Poverty And Prejudice In The Street

Poverty and Prejudice In the novel The Street by Ann Petry Lutie Johnson is a single mother living in Harlem trying to support herself and her son. Petry shows how poverty in Harlem had a cause, an effect, and how people reacted to poverty. Lutie, Boots, and an unnamed, stabbed girl’s lives are shaped by the poverty they live in. Racism is the cause of the poverty that Lutie lived in during the 1940s and she struggles with how black people like herself are forced to live in more poverty than white people. After spotting Bub with his shoeshine box in the street trying to earn extra money, Lutie says to him how white people only view black people as “fit to do… the dirty work,” this contributes to the “walled enclosure from which there was

Once Bub is arrested Lutie begins to think about what circumstances led to his arrest. Lutie arrives at the conclusion that it is because white people do not give jobs that “paid enough for them to support their families,” which is another example of the racism that leads to the poverty blacks live in(388). The white Chandlers often talked about becoming rich and how America is the best country to make it rich in, which led to Lutie’s obsession with getting out of poverty. However, after the officers inform her of Bub’s arrest, Lutie thinks to herself “you forgot you were black,” meaning that while white people can make it big and get rich black people often could not because life did not give black people the same opportunities as white people(389). Suddenly, while Lutie is walking to visit Bub at the Children’s Center she observes the nice houses in the neighborhood and wonders about how white people can live wherever they want as long as they can pay the rent, but colored people could only live at“a