Passing for poor: the construction of poverty and race in immersion journalism

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the practice of “passing” as a form of journalistic research into the conditions of poverty. A close reading of Ted Conover's work of immersive literary journalism. Rolling nowhere: Riding the rails with America's hoboes (1984/2001), reveals an uneasy tension between ethnographic and psychological frameworks for understanding the lives of impoverished “hoboes” who ride the railways of the American West. Through a comparison with John Howard Griffin's racial-passing narrative. Black like me (1961/2004), this article suggests that the increasingly psychological portrait of poverty in Conover's text bears a resemblance to constructions of racial difference. Although both texts set out to refute essentialist and biological notions of difference, they rely on the substitutes of damage psychology and trauma to much the same effect. This article concludes by exploring the economic and cultural reasons that immersive journalism on the subject tends to be so common, in effect blocking writers from impoverished backgrounds from reporting on poverty.