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. Dasani's roots in Fort Greene go back for generations. Nuh-uh. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. ANDREA ELLIOTT, Children are not often the face of homelessness, but their stories are heartbreaking and sobering: childhoods denied spent in and out of shelters, growing up with absent parents and often raising themselves and their siblings. She never even went inside. And about 2,000 kids go there. She is tiny for an 11-year-old and quick to startle. 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. Then Jim Ester and the photographer (LAUGH) who was working with me said, "We just want to shadow you.". What was striking to me was how little changed. But I think she just experienced such an identity crisis and she felt so much guilt. And I think that that's what Dasani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how. He said, "Yes. Now the bottle must be heated. with me, your host, Chris Hayes. 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. About six months after the series ran, we're talking June of 2014, Dasani by then had missed 52 days of the school year, which was typical, 'cause chronic absenteeism is very, very normal among homeless children. And at the same time, what if these kids ten years from now regret it? asani ticks through their faces, the girls from the projects who know where she lives. "What were you thinking in this moment? And there's a amazing, amazing book called Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc which takes place in the Bronx, which is in a somewhat similar genre. "What's Chanel perfume? She is sure the place is haunted. Theres nothing to be scared about.. 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. Taped to the wall is the childrens proudest art: a bright sun etched in marker, a field of flowers, a winding path. And I don't think she could ever recover from that. This week, an expansion of her reporting comes out within the pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.. She is currently a student at LaGuardia Community College in New York. This is where she derives her greatest strength. And they act as their surrogate parents. Criminal justice. Dasani, a tiny eleven-year-old girl when the book begins in 2012, has learned the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. You're gonna get out of your own lane and go into other worlds. It makes me feel like theres something going on out there, she says. Back then, from the ghettos isolated corners, a perfume ad seemed like the portal to a better place. But at the end of the day, they are stronger than anything you throw at them. A fascinating, sort of, strange (UNINTEL) generous institution in a lot of ways. 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 The rap of a security guards knuckles on the door. It's why do so many not? (LAUGH) You know? To know Dasani Joanie-Lashawn Coates to follow this childs life, from her first breaths in a Brooklyn hospital to the bloom of adulthood is to reckon with the story of New York City and, beyond its borders, with America itself. WebInvisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. I mean, everything fell on its face. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. When braces are the stuff of fantasy, straight teeth are a lottery win. To see Dasani is to see all the places of her life, from the corridors of school to the emergency rooms of hospitals to the crowded vestibules of family court and welfare. There definitely are upsides. (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. 11:12 - And at that time, I just had my second child and I was on leave at home in Washington, D.C. where I had grown up. The problems of poverty are so much greater, so much more overwhelming than the power of being on the front page of The New York Times. But I don't think it's enough to put all these kids through college. The brothers last: five-year-old Papa and 11-year-old Khaliq, who have converted their metal bunk into a boys-only fort. As Dasani walks to her new school on 6 September 2012, her heart is pounding. This is the place where people go to be free. Clothing donations. And through the years of American journalism, and some of the best journalism that has been produced, is about talking about what that looks like at the ground level. A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. Nearly a quarter of Dasanis childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and Two sweeping sycamores shade the entrance, where smokers linger under brick arches. Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses a button. Jane Clayson Guest Host, Here & NowJane Clayson is Here & Now's guest host. This was north of Fort Greene park. She's just a visitor. Knife fights break out. Right? "I just want to be a fly on the wall. Sort of, peak of the homeless crisis. But she told me, and she has told me many times since, that she loves the book. Now you fast forward to 2001. INVISIBLE CHILD POVERTY, SURVIVAL & HOPE IN AN AMERICAN CITY. And, as she put it, "It makes me feel like something's going on out there." She knows such yearnings will go unanswered. And so I did what I often do as a journalist is I thought, "You know, let me find a universal point of connection. ", And we were working through a translator. It's now about one in seven. Alexander Tuerkproduced and edited this interview for broadcast withTodd Mundt. And she didn't want the streets to become her kids' family. Their sister is always first. It wasn't a safe thing. A Phil & Teds rain shell, fished from the garbage, protects the babys creaky stroller. And I could never see what the next turn would be. And I have this pen that's called live scribe and it records sound while I'm writing. Then she sets about her chores, dumping the mop bucket, tidying her dresser, and wiping down the small fridge. Except for Baby Lee-Lee, who wails like a siren. 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. Every morning, Dasani leaves her grandmothers birthplace to wander the same streets where Joanie grew up, playing double Dutch in the same parks, seeking shade in the same library. Slipping out from her covers, Dasani goes to the window. Dasani races back upstairs, handing her mother the bottle. Roaches crawl to the ceiling. 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. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. She loves being first the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to win a fight, the first to make the honour roll. 