In 2023, 11 million children, including 1 in 7 children of color, in the United States are living in poverty. Corem Coreano, Ryan Rivera, and Giancarlos Rodriguez — three Puerto Rican children who live in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia are among these children. They are also the subject of Nikhil Goyal’s book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty. These children are living in the midst of an intense drug trade, sexual assault, physical violence, homelessness, gun violence, and systems that fail them. They are forgotten in plain sight.
Writing with profound empathy and heart, Goyal follows the lives of Corem, Ryan, and Giancarlos — taking the reader through the vast challenges they face, but also celebrating their small triumphs. He shows the very heavy burden that children living in poverty in large cities face, detailing how local, state, and federal policy fails them. And, how our nation’s legacy of racism ensures that these children are viewed as anything but children.
Goyal is a sociologist and policymaker. He served as a senior policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, advising the legislator on children and education. Although he has worked on federal legislation related to childcare, K-12 and higher education, and access to college for the incarcerated, Live to See the Day is not a policy analysis or a policy report. It is an in-depth, real, gut-wrenching story (an ethnography) of the lives of children who are enduring the policies and actions that divide us and perpetuate inequities. Goyal is a beautiful writer and engages the reader in the lives of Corem, Ryan, and Giancarlos in order to push us to act, to care, and to change. According to Diane Ravitch, author of Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance in Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, Goyal “brings to life the terrible failure of the federal government to reduce poverty and ensure a decent life for all Americans.”
Goyal shows the reader how one wrong move can change the life of a young person — being with the wrong group of people at the wrong time or in the wrong place. He demonstrates how unsupportive parents can foist queer children into a life of hell. He shows us how school districts reward conformity and don’t embrace children who fight for their rights and the rights of others. Nearly ten years of reporting undergirds Live to See the Day. According to Goyal, “I wrote Live to See the Day to expose the violence of poverty, incarceration, underfunded schools, and criminalization through intimate portraits of children and families and [to] provide a blueprint of how we can address the dropout and poverty crises in the United States.”
Despite small gains, Corem, Ryan, and Giancarlos are continually crushed by a school system that doesn’t have their best interest in mind, by hunger, and by dire poverty. Goyal also explains how toxic masculinity plays out on the streets, punishing young men for being “soft” rather than supporting them for expressing themselves in a world that requires a voice to survive.
Live to See the Day has been out for a few weeks now. When I asked Goyal about the reaction to the book, he shared, “I have had engaging crowds at my bookstore events in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Norwich, and Oyster Bay, which shows that people are both deeply curious and outraged by the issues presented in the book. I hope it will help drive a nationwide conversation about the need to enact a policy agenda that will save the lives of the children of the Kensingtons of America. We cannot tolerate such suffering and poverty in our country any longer.”
Goyal’s book shows our nation at its worst in terms of caring for the humanity of children, but he still believes that “eradicating the miserable conditions in the Kensingtons of America is feasible.” He also believes our efforts are “essential to protect American democracy from the rising reactionary forces that threaten our rights, our way of life, and our planet.”
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