One of the great joys of working at a university is the opportunity to collaborate and learn every day. I am always inspired and awed and humbled by the incredibly interesting work my colleagues do and by their willingness to share and answer questions. Recently I asked my friend about a phenomenon I had never heard of before: poverty tourism.
Poverty tourism provides the opportunity to visit slums in cities in the global south (like Mumbai, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro). There is considerable debate about the value of such tours: there is a question about the ethics of the practice; one has to wonder about whether the visits bring any benefits to the people living in the slums; and it raises issues about how poverty is represented or understood by the participants. Much to my surprise there is a growing scholarly literature that examines these questions. Slum tourism is not a minor phenomenon. In a special edition of Tourism Geographies, that focuses on the issue of slum tourism and the rise of this young field of interdisciplinary tourism research, the authors report that an estimated 300,000 tourists visit Cape Town slums every year while 400,000 visit the shanty towns or favelas in Rio. If this is a phenomenon with which you are unfamiliar I encourage you to Google slum tourism and then hit images. The photographs tell lots of stories: obvious extreme poverty, engagement between tourists and residents, an industry that has arisen around these tours, and children, lots and lots of children who live and play in these communities. If political science has at its core any central question, I think it asks: How should we live together? The images that I saw provide a simple answer: Not like this. Recently one startling statistic was reported by UNICEF in a document called, Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion, that said that: [a]s of 2007, the top 20 percent of the world controlled about 70 percent of total income compared to just two percent for the bottom 20 percent http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/files/Global_Inequality.pdf
While the inequality between the global north and the global south is profound, poverty and inequality is not just something that exists far away in other places. I am constantly reminded of this in the homelessness and poverty in our own city and in communities across our own country and in the United States. The Occupy Wall Street movement highlighted the disparity between the rich and the poor and more recently a number of economic and political observers have drawn our attention to the wealth gap and the decline of the middle class. Just last month the British newspaper The Guardian ran an article by Ana Maria Cox that shed an interesting light on the income inequity issue in America. She writes, ...up to a point, [Americans] take inequality for granted. Indeed, Americans are more sanguine about capitalism's separation of winners and losers than the rest of the world. That is, she says, until they experience it.
Sometime ago another article on the CNN Opinion Page caught my attention. LZ Grandersons article, It hurts to lose Red Lobster, but money is tight tells the story of the impending closure of the restaurant chain. Granderson reminisces about what Red Lobster meant in the community in which he grew up: ...if your family went to Red Lobster for dinner, that meant you were really doing something. It meant you got dressed up in your church clothes. It meant you would be using a salad fork and maybe even ordering the fancy dish you saw on TV. It meant twice, sometimes three times a year, a poor family like mine could order a steak in a middle-class restaurant and pretend we were rich. Grandersons point is that this type of restaurant is suffering from the growing income disparity. He says that people havent stopped going to out to dinner because our collective palate has changed...Its because we cant afford to eat out anymore.
Im not suggesting that missing a yearly trip to a restaurant compares to a life in a Mumbai slum but I am suggesting that poverty, at whatever level it manifests, is grueling and we need to be aware of the growing disparity in the world and in our backyard.
