Tracing the Money

Let's talk about money. I have $15,000 in the bank. Me, who grew up on welfare and mac & cheese, and who scraped together odd jobs off craigslist to make my living.  Where did I, of all working class kids, get this?  I inherited it from Uncle White Supremacy.

You see, a few years ago, word was spreading about a friend of ours who got this amazing job that was paying crazy well and how they needed to hire someone else.  My friend Abby took it on, and in a matter of 5 weeks, she had $5000.  Selling drugs you might ask? Marrying wealthy foreigners who wanted US citizenship? No - mentoring poor, black and latino/mayan kids in public school.  Wow, that sounds pretty noble and even almost anti-racist, huh?

The next year the job had multiplied to four positions for 18 weeks for $20,000.  My friend, a white man from a middle class background, encouraged a bunch of us to apply.  I don't even think they formally advertised the position anywhere - just word of mouth among a white man's friends - and somehow we all got in. It was a white man, a man with a Jewish Israeli background, and two white women.

So I went to work "mentoring" about 15 immigrant kids in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) - half of them Haitian, half of them Guatemalan or Mexican, with a couple other kids tossed in. They had been placed in a vocational program to learn HVAC technology (heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration).  They had an HVAC teacher, and I was supposed to be in class with them, to help reinforce and support their learning in there, and then have my own class with them around - get this - issues of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, personal economics, and gang violence.  I have also failed to mention that this program was put together by Junior Achievement, which is where local business people come in and teach kids how to fit in to capitalism. These were the people I remember who in third grade had us create our own pen assembly factory - teaching us to fall into assembly line.

What ended up happening is that the HVAC teacher for that school was out sick all year - the replacement they found was the school district HVAC maintenance man who had no teaching credentials.  The HVAC program at the school was a four year academy - the ESOL kids were getting half a year. The HVAC substitute didn't give a fuck about these kids, and barely taught them anything. Then I had them for my hour and talked to them about balancing check books and CPR. Eventually they kids were so frustrated and felt so lied to about this program they were in, that I ended up taking home the HVAC textbook, reading one chapter at a time and teaching them HVAC myself.

You may ask yourself - Lynne, did you know anything about HVAC to be teaching anyone about it? Lynne, were you trained in ESOL techniques? Lynne, do you understand enough about what black and latino/mayan immigrants are facing when they come to this country to be their mentor?  Lynne, what were your supervisors saying about the way the program was going?

No, no, no, and jack shit. I didn't know how to best interact and guide these kids. There was a supervisor who was supposed to be in the room with me at all times, but she was happy to disappear unnoticed.  And Junior Achievement didn't seem to really care how well the program was going, just how well it met funding requirements. And where was this funding come from?   A little program called TANF:

Under the welfare reform legislation of 1996, (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act – PWRORA – Public Law 104-193), TANF replaced the welfare programs known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program and the Emergency Assistance (EA) program. The law ended federal entitlement to assistance and instead created TANF as a block grant that provides States, territories and tribes federal funds each year. These funds cover benefits, administrative expenses, and services targeted to needy families.

So let me break it down: 

1. The government takes money away from low income people (which is a multi-racial mix with the highest percentage of welfare recipients being white) and hands it over to the state to offer as grants to local governments and non-profits. This strips away a level of self-determination from low-income people.
   
2. Junior Achievement, an explicitly capitalist non-profit, wins this grant and does the bare minimum to look like they are fulfilling the grant mission.
   
3. The administrators take a huge chunk of the money and are willing to overlook the qualifications of their applicants. 
   
4. The site supervisors are also willing to overlook the performance of the "mentor-teachers" or how the program is being carried out because they are getting paid and can disappear. 
   
5. As a mentor-teacher, I don't fight too hard against the administrators or supervisors because I'm young, lacking in confidence, don't totally see what's going on yet, and am getting paid $100 an hour!!! - accumulating an amount of money which, having grown up poor/working class - have never seen in my life.  I'm not saying I didn't fight hard to make the program be its best for my students - I struggled every single day - but the truth was I not trained, did not have support, did not have major decision making power, and was inexperienced dealing with extreme structural hierarchies like existed via this program. As a white working class person I was exploited -  given access because of my whiteness (my educational background and relationship to other whites) and lured by money which I needed: 
6. The kids, coming from Haiti and Guatemala - where the US and other colonial racist powers have totally wreaked havoc - got almost nothing out of the program, except some steel-toed boots and other work clothes. 
   

The administrators got the highest chunk, the supervisors probably a fair deal, the mentor-teachers an amount that was nothing they'd even seen before.  Nothing trickled down from the money that was taken from the hands of the poor.

And that legacy sits in my bank.