They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. She was named after the water bottle that is sold in bodegas and grocery stores. I was comfortable with that as a general notion of what I should be doing with my work, because I think that is our job as journalists. Whenever this happens, Dasani starts to count. Family was everything for them. They are true New Yorkers. She's a hilarious (LAUGH) person. But at that time, just like it was at the time that There Are No Children Here came out, it's the highest child poverty rate of almost any wealthy nation. She calls him Daddy. I mean, I have a lot of deep familiarity with the struggle of substance abuse in my own family. She spent eight years falling the story The material reality of Dasani's life her homelessness, her family's lack of money is merely the point of departure for understanding her human condition, she says. She will kick them awake. And one thing I found really interesting about your introduction, which so summarizes the reason I feel that this story matters, is this fracturing of America. Dasani slips down three flights of stairs, passing a fire escape where drugs and weapons are smuggled in. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. Dasani races back upstairs, handing her mother the bottle. And obviously, you know, one of the things I think is interesting and comes through here is, and I don't know the data on this, but I have found in my life as a reporter and as a human being along various parts of the Titanic ship that is the United States of America that there's a lot of substance abuse at every level. She was an amazing ethnographer and she and I had many conversations about what she called the asymmetry of power, that is this natural asymmetry that's built into any academic subject, reporter subject relationship. She was a single mother. They have yet to stir. And welcome to Why Is This Happening? She would just look through the window. And I think what I would say is that there are no easy answers to this. Shes not alone. In the blur of the citys streets, Dasani is just another face. I was never allowing myself to get too comfortable. Dasani's 20. She is sure the place is haunted. The2009 financial crisis taught us hard lessons. At that time when I met her when she was 11, Dasani would wake around 5 a.m. and the first thing she did, she always woke before all of her other siblings. And this ultimately wound up in the children being removed in October of 2015, about ten months into Dasani's time at Hershey. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. Nearly a quarter of Dasanis childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and And there's some poverty reporting where, like, it feels, you know, a little gross or it feels a little, like, you know, alien gaze-y (LAUGH) for lack of a better word. Talk a little bit about where Dasani is now, her age, what she had to, sort of, come through, and also maybe a little bit about the fact that she was written about in The New York Times, like, might have affected that trajectory. 16K views, 545 likes, 471 loves, 3K comments, 251 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from EWTN: Starting at 8 a.m. I nvisible Child is a 2021 work of nonfiction by Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative journalist Andrea Elliott. Chris Hayes: You know, the U.S., if you go back to de Tocqueville and before that, the Declaration and the founders, you know, they're very big (LAUGH) on civic equality. And her lips are stained with green lollipop. And it really was for that clientele, I believe. She loved to sit on her windowsill. Massive gentrification occurs in this first decade. The mice used to terrorise Dasani, leaving pellets and bite marks. And so she wanted a strong army of siblings. And this book really avoids it. Like, you do an incredible job on that. 6. Chris Hayes: Yeah. Her body is still small enough to warm with a hairdryer. There's so much upheaval. They were put in a situation where things were out of their control. We could have a whole podcast about this one (LAUGH) issue. You never know with a book what its ultimate life will be in the minds of the people that you write about or a story for that matter. It's just not in the formal labor market. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New I still am always. And so this was his great legacy was to create a school for children in need. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Dasani Coates photographed in September last year. ", I think if we look at Dasani's trajectory, we see a different kind of story. Her siblings are her greatest solace; their separation her greatest fear. It's painful. All you could buy at the local bodega at that time was Charlie. And those questions just remained constantly on my mind. Her skyline is filled with luxury towers, the beacons of a new gilded age. She was invited to be a part of Bill de Blasio's inaugural ceremony. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" And a lot of that time was spent together. And her first thought was, "Who would ever pay for water?" It starts as a investigation into what basically the lives of New York City's homeless school children look like, which is a shockingly large population, which we will talk about, and then migrates into a kind of ground level view of what being a poor kid in New York City looks like. And they were things that I talked about with the family a lot. