"Poor teeth"
Poor teeth, I knew, beget not just shame but more poorness: people with bad teeth have a harder time getting jobs and other opportunities. People without jobs are poor. Poor people can’t access dentistry – and so goes the cycle....
"The Shame of Poor Teeth in a Rich World"
http://aeon.co/magazine/health/the-shame-of-poor-teeth-in-a-rich-world/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=744e77fcb2-Daily_Newsletter_23_Oct_201410_23_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-744e77fcb2-68622033
In the past year, the Affordable Care Act, or ‘ObamaCare’, has changed many lives for the better – mine included. But its omission of dental coverage, a result of political compromise, is a dangerous, absurd compartmentalisation of health care, as though teeth are apart from and less important than the rest of the body...
Upper-class supremacy is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the US Eugenics Records Office not only targeted racial minorities but ‘sought to demonstrate scientifically that large numbers of rural poor whites were genetic defectives’, as the sociologist Matt Wray explains in his book Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006). The historian and civil rights activist W E B du Bois, an African American, wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940) that, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1870s, ‘the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than colour’. Martin Luther King, Jr made similar observations and was organizing a poor-people’s march on Washington at the time of his murder in 1968...