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. And then their cover got blown and that was after the series ran. By Ryan Chittum. 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 she saw an ad for Chanel perfume. Some girls may be kind enough to keep Dasanis secret. In this moving but occasionally flat narrative, Elliott follows Dasani for eight years, beginning in 2012 when she was 11 years old and living in Among them is Dasanis birthplace, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where renovated townhouses come with landscaped gardens and heated marble floors. She will kick them awake. How long is she in that shelter? They rarely figure among the panhandlers, bag ladies, war vets and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. Andrea joins to talk about her expanded coverage of the Coates family story, which is told in her new book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope In An American City.. 'Cause I think it's such an important point. And what was happening in New York was that we were reaching a kind of new level. Elliott says she was immediately drawn to 11-year-old Dasani not only because of the girls ability to articulate injustices in her life, but how Desani held so much promise for herself. People often remark on her beauty the high cheekbones and chestnut skin but their comments never seem to register. And they were things that I talked about with the family a lot. Dasani was in many ways a parent to her seven younger brothers and sisters. And I just spent so much time with this family and that continues to be the case. She ends up there. It gave the young girl a feeling that theres something out there, Elliott says. Offering a rare look into how homelessness directs the course of a life, New York Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott was allowed to follow Dasani's family for almost 10 years. Whenever I'm with Chanel, Dasani, Supreme, any of the kids, I'm captivated by them. So she lived in that shelter for over three years. They can screech like alley cats, but no one is listening. And welcome to Why Is This Happening? Right? On one side are the children, on the other the rodents their carcasses numbering up to a dozen per week. And I hope that she'll continue to feel that way. Chris Hayes: --real tropes (LAUGH) of this genre. Coca Cola had put it out a year earlier. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. And that gets us to 2014. But you know what a movie is. And I think what I would say is that there are no easy answers to this. Actually, I'd had some opportunities, but I was never in love with a story like this one. Right? She's transient." In this extract from her new book, Invisible Child, we meet Dasani Coates in 2012, aged 11 and living in a shelter, Read an interview with Andrea Elliott here. And she would stare at the Empire State Building at the tower lights because the Empire State Building, as any New Yorker knows, lights up depending on the occasion to reflect the colors of that occasion. To an outsider, living in Fort Greene, you might think, "Oh, that's the kid that lives at the homeless shelter. No. She is a child of New York City. And in the very beginning, I was like, "Oh, I don't think I can hear this." For nine years, New York Times journalist Andrea Elliott followed the fortunes of one family living in poverty. 3 Shes a giantess, the man had announced to the audience. 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. At one point, one, I think it was a rat, actually bit baby Lele, the youngest of the children, and left pellets all over the bed. (LAUGH), Chris Hayes: You know? What did you think then?" And I had read it in high school. And just exposure to diversity is great for anyone. I think what she has expressed to me, I can certainly repeat. We just had all these meetings in the newsroom about what to do because the story was unfolding and it was gripping. I mean, that is one of many issues. WebRT @usaunify: When Dasani Left Home. A stunning debut, the book covers eight formative years in the life of an intelligent and imaginative young girl in a Brooklyn homeless shelter as she balances poverty, family, and opportunity. So Bed-Stuy, East New York. She hopes to slip by them all unseen. There were evictions. She spent eight years falling the story of Dasani Coates. I felt that it was really, really important to explain my process to this imam, in particular, who I spent six months with, who had come from Egypt and had a very different sense of the press, which was actually a tool of oppression. It's available wherever you get your books. This is so important." She lasted more than another year. Chris Hayes: Yeah. That, to be honest, is really home. Only a mother could answer it, and for a while their mother was gone. You have piano lessons and tutoring and, of course, academics and all kinds of athletic resources. But the other part is agency. (LAUGH) Because they ate so much candy, often because they didn't have proper food. 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. 6. She could change diapers, pat for burps, check for fevers. But she was so closely involved in my process. She then moved from there to a shelter in Harlem and then to a shelter in the Bronx before finally, once again, landing another section eight voucher and being able to move back into a home with her family. And I said, "Yes." (LAUGH) Like those kinds of, like, cheap colognes. It's in resources. And then, of course, over time, what happens in the United States is that we become less and less materially equal. