And obviously, you know, one of the things I think is interesting and comes through here is, and I don't know the data on this, but I have found in my life as a reporter and as a human being along various parts of the Titanic ship that is the United States of America that there's a lot of substance abuse at every level. And it really was for that clientele, I believe. She would change her diaper. And he didn't really understand what my purpose was. Shes creating life on her own terms, Elliott says. Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. She's been through this a little bit before, right, with the series. But I met her standing outside of that shelter. Beyond the shelters walls, in the fall of 2012, Dasani belongs to an invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children the highest number ever recorded, in the most unequal metropolis in America. She was unemployed. I don't want to really say what Dasani's reaction is for her. And so this was his great legacy was to create a school for children in need. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. And to her, that means doing both things keeping her family in her life while also taking strides forward, the journalist says. 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. Her mother had grown up in a very different time. But nonetheless, my proposal was to focus on Dasani and on her siblings, on children. She attacked the mice. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. And it's a little bit like her own mother had thought. They felt that they had a better handle on my process by then. Only a mother could answer it, and for a while their mother was gone. And I was so struck by many things about her experience of growing up poor. So it's interesting how, you know, you always see what's happening on the street first before you see it 10,000 feet above the ground in terms of policy or other things. To kill a mouse is to score a triumph. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the All In team and features music by Eddie Cooper. And I think that that's also what she would say. There are parts of it that are painful. She's seeing all of this is just starting to happen. First of all, I don't rely on my own memory. After Dasanis family left the homeless shelter, she was accepted to the Milton Hershey School, a tuition-free boarding school for low-income children in Pennsylvania. Theres nearly 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the U.S. About one in 12 live in New York City. (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?'. What is that?" "Invisible Child" follows the story of Dasani, a young homeless girl in New York City. And I just wonder, like, how you thought about it as you went through this project. Just a few blocks from townhouses that were worth millions of dollars. One in five kids. Just a few blocks away are different or, kind of, safer feeling, but maybe alienating also. When she left New York City, her loved ones lost a crucial member of the family, and in her absence, things fell apart. Sept. 28, 2021. 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 just exposure to diversity is great for anyone. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. There is no separating Dasanis childhood from that of her matriarchs: her grandmother Joanie and her mother, Chanel. Its stately neo-Georgian exterior dates back nearly a century, to when the building opened as a public hospital serving the poor. Invisible Child: Girl in the Shadows reportedly was the longest ever published in the newspaper up to that time. 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 Clothing donations. Tweet us at the hashtag #WITHPod. IE 11 is not supported. I mean, this was a kid who had been, sort of, suddenly catapulted on to the front page of The New York Times for five days. She calls him Daddy. And that's the sadness I found in watching what happened to their family as it disintegrated at the hands of these bigger forces. This is typical of Dasani. Chanel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequalitytold through the crucible of one remarkable girl. But under court supervision, he had remained with the children, staying clean while his wife entered a drug treatment programme. And there's some poverty reporting where, like, it feels, you know, a little gross or it feels a little, like, you know, alien gaze-y (LAUGH) for lack of a better word. What's interesting about that compared to Dasani, just in terms of what, sort of, concentrated poverty is like in the 1980s, I think, when that book is being reported in her is that proximity question. This was north of Fort Greene park. 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?" I mean, that is one of many issues. And, of course, children aren't the face of the homeless. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. ", I think if we look at Dasani's trajectory, we see a different kind of story. You know? It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. In New York, I feel proud. To follow Dasani, as she comes of age, is also to follow her seven siblings. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. 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. 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. And, you know, I think that there's, in the prose itself, tremendous, you know, I think, sort of, ethical clarity and empathy and humanization. But it remains the case that a shocking percentage of Americans live below the poverty line. It's unpredictable. It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. So she lived in that shelter for over three years. asani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. Webwhat kind of cancer did nancy kulp have; nickname for someone with a short attention span; costa rican spanish accent; nitric acid and potassium hydroxide exothermic or endothermic Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. She makes do with what she has and covers what she lacks. She had a drug (INAUDIBLE). But I don't think it's enough to put all these kids through college. She became the first child in her family to graduate high school and she has now entered LaGuardia Community College. And then their cover got blown and that was after the series ran. Shes Then Jim Ester and the photographer (LAUGH) who was working with me said, "We just want to shadow you.". And it was an extraordinary experience. Well, every once in a while, a roach here and there in New York. She said, "Home is the people. But the spacial separation of Chicago means that they're not really cheek and jowl next to, you know, $3 million town homes or anything like that. Each spot is routinely swept and sprayed with bleach and laid with mousetraps. 