Poverty Is Violent

We are all products of our environments. This familiar phrase assumes that most of us spent our youth in one neighborhood, one delimited world. But I came of age in between spaces—a white kid with a single mother who filled my life with books and worried about making her salary last the month, and a father with severe mental illness in and out of institutions, I spent my adolescent nights on a rented floor of a two-family house and my days at the private junior high school that had waived my tuition. This boyhood geometry meant that I saw more of my city than I might have otherwise, which caused confusion, and eventually disbelief.

I grew up in late-1970s New Haven, Connecticut, a small, remarkably diverse city with a reputation for being a “representative” American urban setting. One way to think about childhood is as a succession of awakenings—moments of sudden, luminous clarity that say This is how the world is. I played a lot of baseball, which meant that as I progressed through the leagues, I roamed the city on my bicycle. In seventh grade at my new private school, many children had braces on their teeth. In the ensuing summer, I played shortstop near the projects in working-class Fair Haven, and one day, by second base, when a kid with a long Italian surname, whom we called “Rap,” showed glittering evidence of having visited the orthodontist, it occurred to me that here, among us, he was the only one.

Another year I played in Newhallville, a Black neighborhood not far from the failing Winchester gun factory, where I had teammates and opponents whose battered apartments and worn clothing suggested families struggling to meet their basic needs. One day I stood on the dusty field thinking about how right there, just up that hill and across a street named Prospect, the green