White Poverty by William J. Barber II

Author:William J. Barber II
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

Chapter 8

POOR PEOPLE ARE THE NEW SWING VOTERS

I have spent enough time with poor white folks in America to know that the people themselves are not the problem. Whenever someone asks, “Is it race or is it class?,” my answer is, “Yes, it is.”

When I go to the hollers of Eastern Kentucky or a small town in Kansas, I never shy away from talking about race. I am a Black man who knows that racism is America’s original sin.

“But doesn’t all that talk about slavery and Jim Crow just keep us stuck in the divisions of the past?” some ask.

“Only if we misunderstand the past,” I say.

Yes, America’s history is rife with violence that has denigrated Black people and set our white neighbors against us. When we tell the truth about the movements that successfully challenged slavery and Jim Crow, though, we know that they were multiracial fusion movements. This is why we can’t ignore race. Poor white people in America today can learn from the long struggle for racial justice—just as the folks up in Mitchell County chose to learn from the NAACP and the community in Belhaven followed Mamie Till’s example to challenge the violence of unnecessary death in their community. Moral fusion means always understanding the role race plays in public life.

When I talk about race, I insist on talking about it along with an analysis that helps folks understand how all poor people suffer when we’re pitted against one another.

“But if you focus on the class struggle that poor Black people share with poor white people,” others ask, “doesn’t that diminish the particular suffering Black people experience in a white supremacist society?”

“Only if we allow our suffering to define who we are.”

Race has shaped a world where people suffer differently, and we must never diminish the struggle that anyone faces because of the particular ways this world’s injustices have piled up on them. Still, no one ever wins a competition of trying to prove that their pain hurts worse than someone else’s. When we are honest, we have to acknowledge that injustice may touch us in different ways, but it has a universal effect of choking the life out of our dreams and possibilities. There is a leveling effect to the graveyard, where all who’ve been beaten up by this world’s evils are equally dead.

In the Bible, God tells the prophet Ezekiel to warn the people that there is “a conspiracy of her princes within her like a roaring lion tearing its prey.” Political leaders in Ezekiel’s day cared more about power than they did about the people who were crushed by their policy violence. The data of Ezekiel’s day made this clear, but God called Ezekiel to try to articulate the severity of the situation. So the prophet looked to the natural world and compared the political leadership first to a roaring lion, and later to ravenous wolves. “They shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain,” Ezekiel said plainly. He also pointed out that religion had been distorted to prop up this extremism.

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