Community Essay : Open the Closet Door of Poverty : When the poor speak out, society will stop looking askance at “them,” says a teacher whose family was once on welfare.

My community college writing class that semester was not particularly diverse, and the students struggled to identify with writers from unfamiliar backgrounds. They had a particularly tough time with an assigned essay, “What Is Poverty,” by Jo Goodwin Parker. My students decided the author was a stranger they could never know. Because the essay was originally published anonymously, according to the textbook, the class concluded that the author’s anonymity must be linked to her sense of shame. It disturbed me to hear the generalities: “people like that” and “those people.”

Why? My own family, I heard myself say, was on welfare. I immediately wanted to qualify this--but not for long, of course--but I couldn’t. It just wasn’t true. When I was a child, my family received assistance, on and off, for years. “You?” a student asked, surprised. I nodded.

I recognized the shame. The intense shame. “The poor are always silent,” writes Parker. That’s true, but we’re not alone. So many of us are silent about aspects of our lives about which others don’t approve--sexual orientation, religious affiliation, economic class.

Silence leads to absence. It leads to ignorance, to others not knowing who the poor, for instance, really are. We imagine the poor as the other , as far away. It’s easier to avoid them that way, to cut their 3% slice of the federal pie. “But you’re not like the rest of them,” another student said. “You’re different.” I disagreed.

One day, I waited in line at a Venice market with my friend Elena, a lawyer. Elena needed a replacement case for her contacts. I didn’t need anything but chose a refrigerator magnet, an impulse buy. Meanwhile, a young girl counted out a combination of food stamps and coins for her purchase of milk, cheese, bread, toilet paper. She didn’t have enough. Watching her decide which item to return was agonizing. I recognized something about her, the firm mouth, the young calculating eyes. I interrupted her discussion with the clerk.

“Here,” I said, offering some coins. “Go ahead.”

The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am, you don’t know me.”

“That’s OK,” I told her.

The clerk took my money and joined in. “You know what you do,” she advised, handing over the receipt, “next time you got a little extra and you see someone who doesn’t, some homeless or someone, you give that extra to them. That’s the way you pay this lady back.”

The young girl walked away, her bag full. “I hated when that happened,” Elena said as we followed. “Didn’t you? When your mother sent you to the store and you didn’t have enough? I hated that.” Elena’s face was tight, and in it I saw the same proud set of the mouth that the young girl had, the same eyes that learned early how much things cost.

Someone else might use this as an example of the benefits of private charity. But as Elena and I both know, one can’t depend on the kindness of strangers for the cash that pays the rent and puts food on the table. We are not, despite the propaganda, a nation of punctual, providential Samaritans.

Were this an essay written in my class, at this point I’d praise the writer for presenting a problem, for the use of specific examples. But I’d write in the margin, where is a solution? My students learn to avoid blaming single causes and prescribing single antidotes. We explore the seductive terrain of fallacies. Don’t expect your three-page essay to solve California’s transportation problems or mediate gang violence, I counsel. But I challenge them to begin to address possible solutions. So where, I ask myself--writer, teacher, welfare kid--is your answer?

One answer is the abandonment of anonymity, the surrender of shame. The children who stood in line with me at school, free meal tickets hidden in change purses or pockets until the dread moment of public surrender, speak up now, as productive adults. Share those meals with folks you now “do lunch” with--your colleagues, friends, neighbors. Poor people, Parker reminds us, “did not come from another place or time. Others . . . are all around you.” Our elected representatives need to see who we really are as they consider policies that penalize poor children. I’d like to think those policies are under consideration because our leaders don’t know, because they still rely on stereotypes that transform my mother and maybe your mother into Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and Newt Gingrich’s avaricious teen-age breeders.

The silence in which poor people and the former poor have closeted themselves must be broken. The lesbian and gay community has something to teach about visibility and its power to change perceptions, to destroy stereotypes and transform the world. Breaking the silence about poverty will change the way others see us, and the way we see ourselves.

“You?” my students asked. Yes, me. And my friend Elena. The clerk at the checkout counter. The little girl in line. All of us, anonymous, everywhere, waiting in lines with everyone else, counting what we have today and measuring it against yesterday and tomorrow.