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A PROPHET FOR THE POOR  
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Matthew Desmond
August 12, 2024
The New York Review
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_ In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend
William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is
an exclusively Black or urban issue. _

, Jason Fulford

 

REVIEWED:
WHITE POVERTY: HOW EXPOSING MYTHS ABOUT RACE AND CLASS CAN RECONSTRUCT
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Liveright, 270 pp., $22.99

During the last salvo of the bloody West Virginia coal wars, fought
through the 1910s and early 1920s, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin,
having been paid handsomely by the mining companies, ordered his men
to fly biplanes over striking Black and white miners and drop bombs
filled with gunpowder and metal bolts on their heads. A pilot
executing that order may have looked down before releasing his deadly
cargo and spotted in the fray a young Black miner who, as a Holiness
preacher, may very well have been praying. That miner survived the
Battle of Blair Mountain and went on to have a daughter, who would
later marry a navy man who had returned home from World War II only to
find Jim Crow waiting for him. The couple joined the civil rights
movement and, when they had children of their own, introduced them to
the struggle. One of those children, William J. Barber II, born in the
early 1960s, grew up to become the nation’s most prophetic voice on
behalf of the American poor. You might say that the fight was in his
blood.

Reverend Barber wears many hats. He is the president of Repairers of
the Breach and cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign, both
nationwide anti-poverty organizations, and the founding director of
the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity
School. (I have participated in events with the Poor People’s
Campaign and have promoted its work.) But in his latest book, _White
Poverty_, Barber is simply a “watchman,” one who must “cry
aloud, spare not,” as the prophet Isaiah exhorted. “I’ve written
this book to ask America to look its poor—_all_ its poor—in the
face,” Barber writes.

That seems to be the perennial burden of the poverty writer: turning
the heads of the comfortable toward all the ragged desperation just
outside their gates. (“Here is a great mass of people,” Michael
Harrington wrote in _The Other America _(1962), “yet it takes an
effort of the intellect and will even to see them.”) Someone’s got
to do it. Many politicians not only ignore the poor but, on the advice
of their consultants, go out of their way to avoid saying the word
“poverty” altogether. Elected officials tend to be rich—many
members of Congress are millionaires—but pastors generally are not.
Yet members of the cloth have also largely kept silent about American
deprivation. “I am bothered,” Barber writes, “by people who say
so much about what God says so little about, and so little about what
God says so much about—especially the plight of the poor and
rejected in society.”

The latest government statistics estimate that between 11.5 and 12.4
percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2022, depending on the
measure. That amounts to between 37.9 and 40.9 million people, or
roughly the population of California. Still, Barber considers these
counts too low. In 2022 a family of four was considered poor if they
made less than $29,679 that year, but a 2023 Gallup poll found that
most Americans believe such a family needs at least $85,000 to get by.

One can make the poverty problem seem smaller than it is by ignoring
all those Americans who are poor in many ways except officially:
people who aren’t hard up enough to qualify for public housing but
will never be able to afford a mortgage; those who aren’t poor
enough to receive Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance
either.

 Barber prefers a more expansive definition of poverty, one that
considers someone to be poor if a $400 emergency would prevent them
from covering their basic monthly necessities. Using that metric, he
estimates that in a country of 337 million people, an astonishing 140
million are poor or low-income.

Most experts would endorse Barber’s position that the poverty line
is drawn too low but would stop well short of his claim that “nearly
half” of the country is poor. But Barber’s argument isn’t just
statistical; it stems from what he has seen. He has met people living
out of their cars while earning wages that place them squarely above
the poverty line. He has noticed empty dog food cans in the kitchen of
a family with young children but no dog.

As for the statistics, there is solid evidence that a lot of hardship
is endured above the official poverty line. One study found that more
than 20 percent of households with incomes 200 percent above the
poverty threshold experience food insecurity. Medicaid covers roughly
40 percent of all births in America. In February and March of this
year, the Census estimated that a quarter of renting households making
between $50,000 and $74,999 a year would likely face eviction in the
next two months. Findings like these help us understand why data that
overlook millions of families floating uneasily between official
poverty and actual security make Barber so angry.

The official poverty numbers “constitute a _damn_ lie,” he
writes. This is one reason Barber chose to focus on white poverty in
his new book. Because if you believe that poverty is a minor problem,
that it is primarily a Black problem, an immigrant problem, a southern
problem, a Democratic city problem—a _them_ problem—then it’s
not a stretch to believe that the poor have only themselves to blame
for their miseries.

Along line of Black intellectuals has taken up the subject of white
poverty. In _My Bondage and My Freedom_ (1855), Frederick Douglass
wrote about the ridicule that poor, non-slaveholding whites faced
before the Civil War, calling them “the laughing stock even of
slaves themselves.” W.E.B. Du Bois famously described how white
laborers were compensated for their meager pay with a “public and
psychological wage.” Langston Hughes included “the poor white,
fooled and pushed apart” in his poems, as did Toni Morrison in her
novels. Barber considers white poverty as part of his project of
building a mass movement for economic justice, one that rejects the
notion that activism and civil disobedience “are _only_ for Black
people.” Like the Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell
Cox or Du Bois (especially in his 1935 masterpiece _Black
Reconstruction in America_), Barber believes that racism drives a
wedge between poor white and poor Black people, whose needs and
interests are in fact deeply aligned.

