Answer:
To Diana George, poverty is represented by non-profit organizations such Habitat for Humanity in a way of despair, or something that can be easily seen or recognized. Or in the case of this organization and many others, it tries as to find an surfire way to make others empathise with poverty. The problems George identifies as a result of this tactic is that poverty is not always easily recognized, and on even questions that “If it doesn’t look like poverty, then how do we adress it?” (p. 450) The largest, most pressing issue is that seeing poverty in one way instead limits our understanding on how to deal with poverty.
At the very beginning of the article, George creates an anecdote of how she encounters charities. It details her going through her mail and looking over many other poverty organization’s mail. This shows their tactic, of presenting poverty as grim and ragged, while a quote from bell hooks before that states that seeing poverty in one way challenges how people look and deal with it. Providing these two largely contrasting viewpoints, in a way, makes them appeal to different audiences by expressing both her issue and a counterclaim to structure the remainder of textual analysis.
The purpose of George’s textual analysis is to ultimately show that representing poverty as weak and depraving only hinders the fight against it instead of resolving it. Everyday, it’s a question of who is poor and who is not, but that itself is becoming increasingly difficult to tell. This rudimentary mindset eventually leads George to state that “There are certainly many cultural and political reasons for these problems…but I would suggest that the way the way poverty countinues to be represented in this country and on tapes limits our understanding.” So if people continue to see poverty in this sight, the ones that are poor but still have a home or job will challenge this belief. People will not know how to deal with them, and this essentially why George criticizes non-profit organizations such as Health for Habitat