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. And by the way, at that time this was one of the richest cities in the world. And I met Dasani right in that period, as did the principal. But especially to someone like her, who she was struggling. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. You have to be from a low income family. She would change her diaper. "What were you thinking in this moment? In the city, I mean, I have a 132 hours of audio recorded of all my reporting adventures. And you got power out of fighting back on some level. There have been a few huge massive interventions that have really altered the picture of what poverty looks like in the U.S., chiefly the Great Society and the New Deal and some other things that have happened since then. April 17, 2014 987 words. The Milton Hershey School is an incredible, incredible place. She said, "Home is the people. That, to be honest, is really home. It's called Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. By the time Dasani came into the world, on 26 May 2001, the old Brooklyn was vanishing. Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. I had an early experience of this with Muslim immigrant communities in the United States that I reported on for years. WebRT @usaunify: When Dasani Left Home. She attacked the mice. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. (LAUGH) She would try to kill them every week. Their sister is always first. What did you think then?" It, sort of, conjured this new life as this new life was arriving. He said, "Yes. And I just spent so much time with this family and that continues to be the case. We're gonna both pretend we've seen movies. And that's just the truth. All rights reserved. Yeah. The oldest of eight kids, Dasani and her family lived in one room in a dilapidated, city-run homeless shelter in Brooklyn. In one part of the series, journalist Andrea Elliott contrasts the struggle of Dasanis ten member family living at a decrepit shelter to the gentrification and wealth on the other side of Fort Mice scurry across the floor. And how far can I go? It's now about one in seven. Parental neglect, failure to provide necessities for ones children like shelter or clothing, is one form of child maltreatment that differs from child abuse, she says. She would wake up. I felt that it was really, really important to explain my process to this imam, in particular, who I spent six months with, who had come from Egypt and had a very different sense of the press, which was actually a tool of oppression. This is usually the sound that breaks Dasanis trance, causing her to leave the window and fetch Lee-Lees bottle. All these things, kind of, coalesced to create a crisis, which is so often the case with being poor is that it's a lot of small things suddenly happening at once that then snowball into something catastrophic. By the time, I would say, a lot of school kids were waking up, just waking up in New York City to go to school, Dasani had been working for two hours. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. I mean, everything fell on its face. She is in that shelter because of this, kind of, accumulation of, you know, small, fairly common, or banal problems of the poor that had assembled into a catastrophe, had meant not being able to stay in the section eight housing. And at first, she thrived. And she sees a curious thing on the shelf of her local bodega. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. Andrea Elliott: And I think the middle ground we found was to protect them by not putting their last names in and refer to most of them by their nicknames. Taped to the wall is the childrens proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. The familys room at the Brooklyn shelter, with Dasani, right, sitting on the bed. She's been through this a little bit before, right, with the series. I focused on doing projects, long form narrative pieces that required a lot of time and patience on the part of my editors and a lot of swinging for the fences in terms of you don't ever know how a story is going to pan out. And it was just a constant struggle between what Dasani's burdens have imposed on her and the limitless reach of her potential if she were only unburdened. It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. Best to try to blend in while not caring when you dont. I do, though. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. Sept. 28, 2021. I think what she has expressed to me, I can certainly repeat. Her parents survived major childhood traumas. Hidden in a box is Dasanis pet turtle, kept alive with bits of baloney and the occasional Dorito. Her mother, Chanel Sykes, went as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh to escape the influence of a crack-addicted parent. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. In this moving but occasionally flat narrative, Elliott follows Dasani for eight years, beginning in 2012 when she was 11 years old and living in The brothers last: five-year-old Papa and 11-year-old Khaliq, who have converted their metal bunk into a boys-only fort. And that's very clear in the context of her parents here. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours, Elliott says. Multiply her story by thousands of children in cities across the U.S. living through the same experiences and the country confronts a crisis. Elliotts book follows eight years in the life of In fact, there's the, kind of, brushes that the boys have with things outside of their, kind of, experience of poverty and class have to do with, like, parking cars (LAUGH) or helping cars and stuff and selling water at the United Center where there's all sorts of, like, fancy Chicago roles through. It was incredibly confusing as a human being to go from their world back into mine on the Upper West Side in my rental with my kids who didn't have to worry about roaches. And they agreed to allow me to write a book and to continue to stay in their lives. It wasn't a safe thing. She wakes to the sound of breathing. And, you know, I think that there's, in the prose itself, tremendous, you know, I think, sort of, ethical clarity and empathy and humanization. Part of the government. It is a private landmark the very place where her beloved grandmother Joanie Sykes was born, back when this was Cumberland Hospital. Chris Hayes speaks with Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott about her book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City., Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City. Rarely does that happen for children living in poverty like Dasani who are willing and capable but who are inundated with problems not of their own making, she says. The street was a dangerous place. Just the sound of it Dasani conjured another life. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. It was a high poverty neighborhood to a school where every need is taken care of. Its stately neo-Georgian exterior dates back nearly a century, to when the building opened as a public hospital serving the poor. Sometimes it'll say, like, "Happy birthday, Jay Z," or, you know. Right? Her mother had grown up in a very different time. You know, that's part of it. This is The turtle they had snuck into the shelter. Chris Hayes: Yeah. Dasani landed at 39 Auburn Place more than two years ago. She's at a community college. Chanel was raised on the streets and relied on family bonds, the reporter learned. So she lived in that shelter for over three years. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. We'd love to hear from you. It happens because there's a lot of thought and even theory, I think, put into the practice. And they did attend rehab at times. Andrea joins to talk about her expanded coverage of the Coates family story, which is told in her new book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City.. 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. And there's a amazing, amazing book called Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc which takes place in the Bronx, which is in a somewhat similar genre. Like, she was wearing Uggs at one point and a Patagonia fleece at another point. Dasani Coates grew up in a family so poor, her stepfather once pawned his gold teeth to get by until their welfare benefits arrived. It's important to not live in a silo. But she was so closely involved in my process. Elliott hopes Invisible Child readers see people beyond the limiting labels of homeless and poor and address the deep historical context that are part of these complicated problems, she says. And it's a great pleasure to welcome Andrea to the show now. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. This is where she derives her greatest strength. You're not supposed to be watching movies. How did you feel, you know, about the pipe that's leaking?" Jane Clayson Guest Host, Here & NowJane Clayson is Here & Now's guest host. You know, my fridge was always gonna be stocked. She became the first child in her family to graduate high school and she has now entered LaGuardia Community College. But despite the extraordinary opportunity, she talked often about just wanting to go home as troublesome as that home life was. What's also true, though, is that as places like New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco and even Detroit and Washington, D.C. have increasingly gentrified, the experience of growing up poor is one of being in really close proximity with people who have money. Serena McMahonadapted it for the web. And her principal had this idea that she should apply to a school that I had never heard of called the Milton Hershey School, which is a school in Hershey, Pennsylvania that tries to reform poor children. The problems of poverty are so much greater, so much more overwhelming than the power of being on the front page of The New York Times. She has hit a major milestone, though. is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the All In team and features music by Eddie Cooper. People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. Now in her 20s, Dasani became the first in her immediate family to graduate high school, and she enrolled in classes at LaGuardia Community College. And I said, "Yes." So let's start with what was your beat at the time when you wrote the first story? Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. IE 11 is not supported. It signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. Her expression veers from mischief to wonder. I live in Harlem. It wasn't just that she was this victim of the setting. And, you know, this was a new school. And the more that readers engage with her, the clearer it becomes that every single one of these stories is worthy of attention., After nearly a decade of reporting, Elliott wants readers to remember the girl at her windowsill every morning who believed something better was out there waiting for her.. Criminal justice. There were evictions. And so you can get braces. They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. Paired with photographs by colleague Ruth Fremson , it sparked direct action from incoming Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who had Dasani on the stage at his administrations inauguration in January 2014. Sleek braids fall to one side of Dasanis face, clipped by yellow bows. This family is a proud family. Homeless services. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the MontanaLibrary2Go digital collection. Until then, Dasani considered herself a baby expert. The pounding of fists. Find that audio here. She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. Don't their future adult selves have a right to privacy (LAUGH) in a sense? Public assistance. And I think that that's what Dasani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how. She is tiny for an 11-year-old and quick to startle. She was often tired. She was 11 years old. This was and continues to be their entire way of being, their whole reason. Some places are more felt than seen the place of homelessness, the place of sisterhood, the place of a mother-child bond that nothing can break. Mice were running everywhere. Columbias Bill Grueskin tries to explain why the Pulitzer board dismissed The New York Times s Invisible Child series And she said that best in her own words. Andrea Elliott: This is a work in progress. Entire neighbourhoods would be remade, their families displaced, their businesses shuttered, their histories erased by a gentrification so vast and meteoric that no brand of bottled water could have signalled it. And these bubbles get, sort of, smaller and smaller, in which people are increasingly removed from these different strata of American life. Sort of, peak of the homeless crisis. We rarely look at all the children who don't, who are just as capable. And it's not because people didn't care or there wasn't the willpower to help Dasani. Chris Hayes: Yeah. To see Dasani is to see all the places of her life, from the corridors of school to the emergency rooms of hospitals to the crowded vestibules of family court and welfare. This book is filled with twists and turns, as is her story. And so it would break the rules. Andrea Elliott: We love the story of the kid who made it out. I think that that was a major compass for me was this idea that, "Don't ever get too comfortable that you know your position here or your place. And one of the things that I found interesting is that one of the advantages to being within such close proximity to wealthy people is that people would drop off donations at the shelter. If she cries, others answer. So there were more than 22,000 children in homeless shelters at that time in the main system. Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows reportedly was the longest ever published in the newspaper up to that time. And at the same time, there's the old Janet Malcolm line about how every journalist who's, you know, not deluded will tell you what they're doing is ethically indefensible, which is not true and, kind of, hyperbolic, but scratches at something a little bit of a kernel of truth, which is that, like, there is always something intense and strange and sometimes a little hard to reckon with when you are reporting and telling the story of people who are in crisis, emergency trauma and you, yourself, are not. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. How you get out isn't the point. The people I grew up with. That's so irresponsible." If danger comes, Dasani knows what to do. She was such a remarkable and charismatic figure, and also because her story was so compelling. But she told me, and she has told me many times since, that she loves the book. Today, Dasani lives surrounded by wealth, whether she is peering into the boho chic shops near her shelter or surfing the internet on Auburns shared computer. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and But every once in a while, when by some miracle she scores a pair of Michael Jordans, she finds herself succumbing to the same exercise: she wears them sparingly, and only indoors, hoping to keep them spotless. And so Dasani went literally from one day to the next from the north shore of Staten Island where she was living in a neighborhood that was very much divided along the lines of gang warfare. And this is a current that runs through this family, very much so, as you can see by the names. And I understand the reporters who, sort of, just stop there and they describe these conditions and they're so horrifying. And I just wonder, like, how you thought about it as you went through this project. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and seven siblings in one of New York City's Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. Dasanis room was where they put the crazies, she says, citing as proof the broken intercom on the wall. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. And just exposure to diversity is great for anyone. "Invisible Child" follows the story of Dasani, a young homeless girl in New York City. Andrea Elliott: Okay. In this extract from her new book, Invisible Child, we meet Dasani Coates in 2012, aged 11 and living in a shelter, Read an interview with Andrea Elliott here. (LAUGH) She said to me at one point, "I mean, I want to say to them, especially if it's a man who's saying this, 'Have you ever been through childbirth?'. Why Is This Happening? is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and features music by Eddie Cooper. They will drop to the floor in silence. But what about the ones who dont? They would look at them and say, "How could they have eight children? She then moved from there to a shelter in Harlem and then to a shelter in the Bronx before finally, once again, landing another section eight voucher and being able to move back into a home with her family. Nearly a year ago, the citys child protection agency had separated 34-year-old Chanel Sykes from her children after she got addicted to opioids. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. It's part of the reason I stayed on it for eight years is it just kept surprising me and I kept finding myself (LAUGH) drawn back in. Only a mother could answer it, and for a while their mother was gone. Lee-Lees cry was something else. Andrea Elliott: So at the end of the five days that it took for me to read the book to Dasani, when we got to the last line, she said, "That's the last line?" What is crossing the line? Her hope for herself is to keep, as she's put it to me, her family and her culture close to her while also being able to excel.. She sorts them like laundry. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. But when you remove her from the family system, this was predictable that the family would struggle, because she was so essential to that. But because of the nature of how spread out Chicago was, the fact that this was not a moment of gentrification in the way that we think about it now, particularly in the, sort of, post-2000 comeback city era and then the post-financial crisis, that the kids in that story are not really cheek by jowl with all of the, kind of, wealth that is in Chicago. I just find them to be some of the most interesting people I've ever met. Her siblings will soon be scrambling to get dressed and make their beds before running to the cafeteria to beat the line. And I hope that she'll continue to feel that way. Tweet us at the hashtag #WITHPod. In order to witness those scenes, I have to be around. An interview with Andrea Elliott, author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. What was striking to me was how little changed. She's like, "And I smashed their eyes out and I'd do this.". There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. The other thing I would say is that we love the story of the kid who made it out. Then she sets about her chores, dumping the mop bucket, tidying her dresser, and wiping down the small fridge. She ends up there. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. She has a full wardrobe provided to her. And at that time, I just had my second child and I was on leave at home in Washington, D.C. where I had grown up. And there was a lot of complicated feelings about that book, as you might imagine. And I had an experience where someone I knew and was quite close to is actually an anthropologist doing field work in Henry Horner Homes after There Are No Children Here. And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. In New York, I feel proud. And I'll get to that in a second. The people I hang out with. Invisible Child: Dasanis Homeless Life. When braces are the stuff of fantasy, straight teeth are a lottery win. Where do you first encounter her in the city? It's something that I have wrestled with from the very beginning and continue to throughout. Just steps away are two housing projects and, tucked among them, a city-run homeless shelter where the heat is off and the food is spoiled. Just a few blocks from townhouses that were worth millions of dollars. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. And, of course, not. Where is Dasani now? And she talked about them brutally. But you have to understand that in so doing, you carry a great amount of responsibility to, I think, first and foremost, second guess yourself constantly. She trots into the cafeteria, where more than a hundred families will soon stand in line to heat their prepackaged breakfast. That image has stayed with me ever since because it was so striking the discipline that they showed to just walk in single file the unity, the strength of that bond, Elliott says. Now you are a very halal Muslim leader. And I think showing the dignity within these conditions is part of that other lens. I saw in Supreme and in Chanel a lot of the signs of someone who is self-medicating. She was so tender with her turtle. In Fort Greene alone, in that first decade, we saw the portion of white residents jump up by 80%. And I consider family to be Dasani's ultimate, sort of, system of survival. It never works. They rarely figure among the panhandlers, bag ladies, war vets and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. Some donations came in. And that really cracked me up because any true New Yorker likes to brag about the quality of our tap water. She was just one of those kids who had so many gifts that it made her both promising in the sense of she could do anything with her life. She would then start to feed the baby. The movies." And, as she put it, "It makes me feel like something's going on out there." Have Democrats learned them? Auburn used to be a hospital, back when nurses tended to the dying in open wards. The light noises bring no harm the colicky cries of an infant down the hall, the hungry barks of the Puerto Rican ladys chihuahuas, the addicts who wander the projects, hitting some crazy high. Nonetheless, she landed on the honor roll that fall. Whenever I'm with Chanel, Dasani, Supreme, any of the kids, I'm captivated by them. They wound up being placed at Auburn. You have a greater likelihood of meeting someone who might know of a job or, "Hey, there's someone in my building who needs a such."
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