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. How you get out isn't the point. You know, that's part of it. She sees out to a world that rarely sees her. Back then, from the ghettos isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. Eleven-year-old Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates is a primary caregiver for her seven siblings. 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. So I'm really hoping that that changes. I think that what is so striking about the New York that she was growing up in, as compared to, for instance, the New York of her mother Chanel, also named for a bottle of liquid, (LAUGH) is that Chanel grew up in East Brooklyn at a time when this was a siloed community, much like what you are describing about Henry Horner. So let's start with what was your beat at the time when you wrote the first story? Columbias Bill Grueskin tries to explain why the Pulitzer board dismissed The New York Times s Invisible Child series Chris Hayes: Yeah. To be poor in a rich city brings all kinds of ironies, perhaps none greater than this: the donated clothing is top shelf. And she also struggled with having to act differently. She was often tired. And at the same time, there's the old Janet Malcolm line about how every journalist who's, you know, not deluded will tell you what they're doing is ethically indefensible, which is not true and, kind of, hyperbolic, but scratches at something a little bit of a kernel of truth, which is that, like, there is always something intense and strange and sometimes a little hard to reckon with when you are reporting and telling the story of people who are in crisis, emergency trauma and you, yourself, are not. Random House, 2021. She's like, "And I smashed their eyes out and I'd do this.". Right? I still have it. Elliotts book follows eight years in the life of Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. I would be off in the woods somewhere writing and I would call her. This is where she derives her greatest strength. Chanel thought of Dasani. And, really, the difference is, like, the kind of safety nets, the kind of resources, the kind of access people have--. . And, you know, this was a new school. Chris Hayes: I want to, sort of, take a step back because I want to continue with what you talk about as, sort of, these forces and the disintegration of the family and also track through where Dasani goes from where she was when she's 11. They cough or sometimes mutter in the throes of a dream. And they act as their surrogate parents. She liked the sound of it. And in the very beginning, I was like, "Oh, I don't think I can hear this." But especially to someone like her, who she was struggling. And she tried to stay the path. And what was happening in New York was that we were reaching a kind of new level. She is among 432 homeless children and parents living at Auburn. She sorts them like laundry. Email withpod@gmail.com. Bed bugs. We meet Dasani in 2012, when she is eleven years old and living with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. WebRT @usaunify: When Dasani Left Home. They are true New Yorkers. It's, sort of, prismatic because, as you're talking about the separation of a nation in terms of its level of material comfort or discomfort, right, or material want, there's a million different stories to tell of what that looks like. The2009 financial crisis taught us hard lessons. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. But because of the nature of how spread out Chicago was, the fact that this was not a moment of gentrification in the way that we think about it now, particularly in the, sort of, post-2000 comeback city era and then the post-financial crisis, that the kids in that story are not really cheek by jowl with all of the, kind of, wealth that is in Chicago. She's just a visitor. Family was everything for them. 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. She could go anywhere. Baby Lee-Lee has yet to learn about hunger, or any of its attendant problems. No one on the block can outpace Dasani. They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. he wakes to the sound of breathing. And, of course, not. So thats a lot on my plate with some cornbread. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. It's told in her newest book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. Elliott hopes Invisible Child readers see people beyond the limiting labels of homeless and poor and address the deep historical context that are part of these complicated problems, she says. This is an extract 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 And that was stunning to me. Chapter 42 Now a sophomore, Dasani believes that her family is desperately fractured. Dasani's 20. But, like, that's not something that just happens. She was 11 years old. There have been a few huge massive interventions that have really altered the picture of what poverty looks like in the U.S., chiefly the Great Society and the New Deal and some other things that have happened since then. Thats what Invisible Child is about, Elliott says, the tension between what is and what was for Dasani, whose life is remarkable, compelling and horrifying in many ways. It happens because there's a lot of thought and even theory, I think, put into the practice. Andrea Elliott: Yeah. She could even tell the difference between a cry for hunger and a cry for sleep. Their sister is always first. And so putting that aside, what really changed? For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. It was in Brooklyn that Chanel was also named after a fancy-sounding bottle, spotted in a magazine in 1978. Parental neglect, failure