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TechnoratiIt says something about the extremities of inequality in our world when rich people are now paying money to take tours of poor people. An article by Eric Weiner in the travel section of the Sunday New York Times highlights the growing business of "poorism" -- taking tour groups to visit the world's slums and shanty towns for a glimpse at just how bad things really are.
Troubling enough is the irony of tourists paying enough money to a tour guide to traipse through a poor family's home that, if given to that family instead, might actually help them escape from poverty. One excursion cited in the New York Times article charges $7.50 per person to gawk at the Dharavi slums of Mumbai, India. Worldwide, 3 billion people --- nearly half the world's population --- live on less than two dollars a day, including almost 80% of Indians and, most assuredly, 100% of people living in the Dharavi slums.
It's not that rich privileged folks seeing poverty first-hand is a bad thing. It's vital that everyone from titans of industry to those of us privileged enough to have a home and running water understand the true depths of poverty that exist on our planet, in our own backyards and on the other side of the globe. Yet, when day-to-day, the privileged are so removed from the poor that we need tour guides and travel itineraries in order to actually witness what poverty is, there is something to be said for just how extreme inequality has become.
Consider the recently opened Liberty Hotel in Boston, fashioned by remodeling a former prison. With more than 1 in 100 Americans behind bars, there's something sick about people paying $319 and up a night for "lockdown" in a prison-turned-luxury-hotel. Can you imagine young African American men -- 1 in 30 of whom are incarcerated, and all of whom face the ever-present threat of incarceration through racial profiling -- finding it "vacation-like" to spend a night in the prison-hotel, even if they could afford it? That those who can afford a $319-a-night hotel room at the Liberty find it novel reveals how insulated they are from the nowhere-near-novel reality of prison in the lives of many, especially poor communities of color.
Then again, maybe I'm being too -- oh, I don't know -- moral. Perhaps poverty tourism and prison-chic simply reflects pragmatic, economic opportunism. After all, we've build a society and an economy in the United States where extreme greed is rewarded and, in fact, reinforced. The resulting poverty and suffering at the bottom is not only accepted but, by growing prison construction and cutting domestic social service programs and foreign aid, sustained. So, in the otherwise-collapsing US economy, poverty may be just the growth industry we need! Better yet, we should continue to slash public benefit programs and programs that help the poor, to open up new economic "horizons".
With that in mind, knowing that the chieftans of exploitation are always looking for the next big thing, here are some other "poorism" suggestions:
* Inside an ICE raid -- Be there as armed agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency storm the home of a Mexican-American family at midnight, tear an undocumented immigrant mother away from her citizen children and partner, lock her up in prison and send her back to Mexico to never see her family again.
* Waterboarding 101 -- Learn what all the fuss is about when you get waterboarded for hours on end until you finally confess to something and are then detained indefinitely without access to a lawyer or any communication with your family.
* Oh no, HMO! -- Watch as a middle class family takes their sick child to the doctor only to learn that their health insurance won't cover the life-saving medicine their child needs, then in a real nail-biter, watch as both parents take second jobs and wonder: Will it be enough?
* Human Wrongs Around the World -- Travel on a secret CIA extradition flight with stops in Pakistan, Columbia and all the countries where your tax dollars are funding dictatorships and human rights abuses.
I suppose if you can't beat inequality, profit from it. That's the American way, right? Land of opportunity (though some exclusions apply). We could choose to distribute resources and opportunity fairly to everyone, create pathways to education instead of prison and poverty, and re-build an America where we put the common good and common needs ahead of selfishness and exploitation.
Or we could continue to allow those who've risen to the top to systematically kick away the ladder of opportunity for everyone else.
And then sell tickets and call it tourism.
Sally Kohn is the Director of the Movement Vision Lab at the Center for Community Change.
Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
23 Comments so far
Show AllRiverman, I keep seeing the same 2-3 incoherent posts from you repeated on every thread I read, regardless of the subject of the article. Repeating the same deluded rants over and over again doesn't give them any more validity or win you any adherents, and quite frankly, I'm tired of seeing them.
If you don't possess sufficient "higher logic" to respond to a specific article with commentary that actually addresses the issue of that article, then please just don't respond at all!
It's so sad, that Women always have all of those _ O B S T E S T A C L E S placed in their paths.
¿ Perhaps that's likely why they sometimes wear high heels at work ?
Riverman:
I find it difficult to believe that it is my testicles that are responsible for my superior logical abilities.
If that were so, perhaps a further study might find that in fact a sub-category of Nobel winners very over-represented with regard to the general population are homosexual males. If men are superior, queers are even more superior, despite all the obstacles thrown in their paths.
"I suppose if you can't beat inequality, profit from it. That's the American way, right? Land of opportunity (though some exclusions apply). We could choose to distribute resources and opportunity fairly to everyone, create pathways to education instead of prison and poverty, and re-build an America where we put the common good and common needs ahead of selfishness and exploitation."
Do this, and you will destroy America. Mind you, I'm not saying its a bad thing, but understand that the founders of this country did in fact put the rights of the individual over the common good, assuming people would be civil to one another. We can do it, but we must be willing to 'outdate' much, though not all of what this nation set out to be.
Hmm...I think this does already happen in Appalachia. Every August, we travel to my mother's family in WV and a tourist train goes through the hollers and past our reunion. The train slows down and folks are taking pictures of the "hillbillies", not the scenery. So my uncle had the idea that they all pose in stereotypical ways and he now,during reunions, slaps on these crazy fake teeth, strips off his shirt and holds a shotgun along with a few of the others.
