I went home recently and drove down Dick Woods Road, what we used to call the dump road before they named all the roads and put up nice green si= gns in the whole county

I went home recently and dr= ove down Dick Woods Road, what we used to call the dump road before they named all the roads and put = up nice green signs in the whole county. Things have been changing there.&nb= sp; More pavement, more SUV’s. I left for the city twelve years a= go and learned about city politics of displacement and gentrification, and then lo= oked back and realized it can happen in the rural places too. My foster father told me 18,000 pe= ople a year are moving to the county I’m from. Good for business, he says. Bad for poor people, I think.

I drove down the dump road = and passed Barbara Gray’s house and felt my shame. Its not= the Gray’s house anymore. I= t has a door on it now and no rusting cars in the front yard. There is landscaping now. Some other people must be living t= here.

Barbara Gray was the first girl to drop out of my scho= ol for being pregnant. We lost her somewhere between fifth and sixth grade.&n= bsp; She lived near me, in the poor white area that fed kids into the bla= ck schools—they’d been desegregated by law for some 20 years but everyone still know it was the black school. Our county had been one of many th= at closed the schools rather than integrate after Brown.

Barbara rode my bus, in whi= ch white kids sat in the front and black kids in the back “to prevent fighting.” Barbara was = white and she smelled like piss and animals and I hated it when I had to sit next= to her. She was everything I was afraid of in myself—the kind of poor you really can’t hide. The whole school knew that her fat= her had gotten her pregnant. I ne= ver saw her again after I turned 11. Driving down the dump road I felt the old shame of poverty, concern for how I smelled, gui= lt by association with my school bus route. I felt my new shames. = Ashamed that I was disgusted by Barbara just like everyone el= se. Disgusted by m= y own house. Judgmental of greasy hair and outdoor plumbing and thick southern accents. Distancing myself as far as I coul= d.

It’s remarkable that = we can live in a country where so many people don’t know about poverty. There are still all those people l= iving up in the Crown orchard picking fruit when they can get the work in trailers that smell like piss with no phones and no water and I don’t think mo= st people I meet in my new life even know it. They couldn’t even imagine it without some quaint Hollywood storyline to help them get there.

What makes poverty invisibl= e in capitalism? Especially, I keep asking myself, what obscures the ability of identity-based social movements to conceptualize the m= aldistribution of wealth and power? Clearly = some of the same elements that prevented class coalition in my elementary school. First, the capitalist system successfully hides the source of poverty beneath a strong narrative = of meritocracy and the moral failures of the poor. People are to blame if they are poor. Their poverty is a moral failing, and disgusting. Lazy, fraudulent, dirty. Welfare policy is guided by this l= ogic and operates to reinforce it. Race and gender are elements in this story.&nbs= p; Racism helps divide the poor into subclasses and put them at war with one another, and racist and sexist depictions of “welfare queens̶= 1; and other mythological media figures have shored up the rhetoric used to ga= rner support for anti-poor law and policy changes. Gender remains a key vector in the dehumanization of poor people as well, with a long history of the moral failings of the poor being painted as loose sexual morality of single mothe= rs and low-income teens. These s= ame depictions prop up the heavy surveillance the poor are subjected to when seeking aid, and the misuses of the child welfare system to break up poor families and families of color based on hyper-vigilance of families who rec= eive aid from the state or who are overexposed to police and the criminal justice system.

When I think about Barbara = Gray, I think about how these misunderstandings are reflected in our social justice movements, and how it means we leave so many people behind. As women’s rights and queer = rights are increasingly framed as rights to “privacy” with the idea th= at those arguments are more politically expedient in a conservative climate, movements increasingly lose analysis of how people who can’t afford privacy in our culture fare. Fighting for right to get abortions who h= ave private insurance or cash is likely to leave out those most severely effect= ed by the inaccessibility of reproductive health care. Fighting for queer healthcare rights by focusing on same-sex partners being able to share cove= rage only helps those queers (decreasing in number every year as we move toward a temp-heavy no-benefits economy) who have a partner with health insurance. Framing queer child custody rights= in terms of marriage ignores the fact that having the right to marry hasn̵= 7;t prevented those people most vulnerable to “child welfare” intervention by the state, people of color, poor people, and incarcerated people, from losing their rights to their children. Fighting for the right to gender r= ecognition for trans people who have been able to access su= rgery does nothing for the majority of trans people who will never have access to trans health care because it still isn’t covered by private insurance= or Medicaid in most places.

