Summary

In Bell Hooks article he discusses how American’s rarely admitted to being poor and uses his own life as an example. Growing up the author states that his family was poor but he was corrected by Coronel West as being working poor because his father had job. Bell says that he did not begin to see himself as poor until he went to college when money became the topic of many conversations and a major factor in his life. Bell states he rarely thinks of himself in relation to class and tends to see the word as the have and have nots.

In college, Bell said that he never made a connection between poverty and integrity but was shocked by the representations of the poor he learned in class. Society deemed the poor as lazy, dishonest and