Reflection 7: Social Status
This week’s class topic was social status and the reflection activity was to play a game where the goal is to survive one month with a low income and no savings after you just lost your house.
It was a really meta experience to play a poverty simulation on my laptop while I sat in the welcome center of my university.
The first round, I ran out of money on day 20. I tried again but this time cutting down on costs for other people. Maybe my child’s field trip was only $15 or a walk to the ice cream truck cost $5, but I had to save money somewhere. I couldn’t drive across the state for my grandfather’s funeral, and I couldn’t pay for my mom’s crucial medication.
Something else that was really challenging: when you don’t pay on time because you can’t afford something, but then the cost for that service increases or even doubles. It’s like running a losing race and never being able to catch up.
My second play-through I did make it to day 30 with a whole $2 (and rent due the following day).
When it comes to representations of poverty in the news media, we see a lot of numbers. “8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up,” reports The New York Times.
Perhaps those numbers are hard to stomach, but what hits even harder is actually understanding what that looks like in a person’s life.
One of the videos we watched this week, a crash course on social stratification, cited a 2014 study by Gillens and Page which found that “the views of those at the top [wealth quintile] have a positive, significant relationship with the laws getting passed.”
Just as those with more money have greater influence in legislation, those with more money may have greater influence in media.
That brings me back to a prior reading from a few weeks ago from the magazine Quill. The article detailed the cycle of who is in the newsroom; news agencies often offer unpaid summer internships. The people who can take on those internships come from wealthier families. The interns go on to have careers at those same companies.
The actual stories of people living in poverty aren’t represented as frequently in the news because they’re not the ones writing the stories and largely, they’re not the sources for stories either. Hearing their realities — and not just reducing people to numbers — is incredibly powerful and diversifying newsrooms is a start to appropriately covering those communities.