When You Thought Being Poor Was The Punishment

If you grew up poor or remain below the poverty line, you know the challenges that come along by being poor. It is way too often that people who do not have first-hand experience with poverty assume that poor people choose to be poor. News flash! People do not wake up and decide “I am going to be poor today and for the rest of my life.” It is not a choice that is made by people to be born into poverty or continue living below the poverty line for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, the federal system and technology play large roles in deciding who becomes poor and who becomes rich. The ultimate decision of who becomes poor and who becomes rich thrives from the machine powered technologies whose operations are executed with intentional choices such as punishing the lives of the poor and oppressed in society or simply making the rich richer.

There is a purpose for everything that is created or invented. With the creation of math-powered technologies, the intention was not to make things easier for everyone, but rather make all sorts of differences for a specific group in society that does not include Black, brown, womxn, transgender, non-binary, and people of color. These systems, as Cathy O’Neil puts it in Weapons of Math Destruction, “their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists” (O’Neil 10). However, it does not take a mathematician or computer scientist to know that a system is failing and prejudicing certain groups in society over others (O’Neil 17).

Due to the inefficiency of these machine operated lives, it aggregates the most common side effects of poverty to people living in poverty: constant worry, physical and mental exhaustion, vulnerability to hunger, and the risk of homelessness. People who are poor are further punished by the inability to climb the hierarchy of wealth. They are monitored by their credit score performance, by what the technologies and machines say about them. Their credit score, for example, determines whether or not they are eligible for the job; the higher the credit score, the better financially responsible they thus more likely to follow the rules of the job (O’Neil14). How does this make sense when credit score classes are not even offered in school?

Being poor was never the punishment; being part of the system that discriminates the poor to benefit the rich is.