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Don’t deny it

Here’s a weird thing I’ve learned since I started working with the homeless: If you want to know if someone grew up rich or poor, take a look at their teeth. It seems so stupid now, but before I got this job, I didn’t really think about teeth. I went to the dentist every six months. I was bucktoothed and gap-toothed as a child, so I got braces. That’s just how life worked. Almost everyone I knew had braces. By my final year of high school, my graduating class was a sea of perfect smiles. It never once dawned on me that other families might not have thousands of dollars to spend on cosmetic dentistry. In my world, if you needed braces and cleanings, you got braces and cleanings. In the real world, thousands of children go without those things. People who live on food stamps can’t afford fresh food every day; when you grow up poor, you often grow up with sugary snacks and beverages, which decay your teeth over time.If your tooth gets chipped, broken or rotten, it gets pulled or it stays that way, because you can’t afford to fix it. And at the end of the day, you end up as an adult with dental issues. If you have nice teeth, you probably don’t realize this, but we live in a world that is fucking obsessed with teeth. Celebrities have nice teeth. Politicians have nice teeth. When you picture a rich person, a successful person, an educated person, they have a full set of gleaming pearly whites.

In our culture, we use “bad teeth” as a signal of poverty. They are shorthand for low education, for “hillbillies” with a lower quality of life. Bad teeth are not welcome at job interviews. They are not wanted in the dating scene. If you are trying to be taken seriously - at the bank, at the lawyer’s office, at your child’s school, at the doctor’s office - bad teeth will hold you back. And the consequences go far beyond the social issues. Tooth problems are painful. When you go to the dentist every six months, cavities and issues get caught early. When you go years between visits, abscesses, infections, exposed nerves and irreversible damage have time to take root. It’s an extremely painful thing to live with, it can make eating unpleasant, and tooth infections can get into your blood steam and kill you. Teeth are a health problem, and yet we price dental care like a luxury commodity. So if you meet someone with crooked teeth, or broken teeth, or tooth decay, don’t stare. Don’t make fun of them. Don’t fixate on it. That person may not have grown up with the money or nutrition that you did. Take the person for who they are, not for the teeth in their mouth. Dental care should be a human right, just like healthcare. Let’s fight for that.