The Injustice of Place

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of America's places of most extreme poverty, drawn from original data-driven research, from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

"This book challenges and enrages, humbles and indicts?and forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.? ? Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Evicted

Three of the nation's top researchers known for taking on key mysteries about poverty deliver a new, multi-dimensional way of measuring deep disadvantage in every county in the nation as well as in its 500 most-populated cities. By turning the lens of disadvantage from the individual to the community, the authors uncover a surprising picture. Among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged places in the U.S., the majority are rural, many of them rarely if ever researched; only 12 are cities.

Through engaged ethnographic research, deep historical understanding, and riveting storytelling, the authors paint portraits of places within the three regions of America they identify as actual ?internal colonies? within our nation. In rural Leflore County, MS, in the Cotton Belt of the Deep South, we see residents living?and dying?with homicide rates as high as anywhere else in the nation. In Clay County, KY, where Big Coal once ruled, the social infrastructure is so eroded that residents say ?there's nothing to do but drugs.? In Crystal City in South Texas, a town still proud to be known as the ?spinach capital of the world,? cheerleaders revolt in response to white quotas and a legacy of unequal schools. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is what these regions have in common?a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations are facts, these acclaimed and engaged public scholars convince, that must shape a new War on Poverty, 60 years after LBJ's unfinished first one.