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New Its the point Elliott says she wants to get across in Invisible Child: We need to focus less on escaping problems of poverty and pivot attention to finding the causes and solutions to those problems. And then I was like, "I need to hear this. New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott spent nearly a decade following Dasani and her family. So I'm really hoping that that changes. I have a lot of things to say.. I think that you're absolutely right that the difference isn't in behavior. In the blur of the citys streets, Dasani is just another face. Chanel always says, "Blood is thicker than water." And the reporter who wrote that, Andrea Elliott, wrote a series of stories about Dasani. They're quite spatially separated from it. She loved to sit on her windowsill. It was really tough: Andrea Elliott on writing about New Yorks homeless children. I still am always. Here in the neighbourhood, the homeless are the lowest caste, the outliers, the shelter boogies. She just thought, "Who could afford that?". And regardless of our skin color, our ethnicity, our nationality, our political belief system, if you're a journalist, you're gonna cross boundaries. And to her, that means doing both things keeping her family in her life while also taking strides forward, the journalist says. She trots into the cafeteria, where more than a hundred families will soon stand in line to heat their prepackaged breakfast. Shes tomorrows success, Im telling you right now.. But nonetheless, my proposal was to focus on Dasani and on her siblings, on children. In fact, there's the, kind of, brushes that the boys have with things outside of their, kind of, experience of poverty and class have to do with, like, parking cars (LAUGH) or helping cars and stuff and selling water at the United Center where there's all sorts of, like, fancy Chicago roles through. And the Big Apple gets a new mayor, did get a new mayor this weekend. 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. 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. Some places are more felt than seen the place of homelessness, the place of sisterhood, the place of a mother-child bond that nothing can break. The bodegas were starting. This is typical of Dasani. Massive gentrification occurs in this first decade. And it also made her indispensable to her parents, which this was a real tension from the very beginning. Mothers shower quickly, posting their children as lookouts for the buildings predators. I was never allowing myself to get too comfortable. I have a lot on my plate, she likes to say, cataloging her troubles like the contents of a proper meal. It was a high poverty neighborhood to a school where every need is taken care of. All she has to do is climb the school steps. And her first thought was, "Who would ever pay for water?" A concrete walkway leads to the lobby, which Dasani likens to a jail. Each home at the school, they hire couples who are married who already have children to come be the house parents. In New York, I feel proud. Dasani described the familys living quarters as so cramped, it was like 10 people trying to breathe in the same room and they only give you five windows, Elliott recalls. She was doing so well. I live in Harlem. 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. That's what we tend to think of the homeless as. How did you respond? And, actually, sometimes those stories are important because they raise alarms that are needed. Her mother, Chanel Sykes, went as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh to escape the influence of a crack-addicted parent. The smaller children lie tangled under coats and wool blankets, their chests rising and falling in the dark. And they have 12 kids per home. She wakes to the sound of breathing. 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. Andrea Elliott: I met Dasani while I was standing outside of Auburn Family Residence, which is a city run, decrepit shelter, one of two city run shelters that were notorious for the conditions that children were forced to live in with their families. She was named after the water bottle that is sold in bodegas and grocery stores. Of all the distressing moments in Invisible Child, Andrea Elliotts book about Dasani Coates, the oldest of eight children growing up in a homeless shelter in New Like, you could tell the story about Jeff Bezos sending himself into space. Elliott spent 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. She was a single mother. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the MontanaLibrary2Go digital collection. So that's continued to be the case since the book ended. Her stepfather's name is Supreme. They snore with the pull of asthma near a gash in the wall spewing sawdust. Dasanis story, which ran on the front page in late 2013, became totemic in a moment of electoral flux in New York after the election of Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor on a The sound of that name. She was commuting from Harlem to her school in Brooklyn. I think about it every day. She knew she had to help get her siblings fed and dressed. Elliott I read the book out to the girls. Her siblings, she was informed, were placed in foster care. Dasani's family of ten lives in one room of the Auburn Family Residence, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Then the New York Times published Invisible Child, a series profiling a homeless girl named Dasani. And so I have seen my siblings struggle for decades with it and have periods of sobriety and then relapse. And she wanted to beat them for just a few minutes in the morning of quiet by getting up before them. Dasanis room was where they put the crazies, she says, citing as proof the broken intercom on the wall. Theres nearly 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the U.S. About one in 12 live in New York City. So I think that is what's so interesting is you rightly point out that we are in this fractured country now. No one on the block can outpace Dasani. And you didn't really have firsthand access to what it looks like, what it smells like to be wealthy. Dasani would call it my spy pen. It was this aspiration that was, like, so much a part of her character. 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. It was just the most devastating thing to have happened to her family. And that really cracked me up because any true New Yorker likes to brag about the quality of our tap water. Why Is This Happening? She is the least of Dasanis worries. Rarely does that happen for children living in poverty like Dasani who are willing and capable but who are inundated with problems not of their own making, she says. This is We're gonna both pretend we've seen movies. Dasani Coates, the 11-year-old homeless child profiled in Andrea Elliotts highly praised five-part New York Times feature, arrived on stage at Wednesdays inauguration ceremonies to serve as a poignant symbol ofin Mayor de Blasios wordsthe economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. I just find them to be some of the most interesting people I've ever met. 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. 