But under court supervision, he had remained with the children, staying clean while his wife entered a drug treatment programme. Offering a rare look into how homelessness directs the course of a life, New York Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott was allowed to follow Dasani's family for almost 10 years. So this was the enemy. We burn them! Dasani says with none of the tenderness reserved for her turtle. Any one of these afflictions could derail a promising child. The other thing I would say is that we love the story of the kid who made it out. The book takes on poverty, homelessness, racism, addiction, hunger, and more as they shape the lives of one remarkable girl and her family. Invisible Child Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. We just had all these meetings in the newsroom about what to do because the story was unfolding and it was gripping. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. 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. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. Knife fights break out. And one of the things that I've learned, of course, and this is an obvious point, is that those are very widely distributed through society. This is so important." She changed diapers, fed them and took them to school. This is where she derives her greatest strength. This family is a proud family. And at that time in my career, it was 2006. 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. How did you respond? 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. 'Invisible Child' tells the story of childhood homelessness 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 Dasani squints to check the date. Then Jim Ester and the photographer (LAUGH) who was working with me said, "We just want to shadow you.". She is among 432 homeless children and parents living at Auburn. She was such a remarkable and charismatic figure, and also because her story was so compelling. Legal Aid set up a trust for the family. She's a hilarious (LAUGH) person. And then you have to think about how to address it. Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on May 16, 2022. Jane Clayson Guest Host, Here & NowJane Clayson is Here & Now's guest host. CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, we move to New York. Dasani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. She would change her diaper. And how far can I go? This is usually the sound that breaks Dasanis trance, causing her to leave the window and fetch Lee-Lees bottle. She trots into the cafeteria, where more than a hundred families will soon stand in line to heat their prepackaged breakfast. And what really got me interested, I think, in shifting gears was in the end of 2011, Occupy Wall Street happened. 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. 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. And, of course, the obvious thing that many people at the time noted was that, you know, there were over a million people in bondage at the same time they were saying this. Her expression veers from mischief to wonder. April 17, 2014 987 words. And it really was for that clientele, I believe. Back then, from the ghettos isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. So civic equality is often honored in the breach, but there is the fact that early on, there is a degree of material equality in the U.S. that is quite different from what you find in Europe. So in There Are No Children Here, you know, if you go over there to the Henry Horner Homes on the west side, you do have the United Center. The 10-year-olds next: Avianna, who snores the loudest, and Nana, who is going blind. 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 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. And regardless of our skin color, our ethnicity, our nationality, our political belief system, if you're a journalist, you're gonna cross boundaries. It's in resources. She wants to stay in her neighborhood and with her family. And the translator would translate and was actually showing this fly. If she cries, others answer. The citys wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. Anyway, and I said, "Imagine I'm making a movie about your life. Well, by the way, that really gets in the way of getting a job. In New York, I feel proud. They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. She attacked the mice. You can tell that story, as we have on the podcast, about the, sort of, crunched middle class, folks who want to afford college and can't. She had a drug (INAUDIBLE). 'Invisible Child' and childhood homelessness; Implants to And that really cracked me up because any true New Yorker likes to brag about the quality of our tap water. Dasani would call it my spy pen. She's pregnant with Dasani, 2001. And it's, I think, a social good to do so. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control hunger, violence, unstable parenting, homelessness, drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. And that gets us to 2014. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. She didn't know what it smelled like, but she just loved the sound of it. She wanted to create this fortress, in a way. It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. What's your relationship with her now and what's her reaction to the book? To watch these systems play out in Dasanis life is to glimpse not only their flaws, but the threat they pose to Dasanis system of survival. And so it would break the rules. No. And this is a current that runs through this family, very much so, as you can see by the names. Come on, says her mother, Chanel, who stands next to Dasani. "What's Chanel perfume? Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos. It's why do so many not? You know, we're very much in one another's lives. We get the robber barons and the Industrial Revolution. Putting a face on homelessness in 'Invisible Child' | CNN It's painful. Catholic Daily Mass - Daily TV Mass - April 23, 2023 - Facebook How an immersionist held up the story of one homeless Invisible Child 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 Like, "Why do I have to say, 'Isn't,' instead of, 'Ain't'?" Now the bottle must be heated. Andrea, thank you so much. And it's a little bit like her own mother had thought. People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. I want to be very clear. Even Dasanis name speaks of a certain reach. I have a lot on my plate, she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. It's massively oversubscribed. Her mother had grown up in a very different time. Dasani tells herself that brand names dont matter. So you mentioned There Are No Children Here. If you use the word homeless, usually the image that comes to mind is of a panhandler or someone sleeping on subway grates. She felt that the streets became her family because she had such a rocky childhood. I still have it. This is a pivotal, pivotal decade for Brooklyn. And I was so struck by many things about her experience of growing up poor. I mean, I called her every day almost for years. Sleek braids fall to one side of Dasanis face, clipped by yellow bows. They're quite spatially separated from it. Her parents were in and out of jail for theft, fights and drugs. We take the sticks and smash they eyes out! So that's continued to be the case since the book ended. Invisible Child: the Life of a Homeless Family in NYC And she just loved that. (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?'. Dasani It's still too new of a field of research to say authoritatively what the impact is, good or bad, of gentrification on long term residents who are lower income. 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?" They were-- they were eating the family's food and biting. She liked the sound of it. And unemployed. They were in drug treatment programs for most of the time that I was with them, mostly just trying to stay sober and often succeeding at it. There are a lot of different gradations of what that poverty looks like. A Phil & Teds rain shell, fished from the garbage, protects the babys creaky stroller. And she wants to be able to thrive there. And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. 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. And which she fixed. ANDREA ELLIOTT, Andrea Elliott: I met Dasani while I was standing outside of Auburn Family Residence, which is a city run, decrepit shelter, one of two city run shelters that were notorious for the conditions that children were forced to live in with their families. Uncovering 'The Invisible Child' with Andrea Elliott: They are true New Yorkers. Dasani hugs her mother Chanel, with her sister Nana on the left, 2013. o know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates to follow this childs life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. To know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates to follow this childs life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. But she was so closely involved in my process. And, of course, not. So her principal, kind of, took her under her wing. Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. She was 11 years old. It's helping them all get through college. Her skyline is filled with luxury towers, the beacons of a new gilded age. It's something that I have wrestled with from the very beginning and continue to throughout. And in my local bodega, they suddenly recently added, I just noticed this last night, organic milk. I mean, everything fell on its face. And talk a little bit about just her routine, her school life. The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. I saw in Supreme and in Chanel a lot of the signs of someone who is self-medicating. Dasani, a tiny eleven-year-old girl when the book begins in 2012, has learned the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. What is that?" Who paid for water in a bottle? Nine years ago, my colleague Andrea Elliott set out to report a series of stories about what it was like to be a homeless child in New York City. And even as you move into the 1820s and '30s when you have fights over, sort of, Jacksonian democracy and, kind of, popular sovereignty and will, you're still just talking about essentially white men with some kind of land, some kind of ownership and property rights. I think that when you get deeper inside and when you start to really try your best to understand on a more intimate level what those conditions mean for the person that you're writing about, so you stop imposing your outsider lens, although it's always gonna be there and you must be aware of it, and you try to allow for a different perspective. And that's impossible to do without the person being involved and opening up and transparent. Dasani opens a heavy metal door, stepping into the dark corridor. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. She is currently a student at LaGuardia Community College in New York. 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. 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. Elliott says those are the types of stories society tends to glorify because it allows us to say, if you work hard enough, if you are gifted enough, then you can beat this.. It was really so sweet. They did not get the help that many upper middle class Americans would take for granted, whether it's therapy, whether it's medication, whether it's rehab. And I was trying to get him to agree to let me in for months at a time. You just invest time. Their voucher had expired. And yet, in cities, the fracturing happens within really close range. That's what we tend to think of the homeless as. Just a few blocks from townhouses that were worth millions of dollars. What she knows is that she has been blessed with perfect teeth. Mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the buildings predators. She felt the burdens of home life lift off her shoulders, giving her the opportunity to focus her energy on schoolwork, join the track team and cheerleading squad, and make significant gains in math. It's unpredictable. She was named after the water bottle that is sold in bodegas and grocery stores. She has hit a major milestone, though. Dasani described the familys living quarters as so cramped, it was like 10 people trying to breathe in the same room and they only give you five windows, Elliott recalls. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. She spent eight years falling the story of Dasani Coates. But the other part is agency. And you didn't really have firsthand access to what it looks like, what it smells like to be wealthy. And so this was his great legacy was to create a school for children in need. And I said, "Yes." I live in Harlem. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. She doesn't want to have to leave. Dasani keeps forgetting to count the newest child. And she would stare at the Empire State Building at the tower lights because the Empire State Building, as any New Yorker knows, lights up depending on the occasion to reflect the colors of that occasion. 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. And, of course, children aren't the face of the homeless. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. It is on the fourth floor of that shelter, at a window facing north, that Dasani now sits looking out. It comes loud and fast, with a staccato rhythm. Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. Right? But it remains the case that a shocking percentage of Americans live below the poverty line. Like, she was wearing Uggs at one point and a Patagonia fleece at another point. INVISIBLE CHILD POVERTY, SURVIVAL & HOPE IN AN AMERICAN CITY. I wanted to, kind of, follow up (LAUGH) the book that I loved so much in the '80s by looking once again at the story of poor urban America through one child. Like, I would love to meet a woman who's willing to go through childbirth for just a few extra dollars on your food stamp benefits (LAUGH) that's not even gonna last the end of the month." Try to explain your work as much as you can." Chris Hayes: Her parents, Supreme and Chanel, you've, sort of, made allusion to this, but they both struggle with substance abuse. Right? Her city is paved over theirs. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. 'Invisible Child' chronicles how homelessness shaped 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. But basically, Dasani came to see that money as something for the future, not an escape from poverty. And she also struggled with having to act differently. And so I also will say that people would look at Dasani's family from the outside, her parents, and they might write them off as, you know, folks with a criminal record. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. Homeless services. But, like, that's not something that just happens. Dasanis story, which ran on the front page in late 2013, became totemic in a moment of electoral flux in New York after the election of Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor on a 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. 6. I was around a lot of folks like Lee Ann Fujii, who passed away. Her parents survived major childhood traumas. She is forever in motion, doing backflips at the bus stop, dancing at the welfare office. This was north of Fort Greene park. Invisible Child Andrea Elliott 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. It was really tough: Andrea Elliott on writing about New Yorks homeless children. She's had major ups and major downs. asani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless The bottled water had come to Brooklyns bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. And There Are No Children Here, which takes place in what's called Henry Horner Homes, which is in the west side of Chicago right by what is now called the United Center, which is where the Bulls play. And I have this pen that's called live scribe and it records sound while I'm writing. She could go anywhere. 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 makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. Chris Hayes: Yeah. She ends up there. Invisible Child chronicles the ongoing struggles of homelessness, which passes from one generation to the next in Dasanis family. Every once in a while, it would. She saw this ad in a glossy magazine while she was, I believe, at a medical clinic. She doesn't want to get out. It wasn't just that she was this victim of the setting. And it wasn't a huge amount of money as far as I know, although Legal Aid's never told me (LAUGH) exactly how much is in it. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. I think what she has expressed to me, I can certainly repeat. And it's not because people didn't care or there wasn't the willpower to help Dasani. She spent eight years falling the story 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, you know, this was a new school. All she has to do is climb the school steps. Andrea Elliotts story of American poverty is non-fiction writing at So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. 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. 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. And she sees a curious thing on the shelf of her local bodega. Alexander Tuerkproduced and edited this interview for broadcast withTodd Mundt. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. I got a fork and a spoon. An interview with Andrea Elliott, author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. And I remember the imam's face was just, like, horrified. 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. Where do you first encounter her in the city? The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. It's something that I talked about a lot with Supreme and Chanel. She felt that she left them and this is what happened. It's, first of all, the trust, which continues to exist and is something I think people should support.
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