A Brooklyn-based author plans to spend the summer doing research on third-world poverty – inside the US.
Ross Perlin is one of eight Sitka Fellows living on the Sheldon Jackson campus in July and August. This is the first year of the program, designed to foster visionary thinking in young people under thirty.
If he’s successful, Third World Next Door will be Perlin’s second major book.
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Statistics are only a part of this story. Perlin says he’s going on the road.
“And what I’m ultimately envisioning is a sort of political travelogue. It will have the feeling almost of travel writing, but with a kind of urgency. Not just a jaunt, not just travel for travel’s sake, but travel in search of these stories, talking to people, seeing what people’s lives are like.”
In his bio for the Sitka Fellows program, Perlin describes a few places he refers to as “the Third World inside America’s borders”: Infant mortality in Memphis, Tennessee is higher than in Syria or Libya. Life expectancy on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.
This is a reversal in economic dynamics that goes beyond household income.
“And not just poverty. Environmental depradation, housing issues, education issues: areas in the United States where we’re now reaching demonstrably Third-World levels in certain respects. Just as the traditional Third World has been progressing a great deal over the last couple of decades through their economic development policies.”
Perlin calls it the “geography of hardship.” Economic statistics and census tracking are just a way in – a way for the “quantitative to lead to the qualitative.”
“I think it’s not enough to be riding along in a car at 50 miles per hour and looking out the window and saying, Oh that’s a blighted area, that’s Third World over there. You get the background information, you get the statistics, other information that’s available, you talk to people, you spend time with people. From that a picture will emerge of what hardship really looks like.”
Although Sitka is not a part of his study, Perlin says the community illustrates why it is so important that his research takes place on the ground. From the glittering ballroom of a cruise ship anchored in the harbor, Sitka’s waterfront is an odd mix of well-tended historic properties, trailer homes, working watercraft of all kinds (some barely afloat), and industry. Even with the occasional mega-yacht, the town is no St. Tropez.
Unless, Perlin says, you ask some who lives here.
“Your eyes can tell you a story that doesn’t necessarily add up to what people are actually feeling in a community. And that’s an important reason to spend time talking to people. How do people see it from the inside?”
Perlin says he’s not a social scientist. He double-majored in East Asian Studies and Classics at Stanford, and studied for his Master’s Degree at Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship. He lived for three years in China while in school.
Perlin, at 29, is the self-described “gray beard” of the Sitka Fellows program. He broke out on the national scene recently with his book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.
“I’m not an intern abolitionist by any means. The book, which first came out last year, was meant to – and did, kind of – stimulate a national conversation about the way we train young people, the way we transition from the classroom into the workplace. And internships have really become the key gateway – a virtual prerequisite – to the white-collar world, which is where people increasingly need to be for high-level jobs, and jobs that pay well. But there are excesses in that system, and there are aspects of internships we need to question, particularly their being unpaid and lacking certain legal protections. But there are places that are doing it well and can serve as models.”
Perlin says he considered many options around the country for a residency this summer, but he thought coming to Sitka was a way to be “both inside America, and a little on the outside.”
