Comments on: Faking Poverty To Get Paid Was Linda Tirado’s Bad Choice

By: loungecat

loungecat — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 07:48:00 +0000

Thank you for writing with common sense and well-argued indignation. I’ve been getting increasingly angry at the pathetic ‘reporting’ on the whole Tirado scam — so-called journalists presenting Tirado’s story as fact, misquoting bloggers who dare to question the veracity of her claims, and failing to ask Tirado any hard questions at all. While people obviously have the right to waste their money by sending it to her virtual panhandling page, the sad thing is that if she fails to write her book (as apparently she did when supposedly offered a book deal 2 years ago), the backlash by disappointed supporters will be against ‘irresponsible poor people’ rather than Tirado herself. And do I think she would have raised $60+k if she were black and had penned a truly coherent, well-written essay? Sadly, no. Her essay didn’t ‘accidentally explain poverty to a nation’, it encouraged people to pay her a few bucks so they wouldn’t have to really think about the issue.

By: Brotha Wolf

Brotha Wolf — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:28:00 +0000

Damn. I got caught up in a lie. Thanks for bringing this up.

By: TiffJ

TiffJ — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 16:44:00 +0000

I read that piece *at least* three times, and not ONCE did she ever suggest that she was speaking about anybody or any hypothetical situation other than *hers*, so she’s full of it, with the ‘out of context’ b.s. There are folks *still* trying to defend her deception, and coming for the writer who wrote the take-down article on the Houston Press blog, that unraveled her story.

By: Bryan Ortez

Bryan Ortez — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:39:00 +0000

dammit! I feel like an idiot. Reading that story I felt something was up.. I checked out her blog and someone commented they didn’t understand her gofundme.. she kept raising the amount of money she was trying to get.

of course, leave it to a person of color to do the critical thinking for me.

Thank you.

By: beattitudes66

beattitudes66 — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 10:22:00 +0000

Thanks for checking out the article. This IS white privilege because neither you nor I would ever get away with writing a piece like that in such a visible forum as huffpo and have it be thoroughly debunked in this fashion. The article would have been PULLED.

She could have just written it from the perspective of observation and would have been just fine. Instead she chose deliberately to set the perspective as being in poverty and USED it as a mechanism to get money. In her mind because she is “poor”.
Only now she is 50K richer? Meanwhile there are people who are going hungry with no roofs over their heads? There are working poor people who are not even making it paycheck to paycheck and they have no means to solicit funds like this ? But oh poor Linda she didn’t really mean to be taken out of context?

Now we are all supposed to feel sorry for her because she didn’t mean to write it that way? Nope I am calling utter BS on the whole thing.

By: TiffJ

TiffJ — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 07:59:00 +0000

Great piece Beattitudes.

I’m still reeling from this broad’s “poverty fan-fiction” (as it was described elsewhere). I think the thing that irritates me the most, is how she scrambled to try to clean up her Twitter feed so she can insult people’s intelligence* by claiming we read ‘out of context.’

She also admitted that while she’s able to make enough to pay her monthly bills and have resources from her family when the billing cycles don’t match up, how she’s “exhausted” from working. (0__o)
She essentially misled other hardworking folks to donate to her cause so she can vacay and stay home and write her book. Privilege is a helluva drug.

See, a black or brown woman would *not* have gotten away with this shit, because she’d've immediately come under heavy scrutiny after having written the essay and the outpouring of support would *not* have been immediate… trust. This is b.s. and Linda Tirado *should* be ashamed of herself; but judging from her statements and Twitter feed, I doubt she does.