WHITE POVERTY

A prominent faith leader and social activist argues that poverty is much more deeply entrenched in America than we think.

“One of the most damnable features of our common life is the way we talk about poverty as if it’s an anomaly and not a feature of our economic system,” writes Barber II, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. That feature shifts wealth from the already have-nots to the already haves, but with divisive subterfuge: White Americans are thought to be working-class and Blacks poor. The definition of poverty must be extended, notes the author, to incorporate anybody who cannot afford to pay rent and their other expenses, which would result in a number far larger than is now counted by official reports. By that widened scope, the number of the poor includes vastly more white people than Black. Simply changing the way poverty is measured changes the picture, and given that “the average worker in America makes $54 a week less than they did 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation,” that picture must change in order to truly address the problem. Economic class should trump racial or ethnic classification, Barber suggests, and if it did, then the poor would have every reason to forge a political movement to press their demands—for which reason Jim Crow’s “son went to law school and came back to state legislatures in a business suit.” One Black elder’s lament rings especially true: Black Americans have the models of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to honor, “but those poor white folk—they ain’t never had a champion.”

A meaningful call to revise our view of poverty and to insist on real action to rectify the situation.