Most poor people in America are white, of course, though a larger
proportion of Black and Hispanic Americans live in poverty. Yet many
white people have a difficult time admitting they are or have been
poor. On multiple occasions white people have told me that growing up
they “were poor but didn’t know it.” I always find this slightly
amusing, since no Black or Hispanic person has ever said such a thing
to me. When they were poor, they knew it. Black and Hispanic poverty
can be harsher than white poverty, but I also believe that white
people sense that acknowledging their poverty means on some level
denying their whiteness. “It is understood,” Frantz Fanon once
quipped, “that one is white above a certain financial level.”

The experience of surviving economic hardship provides, in Barber’s
view, the primary basis of solidarity among the poor. “If you
can’t pay your light bill,” he jokes, “we’re all Black in the
dark.” But then why do so many poor white Americans continue to
support politicians who refuse to expand Medicaid, strengthen unions,
invest in public education, or fund affordable housing? To remain
faithful to economic elites while appealing to a broad electorate, the
right advances policies that enrich corporations and the upper class
while at the same time developing or amplifying cultural narratives
that stoke social division.

 Tax cuts for the rich; abortion restrictions for the rest. And
perhaps nothing has been more effective, more intoxicating, and more
ruinous in this effort than racism.

In his now classic book _Why Americans Hate Welfare_ (1999), the
political scientist Martin Gilens compiles an impressive array of data
showing that, contrary to popular opinion, Americans generally support
“almost every aspect of the welfare state.” However, that support
falters when the public mistakenly assumes that most recipients of
government aid are Black. This is why fewer Americans supported the
Affordable Care Act when it was referred to as Obamacare. It’s why a
study published last year found that merely asking people to think
about immigration made them less likely to support redistributive
policies and charitable giving. Whether they have bought into a kind
of zero-sum thinking whereby nonwhite gains require white losses, or
they have assumed that nonwhite people are lazy and a drain on
society, many poor white Americans continue to endorse policy agendas
that directly harm them.

Yet throughout his life Barber has witnessed these old, tired schemes
break down. Once, during a meeting with Kentucky miners, Barber
learned about politicians who came to town “talking about how gay
people were supposedly threatening their values” while empowering
multinational corporations to conduct mountaintop mining without any
consideration for the miners’ well-being or environment. “These
assholes who told us our [gay] kids were going to destroy the
community have handed it over to companies that are willing to blow up
the mountains,” a miner told the reverend. Another added:
“They’ve been playing us against one another.” In these moments
Barber glimpses a possible path forward. Recognizing that “white
folks are potentially the single largest base for a movement of poor
people,” he seeks what so many before him have sought: a way to
unite poor and working-class people across racial and political
divides.

Barber plumbs “the evidence of white poverty’s violence so we can
see through the cracks in a broken system” and push back against
forces that undermine “political coalitions across lines of race and
class.” This entails overcoming resistance from both the right and
the left. If the right sows division through the culture wars, the
left engages in a politics of grievance that emphasizes our
differences at the expense of recognizing our shared struggle. Barber
reserves his harshest criticism for elites who resist reaching across
social divides because their authority (and often their careers) is
rooted in representing a narrow set of issues. For the rest of us, he
offers a gentle warning against identity politics that pull us inward.

One can find plenty of people railing against identity politics in the
op-ed pages these days, but they usually sound like grumpy professors
lecturing to undergrads. Barber seems to issue his argument from a
folding chair in a church basement after a potluck. “No one ever
wins a competition of trying to prove that their pain hurts worse than
someone else’s,” he writes. “There is a leveling effect to the
graveyard, where all who’ve been beaten up by this world’s evils
are equally dead.” This isn’t the censorious “seminar-room mode
of activism” common in academia.

 It’s the warmhearted work of community organizing, the stuff of
sitting on porches, getting arrested for demanding health insurance
for the poor, and listening to an older woman tell West Virginia
senator Joe Manchin, after he refused to support a higher minimum
wage, “I knew your momma.”

Mass movements, by definition, must include people who don’t see eye
to eye on everything. When we picture the kinds of folks who could
join us under such a big tent, our minds often fly to the extremes,
causing us to recoil at the thought of shaking hands with _those
types_. But Barber isn’t interested in locking arms with January 6
rioters any more than Dr. King was with Bull Connor—though, it
should be said, crazier things have happened. During the Great
Depression, Black communists were joined by ex-Klansmen in their fight
for political and economic reform.

