STORMING CAESARS PALACE SUMMARY

Storming Caesars Palace Summary

Storming Caesars Palace Summary

Introduction

As previous and present welfare recipient, lone parent, school student and community activists, we are all too aware of the paradox through which recycled images of both the pathology and the victimization of deeply poor women in the US permeate and shape our nationwide consciousness. Reinforcing virulent racism, classism, sexism and homophobia, on the one hand, public images and rhetoric place us as victimizers, yoked to tales of "brood sows," "Welfare Queens," "unfit parents who outlook their young kids as nothing more than rises in welfare checks," "alligators," and "wolves who consume their young" (US Congressional record 1983, 1996 and 2002). On the other hand, supposedly more liberal evaluations mark us as feckless victims; as static, ahistorical, passive, and hopeless casualties of poverty. For demonstration, UC-Berkeley lecturer of Sociology Loic Waquant sympathetically laments "the despondency and storm ... the unstoppable down hill spiral of worsening of urban hellholes rife with deprivation, immorality and aggression where only the outcasts of humanity would address living" and from which-through noteworthy actions of heroism and exceptionalism--poor women and young kids can at best escape (1644).

In the evocative and powerfully in writing raging Caesars castle: How Black Mothers battled Their Own conflict on scarcity, Annelise Orleck and the women whose stories she retells with precision and care, likewise refuse both positions. Storming Caesars castle restores these tropes with an superbly dense and multi-voiced annals, the textual warp and weave of which is convoluted, multifaceted, and lovingly crafted. This communal biography moves fluidly amidst the political and the individual; structures of oppression and actions of opposition; public policies and the inhabits they impact; power, privilege, inequity, and justice. As such, it ruptures, by surpassing, customary notions and narratives of poverty, welfare, and poor women. As Orleck reflects: The canvas of this article is broader than the Silver State and more convoluted than one-by-one lives. Storming Caesars castle is a chronicle of antipoverty policy in the US and poor people's political movements.... This publication sketches connections between bigger historical forces--economic shifts, national political debates, migration, urbanization--and the dwelled know-how of poverty. (5-6)

Discussion

As poor, single mothers approaching to periods with the complexity and contradictions of our own knowledge and identifying the penalty we accrue as a outcome of prevalent misrepresentation, what seems most vital to us is that regardless of Orleck's complex, interdisciplinary, and myriad text, it is the "lived knowledge of poverty and resistance" that stay central to the narrative of Storming Caesars Palace. This centrality we appreciatively accept as a testament to the respect and esteem that Orleck evolves and sustains for the ethical and savvy welfare warriors she arrives to understand and contemplate upon with such vigor, humor, and panache.

The development of this often neglected tale of poor women's resistance and empowerment has its direct beginnings in the mid-century cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, where as young women and young women the book's protagonists wise to work hard and to care and support for their ...