to provide necessities for ones children like shelter or clothing, is one form of child maltreatment that differs from child abuse, she says. Chanel was raised on the streets and relied on family bonds, the reporter learned. She would just look through the window. WebA work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott's Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. She would walk past these boutiques where there were $800 boots for sale. I feel accepted.". But you know what a movie is. But with Shaka Ritashata (PH), I remember using all of the, sort of, typical things that we say as journalists. Well, if you know the poor, you know that they're working all the time. A fascinating, sort of, strange (UNINTEL) generous institution in a lot of ways. I had an early experience of this with Muslim immigrant communities in the United States that I reported on for years. Elliott first met Dasani, her parents and her siblings in Brooklyns Fort Greene neighborhood in 2012. But she was so closely involved in my process. And so it would break the rules. And so you can get braces. She wants to stay in her neighborhood and with her family. You never know with a book what its ultimate life will be in the minds of the people that you write about or a story for that matter. We're gonna both pretend we've seen movies. 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 shelter. But, of course, there's also the story of poverty, which has been a durable feature of American life for a very long time. 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 signalled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun. And she jumped on top of my dining room table and started dancing. You know, my fridge was always gonna be stocked. And at first, she thrived. But I would say that at the time, the parents saw that trust as an obstacle to any kind of real improvement because they couldn't access it because donors didn't want money going into the hands of parents with a drug history and also because they did continue to receive public assistance. Talk a little bit about where Dasani is now, her age, what she had to, sort of, come through, and also maybe a little bit about the fact that she was written about in The New York Times, like, might have affected that trajectory. And this was all very familiar to me. Their voucher had expired. Andrea Elliott: Okay. St. Patty's Day, green and white. Chanel always says, "Blood is thicker than water." Author Andrea Elliott followed Dasani and her family for nearly 10 years, Andrea Elliott is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. And you didn't really have firsthand access to what it looks like, what it smells like to be wealthy. Like, you do an incredible job on that. And that gets us to 2014. And there was a lot of complicated feelings about that book, as you might imagine. She knew she had to help get her siblings fed and dressed. She is the least of Dasanis worries. In 2013, the story of a young girl named Dasani Coates took up five front pages in The New York Times. And I think showing the dignity within these conditions is part of that other lens. It's now about one in seven. She will tell them to shut up. WebInvisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. Over the next year, 911 dispatchers will take some 350 calls from Auburn, logging 24 reports of assault, four reports of child abuse, and one report of rape. And that's really true of the poor. Auburn used to be a hospital, back when nurses tended to the dying in open wards. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. She wanted to create this fortress, in a way. Her parents were struggling with a host of problems. In 2019, when the school bell rang at the end of the day, more than 100,000 schoolchildren in New York City had no permanent home to return to. You're gonna get out of your own lane and go into other worlds. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. East New York still is to a certain degree, but Bed-Stuy has completely changed now. So you mentioned There Are No Children Here. She had been born in March, shattering the air with her cries. I mean, these were people with tremendous potential and incredible ideas about what their lives could be that were such a contrast to what they were living out. Criminal justice. I think it's so natural for an outsider to be shocked by the kind of conditions that Dasani was living in. They follow media carefully. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. The other thing you asked about were the major turning points. I focused on doing projects, long form narrative pieces that required a lot of time and patience on the part of my editors and a lot of swinging for the fences in terms of you don't ever know how a story is going to pan out. Despite the circumstances, Dasani radiated with potential. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. But she saw an ad for Chanel perfume. And how far can I go? She would then start to feed the baby. Hershey likes to say that it wants to be the opposite of a legacy school, that if your kids qualify, that means that the school hasn't done its job, 'cause its whole purpose is to lift children out of poverty. 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. And I was trying to get him to agree to let me in for months at a time. At Hershey, I feel like a stranger, like I really don't belong. And a lot of things then happen after that. Her body is still small enough to warm with a hairdryer. And at the same time, what if these kids ten years from now regret it? (LAUGH) And the market produces massively too little affordable housing, which is in some ways part of the story of Dasani and her family, which is the city doesn't have enough affordable housing. And these bubbles get, sort of, smaller and smaller, in which people are increasingly removed from these different strata of American life. Her husband also had a drug history. Chris Hayes: So she's back in the city. 