Poverty In The Other Wes Moore

Poverty shares traits with the Shawshank State Penitentiary: a rare few find a way out but more often than not, those who begin the escape get caught and sent back to the same place they started. The path out exists, but it may require help from outside influences or having to digging away at a hole with a rock hammer for years. Unfortunately, not every impoverished American shares the triumphant tale of Andy Dufresne. The Other Wes Moore tells the story of two men of the same name and beginnings who have disparate futures. The author, Wes Moore, ended up on a path to success while the other Wes Moore remains in a jail cell for the rest of his life. The author’s rock hammer was access to a quality education and removal from a rough neighborhood.

In the study “Racial and Class Divergence in Public Attitudes and Perception About Poverty in USA: An Empirical Study,” professor Francis O. Adeola analyzes existing data to determine if people themselves or a structural influence causes poverty (Adeola 56). Building upon the idea of structural poverty, Adeola contends “poverty rates tend to persist in the same neighborhood over many years” (61). For the other Wes Moore, this neighborhood was the Murphy Project Homes: one of the most dangerous places in Baltimore (Moore 18). Furthermore, he examines how “[t]he poor form a unique subculture,” reinforcing aspects of poverty (Adeola 61). The subculture that surrounded the other Wes Moore included the normalization of the presence of drugs and

Adeola claims the growth of poverty in the United States pushes a “disproportionate burden . . . on African-Americans” and single mothers (75). Both of these factors are a part of contribute to Wes’s story. Wes’s mother, Mary, continues the trend of generational poverty as“the first in her family to even begin college”(Moore 14). Mary losing her Pell Grant is another example of oppression Adeola discusses (Moore 17). The study outlines how “[the government] has long been raging war against poor people using a variety of weapons (Adeola 76). For Mary, she lost her grant after President Ronald Reagan passed a budget that gutted funding for the entire program (Moore 17). If Mary would have been able to finish school, a complete education could have been an expectation for Wes. To her son’s misfortune, the government actions that disrupted Mary’s educational career indirectly harmed Wes’s opportunities with the reinforcement of generational poverty. With an impoverished family, an absent father, and a rough neighborhood, Wes’s likelihood of success further declined. As a high school dropout with a criminal record, Wes’s search for a high paying job became nearly impossible (Moore 140). Wes tried to overcome his poverty riddled life by joining the Job Corps with his friend Levy (Moore 139). Through this, Wes hoped to find a steady income without the danger of being in the drug