White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy

"He is. Reverend Barber is an amazing person who carries on Martin Luther King’s vision. In the late 1960s, before Martin Luther King was murdered, he was getting poor people around the country, of all different colors, to come together to advocate for anti-poverty programs. Reverend Barber has carried that forward. He’s been running the Poor People’s Campaign for a couple of decades now. He goes around the country to interview people and get them organized, to talk about the experience of poverty, to make sure that it’s on the national stage and in the national conversation. What I like about White Poverty is that he talks about the experience of racism in the United States and goes all the way back to enslavement and the first slave ships that arrived. He explains how landowners started to create the myth that skin color has something to do with whether you’re worth being paid or not. He demonstrates that a lot of poor white people were convinced, also via legislation, that they were different than the Black folks who had to work for free who were enslaved. “Hunger can never be understood in a vacuum” White people did not want to be associating with Black people because there were laws against it. Both during enslavement and after emancipation, there were laws that restricted white people from going into business or even congregating with Black people. Certainly, they should not be having intimate relationships. He shows the deep damage of that myth — that white people are not poor, or that white people’s poverty is different than Black people’s poverty. It’s the same type of poverty. It’s the same experience. But a lot of white people get convinced that the policies and programs that harm them are not harmful because they think it only pertains to Black people. So it’s a really beautiful investigation of the racism that’s embedded in the United States and how people buy into these terrible myths that white people are not poor, or that white people and Black people can’t organize together. By talking about the Poor People’s Campaign, he shows how people of all different backgrounds can come together to talk about the same issues, the same struggles, and through their social action improve our democracy in the United States. What I also love about Reverend Barber is that he’s very prophetic. He knows his scripture, and it’s really beautiful to read his work. It reminds us that we are all aspiring to be happy. We are all aspiring to be in a good relationship with each other. I just love the way he uses his scripture. I highly recommend that book. It’s a very inspiring book, and it reminds everyone that more white people than Black people are suffering in America in terms of sheer numbers. For example, in the United States, we have a program called Medicaid. It’s healthcare for people who are poor, who are not working, or who are disabled or who can’t afford to pay for their healthcare. During the Obama administration, there was Medicaid expansion. There were lots of states that were able to expand the number of people that they could support through Medicaid to get healthcare. But the states that had higher rates of Black people who were poor, primarily in the South, refused to expand Medicaid because they thought more Black people would benefit from it. What happens is that the legislators — and the white people that they represent — think that any kind of social program that is put into place is not helping white people, but only helping Black people. So that’s why in this book Reverend Barber talks about breaking down these myths: the myth that white people don’t get help with these public assistance programs. They’re the primary ones who do get the help. There’s also a sense of fear towards Black people that a lot of white people have. All of this fearmongering that has happened since the time of colonization, of enslavement, has stayed with us up to today. I don’t know if you know anything about American politics right now, but it is unbelievable, the type of racism that is allowed to be spewed in the public domain. A lot of white people who are poor get really concerned and think, ‘They’re getting more than me, and that’s not fair.’ In the meantime, they’re in the same boat. They just can’t see that they’re in the same boat."