a person, like us.
The next time I was pretty sure I was pregnant, I went downtown to the women’s health center several blocks from the pro-life pregnancy center. I sat in the dank, soviet-looking waiting room, staring at the cinder block walls. I took my test in a dim little bathroom with no poster at seated eye level warning me about sex– though there was a poster with common symptoms of STDs and hotline numbers I could call to report rape and domestic abuse if I needed to, information a pregnant woman in any social class might need. A real nurse in a lab coat took information from me as we waited for my result. She assured me that the records were confidential and protected by patient privilege. She did not try to make small talk establishing that she knew me.
When she asked what birth control I used, I said “the sympto-thermal method.”
She looked confused for a moment. “Oh, fertility awareness?”
“Yes,” I said. “Cervical mucus and basal body temperature.”
She smiled, nodded and jotted it down. Apparently, to her, what I did about my fertility was my own business.
We had a conversation about my health and living situation, and she treated me like an adult. I didn’t have to take classes to earn anything.
Was the women’s health center a better place to get a pregnancy test? I don’t know. I disliked both of them. But I liked being treated with empathy a lot better.
When you start from a position of empathy, you stand a chance at helping.
Helping people is supposed to be the point, isn’t it?
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