[Updates with link to Chris Arnade's Flickr page.]
"I write, I listen, I research, I tell stories. Mostly just listen. I don't think we listen without judgment enough," writes Cassie Rodenberg, introducing her Scientific American blog The White Noise. "I explore marginalized things we like to ignore. Addiction and mental illness is The White Noise behind many lives — simply what Is."
What she doesn't say is that the place where she goes to listen can be as dangerous as a war zone–Hunt's Point, in New York's South Bronx.
It's home to the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, which claims to be the largest wholesale food market in the world, with annual revenues of more than $5 billion.
But turn a corner, and you will find yourself in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, with half the population living below the poverty line and the highest violent crime rate per capita in New York City. Wikipedia tells it this way: "…the area has a high rate of incarceration. Due to the lucrative drug trade in the area, many drug addicts reside in the community. The neighborhood is also notorious for its prostitution industry."
Rodenberg tells it this way, in the form of a letter to a woman she met there:
God, my visits to you in jail were memorable. That first time you thought I was your pimp and you busted out into tears and I felt like the worst person in the world for showing up, for giving you the hope that it was him instead. (Why can’t Rikers tell you who’s visiting in the three hours it takes me to make it through security to you? Ugh.)
I looked for him, your pimp, for you though, walked into that crowd of hooded men against the fence in Hunts Point and asked for him. He said he would visit and never did, said he got a new girl. I told him to go fuck himself. I guess I knew then that I was too close to you to be a removed observer with a tape recorder. Hard to believe it was ever that way.
If that's not powerful enough, Rodenberg boosts the intensity by beginning her post with the abstract of a scientific study that reads the way you'd expect: "Some combinations of street life and drug use trajectories seem to contribute to injection among street youth. Some important factors interact and increase the risk of street youth transitioning to injection: poor personal assets; early rupture with primary social institutions; social integration into subcultures where both street life and “drug trips” are fashionable, drug preferences and the local drug market."
Rodenberg then immediately cuts to this:
Beauty’s gone. I know it like I know anything. It’s in your bones when someone leaves. You can feel it in the outlines of the rib cage, how the loss somehow bends you forward, leans you inward…
Rodenberg has been visiting the South Bronx for two years, she said Saturday in a presentation at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Gainesville, Fla. She partners with Chris Arnade, whose remarkable photographs (including the one above) illustrate her stories. She has become so involved with the project that she went to work teaching school in the South Bronx. It's a stunning commitment to an important and mostly invisible story, to her "street family" of addicts, prostitutes, and the mentally ill, who have little chance to tell their stories, let alone escape from that world.
One addict, a former contractor who worked on nuclear submarines, spouts phrases like "electron efficiency," "energy shells," and "Krebs cycle" and dreams of building an infrastructure for tidal turbines "after he gets himself cleaned up (only drinking and shooting a little heroin outside his program)." The piece, which begins with two paragraphs from a study of tidal power, is called Delusions of Power.
There is much more here. Rodenberg's posts and Arnade's photographs are as powerful and important as any reporting I've seen anywhere. They refuse to let us forget.
-Paul Raeburn
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