Summary

Chapter 4 is titled “The Shame a Country Could Assign.” The author begins with a summary of the ways that government programs and societal expectations combined to create a powerful sense of shame not only for herself and for family. This sense of shame, she suggests, was and is felt by virtually anyone in her situation, i.e. poor and white. The shame of being both, she says, was particularly powerful because wealthy white people seemed to think that all white people were inherently privileged, and the existence of poor white people proved that theory wrong. She goes on to describe different ways in which the social and economic processes of government contributed to the perpetuating of both white poverty and the shame of people living in such circumstances.

The author also says that “when Grandma Betty confessed … that she’d briefly gone on...