These are narrow times, tig= ht times, conservative times. Gr= owing up around poor people, I saw different responses to the tight narrowness of= our situations. Some saved everyt= hing they could, and others shared everything that came their way. Always, it was clear to me that wh= en we pooled what we all had more more of the time. I’m worried that many of the feminist and queer social movement organizations have chosen the other approach, narrowing their agendas, excising deeper radical politics around poverty and racism, and framing their aims in ways that they hope are more politically expedient. Too of= ten, I think, this is easy to do because our paid leadership positions in the non-profit industrial complex are doled out based on educational, race, cla= ss and gender privilege, so the life experiences of the people who end up in l= eadership often match these narrower agendas. They aren’t part of the groups being cut out, so it doesn̵= 7;t feel like such a big deal, or its invisible altogether to them. Then those who articulate the prob= lems with this narrowing are accused of being “divisive” when we bri= ng up the fact that shaping a politics around a single identity category and ignore different manifestations of sexism or homophobia or transphobia along lines of race and class usually means shaping an agenda that meets on= ly the needs of non-poor white people.

In recent years, gay and le= sbian rights organizations have paid some new attention to the ongoing marginalization and exclusion of trans people from their movements and agen= das, but at this point most of that has only led to marginal improvements that l= ook like lip service—hiring one trans staff person or adding a trans pers= on to the board, adding a “t” to their name or mission statement.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> The real problems that trans people face, especially because we are disproportionately poor, disproportionately incarcerated, and overexposed to systems that oppress through anti-poor and racist frameworks (prisons, immigration, welfare, shelters, foster care, juvenile justice, Medicaid), remain totally unaddressed in lesbian and gay political resistance.

I think there is shame here= . The same kind of shame I felt when= I sought to distance myself from Barbara Gray’s too-loud poverty. When I hear “our families ar= e just like yours,” “our love is just like yours,” I hear a shame and distancing of difference, and I fear the exclusions that are required to live up to the racist, classist, heterosexist a= nd transphobic ideals of gender, sexuality and family structure that remain the norms. If anything, we should= be ashamed of the history of marginalizing oppressed people within feminist, q= ueer and trans movements. We should take as our primary occu= pation the job of reframing our movements and restructuring them to root out that oppression. We should become relentless seekers of manifestations of oppression in our own activist acti= ons and in the organizations and movements of which we are constituents, and we should be wide open and welcoming to anyone naming those dynamics and deman= ding change.

It isn’t hard for me = to imagine other ways that feminism and queer and trans struggles could engage= in our resistance, especially because despite the volume and visibility of the conservative strands of our movements there is always a sustained, radical, visionary alternative operating with less money and deeper analysis in every community. I see people build= ing organizations based on a commitment to the leadership of those most vulnera= ble to sexism, racism, classism and heterosexism. I see people connecting issues of = gender justice by standing up for welfare moms against Bush’s “Health Marriage Initiative” and connecting that work to the termination of parental rights of prisoners and the abuse faced by tra= ns youth in the child welfare system. I see people connecting the increasing criminalization of immigrants= to the denial of ID that represents the real genders of tr= ans people and the increasing military recruitment in communities of color. I see people understanding that resisting the occupations of Iraq and Palestine is a queer and trans issue, as is resisting abstinence-only sex education and the growth of the prison industry. They do this work out of a place of faith, the same faith we require to share when we don’t have much. To do this work and do it sustainably and inclusively, we have to assume that we’re going to win, that our coalitions are stronger when they include more people, that the cost of a compromise that requires exclusion is always too expensive to afford, and that the scarce times should not change our visions of what we want.