Matthew Shaer on the Pandemic and Inequality

Your Fellowship project will be a book about the criminalization of poverty in the United States. Can you tell us about this project and if it has evolved since this summer’s reckoning with racial injustice?

I’d say that the evolution has actually happened along a couple different tracks. The first is the one you mention here: the increased focus on racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. The other is the pandemic, which has laid bare all sorts of socioeconomic faultlines, and made clear exactly how close to financial ruin many Americans are. In my original book proposal, I wrote that “for millions of Americans from every region of the country and from every ethnic background, economic survival has become a never-ending juggling game. Rent or the power bill. The co‐pay for a doctor’s appointment or groceries.” That was in 2019. A bunch of statistics published this fall show that since the start of the pandemic, poverty rates have since skyrocketed. And yet courts around the country are still dumping all kinds of fines and fees on defendants—in fact, there’s evidence that fines and fees collection has increased in some jurisdictions as a way of offsetting pandemic-induced revenue decline. I need to account for all of that.

You recently wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine about a community, centered around a suburban Atlanta highway, that has been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Can you talk a bit about your process in choosing and reporting this piece, especially with the limits on reporting caused by the virus?

This one started with a statistic, or a set of statistics, I guess: COVID-19 has not affected all Americans equally. Not in a medical sense, not in an economic sense. It’s been especially hard on people of color; especially hard on minorities. I was talking to my editor at the magazine, and he was like, “Let’s focus on one community, and try to bring the issue to life.” In Atlanta, Buford Highway is famous for its diversity, and its large immigrant population, so we settled on that as a backdrop pretty quickly. And in March, I started driving back and forth to the area, talking to residents. The Times was a big help with PPE training, and the magazine was good enough to provide N95 masks; I never felt unsafe. Still, I tried to do most of my interviewing outside, or in well-ventilated areas, and once I’d identified four main subjects/protagonists, I started to use more Zoom calls/Skype sessions, etc. At first, I figured those forms of communication would be a terrible replacement for in-person communication, but sometimes they were a help—a distraction-free setting for a source to really dig into a topic or line of questioning.

You’ve written a number of in-depth pieces this year, including for Slate and Esquire. How do you balance working on these pieces and launching a podcast studio with your book project? How do you stay organized and on deadline?

This question made me laugh. Because I do not stay organized, and I do not stay on deadline. My wife and I both work full-time, and we’ve got two small children at home, neither of whom is doing in-person school, and everyone is home ALL THE TIME, and our living room typically resembles an overturned ball pit, with, like, a couple stale pizza crusts sticking up like cacti. That said, I tend to divide work tasks into different buckets. Bucket one is the reading or emailing or research organization—I’ve learned to do that with a five year old hanging off my back, demanding to watch a fourth episode of Bluey. But for writing, I need quiet. I need a closed door. So I try to steal hours in the mornings or evenings to do that, and just give myself over to chaos during the day. And then I try to be patient/forgiving with myself. This year is a Bad, Crazy Year. It’s okay to not hold yourself to the expectations you’d had in January, before all the insanity began.

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