Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America Audiobook (Free)

‘Candid, empathetic portraits of silenced men, women, and children.’ –Kirkus

Broadly acclaimed photographer and writer Chris Arnade shines new light on America’s poor, drug-addicted, and forgotten–both metropolitan and rural, blue state and red state–and indicts the elitists who’ve still left them behind.

Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, Walker Evans in the 1930s, or Michael Harrington in the 1960s, Chris Arnade bares the reality of our current class divide in unforgettable true tales. Arnade’s uncooked, about Dignity: Searching for Respect in Back Row America deeply reported accounts cut through today’s clickbait mass media headlines and indict the elitists who misunderstood poverty and craving in America for decades.

After abandoning his Wall Street career, Arnade made a decision to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and getting good friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald’s. After that he started generating across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of tales almost everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and geography.

The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America’s Back Row–those who lack the credentials and benefits of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back again Row’s beliefs as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or custom as naïve.

As Takeesha, a female in the Bronx, told Arnade, she really wants to be seen she sees herself: ‘a prostitute, a mother of 6, and a child of God.’ This book is his try to help ordinary people truly find, hear, and respect millions of people who’ve been left out.