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 is a investigative reporter at The New York Times, (BACKGROUND MUSIC) a Pulitzer Prize winner. Thank you! First of all, I don't rely on my own memory. Ethical issues. She was so tender with her turtle. But she was not at all that way with the mice. And that's just the truth. Elliotts book follows eight years in the life of Dasani Coates photographed in September last year. WebBrowse, borrow, and enjoy titles from the PALS Plus NJ OverDrive Library digital collection. With only two microwaves, this can take an hour. And she jumped on top of my dining room table and started dancing. 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. She liked the sound of it. 16K views, 545 likes, 471 loves, 3K comments, 251 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from EWTN: Starting at 8 a.m. Others will be distracted by the noise of this first day the start of the sixth grade, the crisp uniforms, the fresh nails. Part of the government. We suffocate them with the salt!. But when you remove her from the family system, this was predictable that the family would struggle, because she was so essential to that. They are all here, six slumbering children breathing the same stale air. Shes creating life on her own terms, Elliott says. The difference is in resources. This family is a proud family. Lee-Lees cry was something else. So her principal, kind of, took her under her wing. The invisible child of the title is Dasani Coates. 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. If danger comes, Dasani knows what to do. 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. I got rice, chicken, macaroni. The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni her siblings - except for Baby Lee-Lee, who is a plump chicken breast. And I pulled off from my shelf this old copy of Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, which is a classic incredible book about two brothers in the Chicago housing projects in the 1980s. All rights reserved. Children are not the face of New Yorks homeless. She could even tell the difference between a cry for hunger and a cry for sleep. Author Andrea Elliott followed Dasani and her family for nearly 10 years, It doesn't have to be a roof over my head. But under court supervision, he had remained with the children, staying clean while his wife entered a drug treatment programme. Toothbrushes, love letters, a dictionary, bicycles, an Xbox, birth certificates, Skippy peanut butter, underwear. The book is called Invisible Child. 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. They were in drug treatment programs for most of the time that I was with them, mostly just trying to stay sober and often succeeding at it. Her parents were struggling with a host of problems. They were-- they were eating the family's food and biting. If you use the word homeless, usually the image that comes to mind is of a panhandler or someone sleeping on subway grates. She looks around the room, seeing only silhouettes the faint trace of a chin or brow, lit from the street below. I feel good. And they agreed to allow me to write a book and to continue to stay in their lives. You have a greater likelihood of meeting someone who might know of a job or, "Hey, there's someone in my building who needs a such." A little sink drips and drips, sprouting mould from a rusted pipe. Andrea Elliott: We love the story of the kid who made it out. She will tell them to shut up. Serena McMahon Twitter Digital ProducerSerena McMahon was a digital producer for Here & Now. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering East River. It literally saved us: what the USs new anti-poverty measure means for families, Millions of families receiving tax credit checks in effort to end child poverty, No one knew we were homeless: relief funds hope to reach students missing from virtual classrooms, I knew they were hungry: the stimulus feature that lifts millions of US kids out of poverty, 'Santa, can I have money for the bills?' So you mentioned There Are No Children Here. Well, every once in a while, a roach here and there in New York. And I had focused for years on the story of Islam in a post-9/11 America. Homeless services. By the time Dasani came into the world, on 26 May 2001, the old Brooklyn was vanishing. People who have had my back since day one. Laundry piled up. It's massively oversubscribed. It is a story that begins at the dawn of the 21st century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality. And then you have to think about how to address it. Child Protection Services showed up on 12 occasions. The citys wealth has flowed to its outer edges, bringing pour-over coffee and artisanal doughnuts to places once considered gritty. And, you know, this was a new school. 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 The ground beneath her feet once belonged to them. She spent eight years falling the story Chris Hayes: Dasani is 11 years old. And as I started to, kind of, go back through it, I remember thinking, "How much has really changed?" Well, if you know the poor, you know that they're working all the time. And this ultimately wound up in the children being removed in October of 2015, about ten months into Dasani's time at Hershey. Chanel was raised on the streets and relied on family bonds, the reporter learned. And, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what that experience is like for her. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about your subjective perspective and your experience as this observer and the ethical complications (LAUGH) of that and talk a little bit about how you dealt with that right after we take this quick break. She is always warming a bottle or soothing a cranky baby. Now you are a very halal Muslim leader. Like, you do an incredible job on that. She's passing through. Chris Hayes: --to dealing with those. And it's, I think, a social good to do so. There is no separating Dasanis childhood from that of her matriarchs: her grandmother Joanie and her mother, Chanel. They wound up being placed at Auburn. I mean, whether you're poor--, Andrea Elliott: --or you're wealthy, (LAUGH) like, you know. And it was an extraordinary experience. is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the All In team and features music by Eddie Cooper. Now Chanel is back, her custodial rights restored. She would change her diaper. Find that audio here. Named after the bottled water that signaled Brooklyns gentrification, her story has been featured in five front pages of the New York Times.