 And Barber once found himself riding in the back of a truck with a
Confederate flag bumper sticker when he was campaigning with white
Republicans to reopen a rural hospital. Barber doesn’t seek
compromise with violent fringe groups on the right, but neither does
he have use for political purity, where working with someone on a
specific issue requires aligning on all others as well. As the old
refrain goes, in politics there are no permanent enemies and no
permanent allies—only permanent interests.

The history of poor and working-class struggle in America has been a
history of white against Black, citizen against immigrant, urban
against rural—a history of fighting over scraps. But there have been
powerful moments when people overcame these divisions in the interest
of class solidarity. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a
committee of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that formed in
1935 and operated as an independent organization from late 1938 to
1955, created a campaign around the mantra “Black and white, unite
and fight.” Unlike the overtly racist AFL, the CIO asked its
members to pledge to “never discriminate against a fellow worker on
account of creed, color, or nationality.” During a 1935 CIO union
drive, a white steelworker urged his coworkers to “forget that the
man working beside you is” white, Black, or Jewish. “[He] is a
working man like yourself and being exploited by the ‘boss’ in the
name of racial and religious prejudice.”

The CIO rank and file understood that their fight was not with
fellow workers belonging to different racial groups or political
parties but with corporate elites pulling the strings. If this was
accomplished nearly a hundred years ago, when racism was much more
brazen, it surely can be accomplished today, as the multiracial
organizing efforts that gave rise to the Fight for $15 have shown.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the power of the old myths,”
Barber writes. “But when we listen closely to the songs of America,
fusion is all around us.” Those songs can be difficult to hear these
days, with story after story about how divided we have become. But
might all the talk of division itself divide? And might our divisions,
as they deepen, also deepen our commitment to overcome them?

Our political news and commentaries are offered by people who, I
suspect, haven’t spent much time in the North Carolina High Country.
Barber looks around and doesn’t only see a polarized nation. Truth
be told, neither do many other community organizers with whom I’ve
met over the years, people who have worn out their shoes hustling for
ballot measures and collecting signatures. Those agents of action
recognize that we are far less divided in the bleachers of a Friday
night football game or the post office line than we are on social
media or political talk shows. And they recognize, too, that many of
our beliefs are not as intractable as they first seem.

Social science is beginning to affirm what old-school organizers have
long intuited: that face-to-face conversations can soften prejudices
and change people’s attitudes about welfare policies. A respected
study published in the_ American Journal of Political
Science_ reported the results of a 2019 experiment that sought to
increase support for enrolling unauthorized immigrants in Medicaid.
Canvassers knocked on doors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North
Carolina. During some visits, they shared a story that elevated the
perspectives of unauthorized immigrants; during others, they had a
brief conversation about an unrelated topic. Four months after the
study, voters exposed to the viewpoints of unauthorized immigrants
were far likelier to voice support for a plan to include those
immigrants in government health care programs. We don’t need to
subject ourselves to extensive training to have effective
conversations across racial or political divides. But we do need to
find the courage to leave the comfort of our neighborhood and media
bubbles. This is why the community organizer George Goehl calls
one-on-one conversations “maybe the most fundamental organizing of
all.”

Barber doesn’t see red and blue counties so much as unorganized
ones, “where the largest bloc of voters isn’t Republican or
Democrat, but rather poor people who often do not vote.” In the last
two presidential elections, over 60 percent of nonvoters lived in
households making less than $50,000 a year, but most people in that
income bracket who did vote went for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in
2020. This is why Barber thinks that poor people are the new swing
voters, “the sleeping giant that, if awakened, could decide the
future of the nation.” After all, the poor have the most to gain
from policies that establish a living wage, expand affordable housing,
and promote workers’ rights.

Will poor Americans come out in force to support the Harris–Walz
ticket? Harris has given them some reasons to. In a major speech in
August, she argued that “no child should have to grow up in
poverty,” promising to address the nation’s housing shortage with
the construction of three million new homes by the end of her first
term and to restore and expand the extended child tax credit enacted
temporarily in 2021, an initiative that cut child poverty nearly in
half that year.

 These policies would bring much-needed relief to millions of
struggling families. Yet political quiescence among poor and
working-class Americans has long vexed Democratic candidates. When
John F. Kennedy visited West Virginia during his presidential
campaign, he encountered, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “the
incredible pauperization of the mountain people” but “with hardly
a sound of protest.” Today voter suppression, a widespread sense of
powerlessness from years of being held down, and the decline of unions
have combined to undercut the political power of the American poor.

Reverend Barber wants to change that. In exploited, left-behind
communities where others too often see only desperation and misery,
Barber sees power. Where others see division, Barber sees the
potential for unity. And where others descend into hopelessness,
Barber expresses a prophetic imagination. “It is the task of the
prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more
visible ones of the old order,” the theologian Walter Brueggemann
has written. It’s what a watchman does.

_MATTHEW DESMOND is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at
Princeton. His books include Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the
American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction,
and Poverty, by America, which was published last year. (October
2024)_

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* Book Review
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* Reverend Dr. William Barber
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* poverty
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* Inequality
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* Racism
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* mass movements
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* Working Class
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