A 2023 Harvest for Hunger ad featuring a photo of a young girl revealed more about those who created the ad than it did about people who are food insecure. In a column, I imagined how the advertising company decided to portray her and wrote: “The result is a hackneyed stereotype of the poor — a child whose hair is messy, a stand-in for dirty, which is just a short walk to laziness. Not far behind laziness is dishonesty. Charles Dickens couldn’t have done better.”
The pervasiveness of bias, if not outright bigotry, against poor people surfaced in a letter to the editor responding to my most recent column, in which I explained that I am factually and legally a member of America’s working poor. I described how our nation’s policies currently favor the richest 1% over everyone else, causing income inequality to explode in recent decades. Unlike much of the second half of the 20th century, today jobs that pay a living wage and offer comprehensive benefits packages, including health care and retirement, are hard to come by.
And I described the benefits cliff – when people who receive government assistance, in my family’s case Medicaid, can lose all benefits when they earn only a little more than 138% of the federal poverty level. My column concluded: “The problem isn’t the poor, working or not. The problem is our systems.”
The overwhelming response to that column was positive. Yet the point was lost on some who, rather than recognize America’s intentional and systemic imbalance in wages, health care, housing costs and more, would blame the poor – in this case me – for our status.
Marcia Schray’s letter to the editor dismissed my factual and legal status as a working poor American and called me disingenuous. Her letter repeated a number of widely held, but false, biases and stereotypes about the poor. Chief among them is the belief that if poor people have lives that are anything but coarse and miserable, they must be grifting. Or, as another reader pointed out, apparently I am “not poor enough” for Schray.
Schray claims to have long read my columns and gives my “travels, foreign and domestic, [and] summer long vacations” as examples of my not being factually and legally poor. Yet every time I’ve written about trips I’ve taken, I’ve pointed out that anyone can travel cheaply if willing to forgo things in order to save for travel and rough it when they go. I mostly travel by car to the homes of family and friends. I do not take summer-long vacations, but for years enrolled my children in municipal summer camps in Michigan where we stayed in a small camper in their grandparents’ driveway. I cannot teach in the summer as there are no teaching jobs then, but work all year long as a freelance proofreader and writer, which I can do remotely.
Schray then mentions my children’s father, whom I left years ago, is an attorney. Why? My best guess is Schray believes all attorneys live like those on the TV show “The White Lotus” with fabulous incomes and no concerns for mundane expenses like health care.
That’s simply fantasy.
Solo practitioners lack access to corporate benefits packages and pay a premium for health insurance with high deductibles and measly coverage.
Most poor Americans, Schray states, don’t own a home, let alone two or three. That’s likely true. I bought a house in Akron in 2003 for $112,500. In 2014, I was able to acquire on a lease-to-own contract the neighboring home that had a mortgage balance of $52,000. I’ve shared this information before because there are few places besides Akron where someone could purchase two homes for a total of $164,500.
I live in an inner-city neighborhood that is economically and ethnically diverse. My homes are over 100 years old and designed very differently than new homes. All of which is to say, many people aren’t willing to live in houses like mine in neighborhoods like mine, a choice I happily made for many reasons, including the fact that it allows me to live within my means.
As for my means, my adjusted gross income in 2024 was $19,414. I earned just over $25k in wages last year, but my AGI was $4,072 due to the expenses of my one rental home. Rather than making me rich, as Schray seems to believe, my one rental home allows me to invest in a safe asset, the income and expenses of which, over the course of several years, roughly break even.
Meanwhile, as a self-reported regular reader, Schray forgets the many times I’ve written about being a “Second-hand Rose” to quote a Streisand song. From my base-model car to most of my shoes and everything in between, including what I buy for my children, I purchase used, and at bargain prices.
Bias is generally based upon assumptions that fall apart when met with facts. The poor are no more lazy, slovenly or mendacious than the rich. Nor are the poor Dickensian caricatures. As I wrote before, most people are doing all that they can to take care of their families as best they know how, but federal policy changes beginning in the 1980s have left the majority of Americans behind, even as the rich prosper. No wonder we have to find creative ways to live that are not coarse and miserable, something those who would shame us might consider.
This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 1, 2026.
Whoopsie Piggle 