Celine-Marie Pascale - Living on the Edge

1 Series page

2 Title page

3 Copyright page

4 Dedication page

5 Acknowledgements

6 Preface

7 1 The Lay of the Land

8 2 The Struggling Class

9 3 A Hazardous Life: The High Price of Being Poor

10 4 Sacrifice Zones: The Places We Call Home

11 5 Ordinary Things That Can Only Happen Here

12 6 The Burdens of Prejudice: Class and Race

13 7 The Burdens Women Face

14 8 The Face of a Movement?

15 9 The Myths We Live By

16 10 And Then, the Pandemic…

17 11 The Future We Want

18 Appendix A: Methods, Methodology, and Theory

19 Appendix B: Table of Interviewees

20 Index

21 End User License Agreement

1 Cover

2 Contents

3 1 The Lay of the Land

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“Dr. Pascale writes with clarity, purpose, and a studied, personal understanding of the human condition. ‘The Struggling Class’ will be a term new to many, but it is, indeed, the way of life for too many others. The book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand, in a way that is both supremely accessible and thoroughly researched, how economic, racial, class, caste, geographical, environmental, and other factors converge to create systemic inequalities designed to hold down a diverse stratum of people – from the Native residents on the Standing Rock Nation, where I grew up, to those doing their level best to make life work every day in places like Appalachia, Wind River, and Oakland. It skillfully illustrates key connective tissues that demonstrate how, despite outward differences, we share in the same struggle. In order to reinvent a democracy that works for everyone, we need radical, systemic change that begins to address the financialized, extractive colonial mentality and other, deeply embedded, cultural wrongs. Only in this way can we begin to envision a fairer, healthier future for the next generations.”

Chase Iron Eyes, Lakota People’s Law Project Co-Director and Lead Counsel

“Is there support for a living wage, free education, and other egalitarian commitments within the low-income population? Yes! In a trenchant analysis, Celine-Marie Pascale shows that egalitarian sensibilities are alive and well among low-income workers, not because they necessarily subscribe to or care about conventional political parties or platforms but because their everyday lives expose a deeply unfair system. A brilliant account of ‘hard-knocks egalitarianism.’”

David B. Grusky, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University

“This often poignant and moving book presents a vision of America and Americans that is often missing from dominant narratives. One walks away from this book with a better sense of the diversity of average, struggling Americans, as well as what all those people have in common – the struggle. As the author says, ‘this is more than a collection of individual troubles; it is the story of a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis.’”

Allison L. Hurst, Associate Professor of Sociology, Oregon State University

“A rare book that combines a humane accounting of lives lived in hardship, attentive to race and gender, with a robust and data-driven critique of the policies that caused their dysfunction – a true bottom-up primer on American poverty with real-world applications for upturning the myths that surround inequality.”

Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“This is an impressive book, wide and deep, with diverse people around the country struggling to live. A yarn; no, yarns – economic and much more – always real, face-to-face with the author: what their lives are, sometimes doing themselves no favors, but more often the effects of laws and attitudes both far away and near, government and corporations, and the hate of people. Why it’s hard to end poverty. Living on the Edge reaches in every direction. Personal, powerful: once you pick it up, you won’t put it down.”