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. You can try, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City., Why the foster care system needs to change as aid expires for thousands of aged-out youth, The Pandemic's Severe Toll On The Already-Strained Foster Care System. The brothers last: five-year-old Papa and 11-year-old Khaliq, who have converted their metal bunk into a boys-only fort. And it also made her indispensable to her parents, which this was a real tension from the very beginning. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. The material reality of Dasani's life her homelessness, her family's lack of money is merely the point of departure for understanding her human condition, she says. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. The thumb-suckers first: six-year-old Hada and seven-year-old Maya, who share a small mattress. You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. I can read you the quote. (BACKGROUND MUSIC) It is an incredible feat of reporting and writing. 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. 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. How did you respond? All these things, kind of, coalesced to create a crisis, which is so often the case with being poor is that it's a lot of small things suddenly happening at once that then snowball into something catastrophic. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America. And I found greater clarity after I left the newsroom and was more in an academic setting as I was researching this book. Dasani, a tiny eleven-year-old girl when the book begins in 2012, has learned the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. Andrea Elliott: And I think the middle ground we found was to protect them by not putting their last names in and refer to most of them by their nicknames. 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. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. And one of the striking elements of the story you tell is that that's not the case in the case of the title character of Dasani. By the time most schoolchildren in New York City are waking up to go to school, Dasani had been working for probably two hours. And demographers have studied this and I think that we still don't really know ultimately. I do, though. And she talked about them brutally. And she just loved that. She ends up there. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" Her name was Dasani. There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. And talk a little bit about just her routine, her school life. Come on, says her mother, Chanel, who stands next to Dasani. In the dim chaos of Room 449, she struggles to find Lee-Lees formula, which is donated by the shelter but often expired. Her eyes can travel into Manhattan, to the top of the Empire State Building, the first New York skyscraper to reach a hundred floors. Andrea Elliott: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. We rarely look at all the children who don't, who are just as capable. She has hit a major milestone, though. But the family liked the series enough to let me continue following them. It was really tough: Andrea Elliott on writing about New Yorks homeless children. I read the book out to the girls. In the city, I mean, I have a 132 hours of audio recorded of all my reporting adventures. 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. It's just not in the formal labor market. She doesn't want to have to leave. She's pregnant with Dasani, 2001. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. Sort of, peak of the homeless crisis. 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. She was so tender with her turtle. What's also true, though, is that as places like New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco and even Detroit and Washington, D.C. have increasingly gentrified, the experience of growing up poor is one of being in really close proximity with people who have money. Ethical issues. Thats a lot on my plate.. Lee-Lees cry was something else. Had been the subject of tremendous amounts of redlining and disinvestment and panic peddling that had essentially chased white homeowners out. They wound up being placed at Auburn. And there's so much to say about it. And I'm also, by the way, donating a portion of the proceeds of this book to the family, to benefit Dasani and her siblings and parents. By the time I got to Dasani's family, I had that stack and I gave it to them. She's a hilarious (LAUGH) person. But what about the ones who dont? Massive gentrification occurs in this first decade. They spend their days in school, their nights in the shelter. Right outside is a communal bathroom with a large industrial tub. This is freighted by other forces beyond her control hunger, violence, unstable parenting, homelessness, drug addiction, pollution, segregated schools. But she was not at all that way with the mice. Their fleeting triumphs and deepest sorrows are, in Dasanis words, my heart. They have yet to stir. Taped to the wall is the childrens proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. It's called Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. That, to be honest, is really home. But to Dasani, the shelter is far more than a random assignment. She is tiny for an 11-year-old and quick to startle. 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. Dasani gazes out of the window from the one room her family of 10 shared in the Brooklyn homeless shelter where they lived for almost four years. And I just spent so much time with this family and that continues to be the case. And I had avoided it. Tempers explode. You know, she just knew this other world was there and it existed and it did not include her. That's what we tend to think of the homeless as. Child Protection Services showed up on 12 occasions. 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. And those questions just remained constantly on my mind. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. Luckily, in this predawn hour, the cafeteria is still empty. A movie has characters." I just find them to be some of the most interesting people I've ever met. He said, "Yes. And I met Dasani right in that period, as did the principal. I didn't have a giant stack of in-depth, immersive stories to show him. It's part of the reason I stayed on it for eight years is it just kept surprising me and I kept finding myself (LAUGH) drawn back in.