Dignity Seeking respect in back row America

Arnade almost literally wandered into a photojournalism career, taking long walks after his day job as a trader, which eventually led him to the Bronx's Hunts Point neighborhood. Within a couple of years, he left Wall Street to document life there and in other places ""with a reputation as 'a place you shouldn't visit' or a place that 'sucks' or where 'everyone who can leave has left.'"" Crisscrossing the U.S., he spends time in various McDonald's and churches and, overwhelmingly, meets people eager to talk and be photographed. In chapters on themes like racism, addiction, and religion, he organizes their stories, along with his uncaptioned color photographs of people posing, gathering, hugging, praying, and shooting up, as well as unpeopled landscapes. Arnade offers no tidy conclusions, and his work is bound to provoke reaction, discussion, and perhaps controversy. Inarguably, his ""attempt to listen and look with humility"" is a portrait of what it's like to feel disfavored by the institutions and values of a ""front row"" society that purports to be a meritocracy, with education serving as its all-access pass.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

A journey across America reveals stories from communities forgotten and destroyed.In 2011, Wall Street bond trader Arnade, who often took long walks around New York, decided to explore the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, an area he had been warned was dangerous and forbidding. What he found surprised him: a "welcoming, warm, and beautiful" community, unfairly stigmatized, he thought, because of drugs and sex work. For the next year, he frequented dive bars, McDonald's, and evangelical churches, where residents told him about the complexities and challenges of their lives, a reality that contrasted starkly with his "cloistered and privileged" world. Questioning his own values, the author quit his job to immerse himself fully in Hunts Point: talking, listening, and trying to helpdriving people to detox, prison, or a hospital or doling out small amounts of cash to help them get by. Unfortunately, he got pulled into their lives more fully than he had planned and, for a short time, ended up abusing drugs and alcohol. However, his experience led him to embark on a larger project: a journey to other poor, neglected neighborhoods"black, white, Hispanic, rural, urban"to document, in photographs and narrative, life in the nation's "back row." In every community, Arnade listened to residents' life stories: about drug addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, abuse, unemployment, and eviction. He listened, also, as people told him about the importance of faith to help them make peace with their lack of control over their lives and connect them with "something beyond the material." Arnade strives to afford each individual respect for choices made and understanding for opportunities denied. Although he concludes that everyonein the front row and the backmust listen, keep from being judgmental, and understand others' values, he offers no other suggestions for changing an exclusionary, exploitative, racist system that has created vast economic and social inequality, drug addiction, and humiliation. Some analysis would have given this moving volume more heft.Candid, empathetic portraits of silenced men, women, and children. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Introduction   I first walked into the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx be­cause I was told not to. I was told it was too dangerous, too poor, and that I was too white. I was told "nobody goes there for any­thing other than drugs and prostitutes." The people directly telling me this were my colleagues (other bankers), my neighbors (other wealthy Brooklynites), and my friends (other academics). All, like me, success­ful, well-educated people who had opinions on the Bronx but had never really been there.   It was 2011, and I was in my eighteenth year as a Wall Street bond trader. My workdays were spent sitting behind a wall of computers, gambling on flashing numbers, in a downtown Manhattan trading floor filled with hundreds of others doing exactly the same thing. My home life was spent in a large Brooklyn apartment, in a neighborhood filled with other successful people.   I wasn't in the mood for listening to anyone, especially other bank­ers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadn't been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending the company I worked for, Citibank, into a spiral stopped only by a government bailout. I had just seen where our--my own included--hubris had taken us and what it had cost the country. Not that it had actually cost us bankers, or my neighbors, much of anything.   I had always taken long walks, sometimes as long as fifteen miles, to explore and reduce stress, but now the walks began to evolve. Rather than walk with some plan to walk the entire length of Broadway, or along the length of a subway line, I started walking the less seen parts of New York City, the parts people claimed were unsafe or uninteresting, walking with no goal other than eventually getting home. Along the walk I talked to whoever talked to me, and I let their suggestions, not my instincts and maps, navigate me. I also used my camera to take por­traits of those I met, and I became more and more drawn to the stories people inevitably wanted to share about their life.   The walks, the portraits, the stories I heard, the places they took me, became a process of learning in a different kind of way. Not from text­books, or statistics, or spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations, or classrooms, or speeches, or documentaries--but from people.   What I started seeing, and learning, was just how cloistered and privileged my world was and how narrow and selfish I was. Not just in how I lived but in what and how I thought. Excerpted from Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.