If you grow up in America, one of the things you’re taught to believe is that there are no coincidences. This country’s foundational mythology is premised on the idea that you make your dreams come true through determination and hard work; you get what you deserve. It’s equally clever and cruel, this lie, but it’s nevertheless persisted and proliferated, leading to a rancid reality, in which countless Americans feel they’re entitled to every privilege they inherited, and that those who live in poverty (or suffer from addiction or never received adequate education) are similarly deserving of their lots in life. There’s no such thing as the luck—or a lack of it—because, here, in the land of opportunity, luck is something you make, not something which makes you.

This American lie fuels the capitalist engine and perpetuates imbalanced, exploitative systemic problems in our country, like racism, sexism, and classism. We’re taught to believe things are the way they are because hard work has gotten some people to where they are—the top of the existing power structure—and a lack of hard work has left others at the bottom. This narrative is one that is easy enough to believe, or at least accept without thinking too much about it, because it’s rare that the stories of those people at the bottom are told—and rarer still that they’re told from a place of, yes, empathy, but also integrity, free of the kind of “poverty porn” that has been known to happen when journalists and photographers and documentarians, all coming from mass media markets like New York City and Los Angeles, approach their subjects from an outsider’s perspective.

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