Little do these tourists know, many of the folks there are quite wealthy but just never forgot their roots.
This article somehow reminded my of this Barbara Bush quote:
• in an NPR radio interview, after visiting with Hurricane Katrina evacuees in the Astrodome in Texas, 8/5/2005: What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.
riverman101 I would like to highly recommend a ten gauge shoot gun loaded with double-ought buck shot. Apply the barrel end directly to the forehead and pull the trigger. Guaranteed to clear your mind of what ails you.
Yes, sign up for one of the tours available from my company: "Ultimate Renditions". We seize you as you go about your everyday business, drug you and blindfold you and fly you to a disused army base in Poland, torture you for 10 months and then let you go for no reason. Except, unfortunately, you don't actually get to go on the trip you paid for: instead we kidnap someone whose name is kind of similar to yours.
Riverman,
I have no doubt that you take yourself to be among the male top 1% you adore so rantingly. Else why would you have the gall to tell the other 99.5% of humanity how they must act to prevent the Apocalypse. Your command of English grammar and spelling, rather worse than that of our not soon enough to be departed Fearless Leader, no doubt shows how truly, awesomely masculine you are since girls test better than boys at languages. Further proof is provided by the fact that all the Nobel Prize winners in literature have been members of the second sex. All hail Riverman, the new Man God.
But seriously, folks, do the American rich touring the world's slums for entertainment put you in mind of anything? Like the French nobility touring the Bastille? Like the Brit sahibs and memsahibs touring the city slums and "quaint" poverty ground villages of their far flung Empire? Might we not be chastened by what happened to them?
I for one hesitate not one wit to nominate The Dick and his neo-con entourage (male and female alike) to be the first in line to taste Madam Guillotine's sweet kiss. (Shrub, like the rest of the dummies, is of course exempt.) Next will be all CEO's who make more than forty times the wage of their lowest paid employee. Then 95% of the lawyers. Then the I love truth and damn the consequences "pure" scientists and intellectuals. Then the artists including, of course, the writers and the, shudder, theater people. So many heads, so little time. But the effort will be repaid since eventually we'll kill enough of the smart folks, moral or immoral or premoral or amoral, so that Riverman will finally be in the revered top 1%. Then all of us left will see the light and make him Dictator of the World For Life by popular demand.
Wow riverperson, I never read any of your posts before now because they usually SHOUT SO LOUD I CANT HEAR. For some reason I read your above post and am appalled. You really do need to find a place to post long rants to people who care. Hey, I am a bleeding heart liberal who Should have a disabled placard for how deeply I am pained by the ignorance in this world. You riverperson, do not get this response from me. I just think you are sick and need help. Wish I were more poetic like empirePie.
A Riverman mini Epic
A misty eyed mysogynist
pined for his mother...
like a Noah abandoned in the river
he meandered and he meandered
till he caught his own reflection
by the bushy bullrushes
an epiphany of logic or so it seemed
Ah ha...big MaMa is not big manna
but hey..was Narcissus gay?
I envision Survivor Bush. Let's drop him off (Cheney could go on a separate adventure) somewhere in the middle east. No passport, no money, just the clothes on his back and an English/Arabic dictionary. He could get the education of his life trying to find his way to, say, Tokyo surviving on his wits. It will be a short trip.
Well... I might go if Bono was the head sherpa. But otherwise, it's like throwing away $4,000 for an hour with a hooker.
I've lived and worked in or near Philly all my life, and take public transportation to boot. It occurs to me that there's an undeveloped tourism market for perfectly good domestic poor folk, who can hold their meager possessions with the best of the foreign impoverished.
Amerika first!
I read a study where they separated 6th graders by sex and found that the boys who were math inclined raced ahead, leaving the stragglers behind, and the girls who were math inclined tutored the stragglers and kept the entire class on track. It's more about competition versus cooperation, and that has to do with socialization. Our society encourages boys to compete and girls cooperate to survive as second class citizens.
riverman, I think you're looking at the world through a very narrow lens.
kathyodat
How about tours of Camden NJ or Bronx projects? Won't be too popular because rich liberals are more enchanted by exotic poverty. They see poor Americans as dull beings with bad taste in clothing.
Next: Tours for the poor to see how the rich live.
Bring your pitchforks!
Of course one can see how the "other half" (or is it the other 90%?) lives more cheaply, the difficulty is returning safely to your hotel.
I think it's sick. One step from the Roman circuses. George W bush was well known in college for despising the poor and wanting to do away with Social Security. These people are only doing this because they are bored and looking for novel ways to stimulate their jaded appetites. Worse to come, count on it. I feel like we're watching the end stage of civilization.
kathyodat
Great article. I also saw the Times article and thought it was fairly sick and deranged, to say the least.
Ah, the latte liberal. So much heart, so little head.
I am envisioning my own new travel company. We'll take the uber-rich on a tour of rendition sites scattered throughout Central and West Asia. The tour will conclude with an all-expenses-paid .22 to the back of the head.
DD you have a valid point there
I recently learned that tourism has emerged as the #1 industry in the world, measured in trillions. Bigger than mining, or manufacturing, or agriculture, or education, or retail, or finance. Bigger than anything else, period.
Tours to see the poor are not a surprise any moreso than tours to see the wildlife in some far-off place. The good news is that SOME of the people who have the money to go and then actually "see" will go home transformed, never to be the same and no longer satisfied with "tsk, tsk."
The "magic of the market" knows no limits of chutzpah.