Da Costa - final before TS


Correspondence Address: Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa, Department of Sociology, York 
University, Tkaronto, ON, M3J 1P3; email: jdacost5@yorku.ca 

ISSN: 1911-4788 

Volume 16, Issue 3, 649-651, 2022 

Creative Intervention 

Re: What is Wealth Inequality? 

JADE CRIMSON ROSE DA COSTA 
York University, Canada 

Context 

In May 2022, I was invited to participate in a small community-based panel 
about wealth inequality that was hosted by ThriveYouth (then known as 
DAREart), a community youth group based in Tkaronto that provides a 
platform for children and young adults to pursue creative expression, learn and 
think critically,1 and “develop the skills and confidence needed” to promote 
transformative action (ThriveYouth, n.d., para 1). Bringing together 
community leaders and social justice-minded high school students, the panel 
was organized around the question “what is wealth inequality and why does it 
exist?” The question immediately struck me as the type of question students 
might ask during a lecture or tutorial, or which a keen peer might pose after a 
conference presentation. However, I had been invited into the panel not as an 
academic but as a community organizer, and so I answered as such. I felt a 
great pedagogical and creative liberty in that space, and in response I was 
inspired to write down my thoughts, as a poem, one which wove together my 
multidimensional experiences with wealth inequality as both person and 
organizer. The result was a very full, very alive description of wealth inequality 
(or, as I prefer, wealth inequity) that I would have never expressed if I had been 
constrained to academic jargon and rhetoric. Whereas academia often requires 
us to “prove” and “validate” all our thoughts and feelings, typically by using 
three-dollar words, poetry allows us to embody and express them as is, free of 
citations and structured analyses. I performed the poem, found below, to the 
youth who then attended the 2022 panel in Toronto (followed by an equivalent 
event in Vancouver). 

1 Tkaronto is the original name of the colonially known city of Toronto. As shared by Indigenous 
creatives Selena Mills and Sara Roque (2019), “Toronto itself is a word that originates from the 
Mohawk word ‘Tkaronto,’ meaning ‘the place in the water where the trees are standing,’ which is 
said to refer to the wooden stakes that were used as fishing weirs in the narrows of local river 
systems by the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat” (para 6). 



Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa 

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 16, Issue 3, 649-651, 2022 

650 

Re: What is Wealth Inequality? 

I understand wealth inequality for what it isn’t. 
It isn’t just working-class white people yelling in the streets. 
It isn’t just something that dead white men 
wrote about 
during the industrial revolution, 
or the black and white films they made about factories. 

Wealth inequality isn’t just the Great Depression 
or assembly lines, 
or even capitalism. 

Wealth inequality is COVID-19; it’s Amazon; it’s white supremacy. 
it’s going to bed hungry and waking up the same. 
It’s working paycheck-to-paycheck, 
and taking on more shifts, 
just to keep up with price inflation.  

It’s taking three bus transfers, 
just to get somewhere a few kilometres away. 

It’s raiding tent cities, 
and paying $2500 in rent. 

It’s reusing every single yogurt container you’ve ever bought, 
so that you never have to buy Tupperware. 

It’s being haunted by poverty, 
even when you are no longer poor. 

Wealth inequality is being the immigrants, 
the white people in the streets, 
are yelling at. 

The same immigrants, 
who were pushed out of their homes, 
in service of Canadian nationalism. 

It’s the migrants and refugees, 
who pick the fruits and vegetables, 
that fill our grocery stores –  
the same migrants, 
who pay for health insurance, 
they can’t access, 



Re: What is Wealth Inequality? 

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 16, Issue 3, 649-651, 2022 

651 

but who break their backs, 
to feed our children – well, some children. 

Wealth inequality is criminalizing sex work, 
it’s conflating being ‘queer’ with being ‘rich’ and ‘white’. 

It’s trans youth ‘house surfing’  
it’s never going to the dentist, 
it’s defunding harm reduction, 
it’s thinking that “AIDS is over”, 
while Black and Indigenous folx, 
continue to live through a pandemic. 

It’s thinking “COVID is over”, 
when disabled people can’t leave their homes, 
or access their fundamental needs 
or stay alive.  

Wealth inequality is not the root, 
but the symptom of a world 
that is haunted, 

haunted by settler colonialism, 
by anti-black racism,  
by imperialism, 
by ableism, 
by sexism, 
by queerphobia, 
by fatphobia,  
by whorephobia, 
by transphobia, 
by Islamophobia, 
by Xenophobia, 

By all the isms and ophobias we live every-single-day; 
by the systematic death, 
designed for profit.  

References 

Mills, S., & Roque. (2019). Land acknowledgements: uncovering an oral history of Tkaronto. 
Local Love. Retrieved October 13, 2022. https://locallove.ca/issues/land-
acknowledgements-uncovering-an-oral-history-of-tkaronto/#.YaPALNDMI2w 

ThriveYouth. (n.d.). ThriveYouth Development Canada. https://thriveyouth.ca/