THREAD
This is a thread about #poverty and how people who aren't poor treat poor people. I was reading a thread about people giving expired food to food banks and it sent me into a memory hole to my and my parents' lived experience of poverty. DO NOT DO THIS.
1/x

One of the miseries of my poverty childhood was wearing other people's clothes. It was also a misery of my mother's and why I was taught to sew at 8. Our clothes were either made by my mother, who was an extraordinary seamstress, or came from the thrift store.
2/x

DO NOT GIVE TORN, TOO-WORN OR STAINED CLOTHES TO THIFT STORES. Why would someone else, who already has to deal with the humiliation of wearing USED clothing, want your stained ("just a little stain") blouse or moth-eaten ("someone handy can mend this") sweater?

3/x

As a child, I lived in fear of turning up to a school or church event wearing the clothes one of my classmates had donated in a clothing drive. And while my mother was an expert seamstress who worked for various clothiers, handmade clothes always look handmade. 4/x

My mother used to tell stories of her being bullied about her clothes at college.-This is her at 17 in her freshman year as a scholarship student at Wellesley College. She is wearing an evening gown my grandmother made for her for the dance she was going to with my father.
5/x

My mother was brilliant and as you can see, beautiful. But she was bullied mercilessly by the rich girls at Wellesley about being on scholarship and being poor. Her reaction to only having clothes my grandmother had made for her then, was to shop thrift stores for us.
6/x

Saturday mornings I would hold my breath in the thrift store in the smell of stale air and other people's sweat as she taught me how to search for good labels and check for worn cuffs, see if a hem was long enough to let out or if there were stains under the arms. I hated it.
7/x

My reward for performing this exercise I hated was 10 paperbacks with the covers torn off for $1. When my parents were helping run a Civil Rights group between Mississippi and Philly, our house was the place donated clothes were brought to be sent to the CR group in MS.
8/x

One day my mother's friend Miss Hilda, from MS, a tall dark-skinned Black woman who was probably my first real crush when I was 8, who stayed at our house when she was in town, asked my mother why she was washing and mending and then having me iron these clothes first.
9/x

Miss Hilda said that could be done in MS. My mother said she would never insult the folks in MS by sending them torn, dirty or stained clothes. "These clothes should be like a gift," she said. "They should *feel* new, even if they aren't and smell of starch, not sweat."
10/x

I looked over from my ironing at Miss Hilda. She was crying. Quietly. But real crying. Tears just rolling down her face. She had her arms around herself. My mother was bent over her sewing and didn't see. The sewing machine hummed.
11/x

I put down my iron, went over to Miss Hilda and put my hand on her arm. "Why are you sad?" I asked, because I was 8 and it would take me years to get it. I ran to grab her some tissues. My mother didn't look up--to look up would be to break the pact between them.
12/x

My mother would never know what it was to be Black, but in our little Philly rowhouse, she knew what it was to be poor. She knew opening a box of carefully folded, washed & pressed clothes with tissue paper would be a welcome surprise, not another source of humiliation.
13/x

And Miss Hilda knew that my mother enlisting her oldest child--though I was only 8--to help in this process was the best my mother could do in her white skin: raise her daughters to know that everyone should always be treated with respect and deference to their humanity.
14/x

My mother didn't want whoever opened that box at the Black church in MS with which she worked to think that they didn't deserve the same niceties and respect and dignity she would want for her own family. And that was why Miss Hilda was crying.

15/x

So please--don't send your dirty, stained, torn, moth-eaten things to clothing drives or charities. If you don't want to wear it, why should someone else? It is a daily humiliation to be poor. Don't add to that with your lack of respect for those folks' dignity. Thank you.

16/16