“If white America would come face-to-face with white poverty, it would realize that these anti-poverty programs are needed in their communities, too. And we would move beyond a view of poverty as the pathology of a specific racial or ethnic group. Would white people casually accept Newt Gingrich telling them that their children have no work ethic and need to start cleaning school bathrooms?”— Poor White Kids: Are They Invisible? (via robot-heart-politics)
This was a big part of the discussion in my Class and Inequality course this semester. There’s almost an equal percentage of poor whites as for other races, it’s just not made known as much.
This actually isn’t true. The poverty rate is considerably higher for people of color than it is for whites. 12.4% of whites live in poverty compared with 38.2% and 35% of blacks and Latinos. The article discusses this, and I don’t think the takeaway here is that white people have it as bad as people of color. The point of the article is that poverty in America has come to be so heavily identified with negative stereotypes of people of color, and that poverty is largely demonized because it is a coded means of using negative stereotypes of people of color without actually having to use blatantly racist language.
This enables people like Newt Gingrich to get up in front of a national audience, argue that poor people have no work ethic unless it involves something illegal, and then when he’s challenged on the matter, he can say, “Well, I wasn’t talking about all poor people. I was just talking about those poor people from certain communities,” i.e. “You know who I’m talking about.” And even though we all know he’s talking about poor black and brown kids from inner-city, non-white communities, he gets a pass on peddling racist stereotypes because he didn’t explicitly call black and brown people a bunch of lazy criminals. Even though we all know that’s what he means.
I think what this article misses is that poor white people don’t view themselves as poor and aren’t viewed as poor, even when they are poor. They are viewed as noble, struggling Americans, which is a very different thing. The noble struggling Americans work 3 jobs to put food on the table, take care of their kids and pay their own bills. The lazy poor don’t work, do drugs, and leech off American taxpayers by shamelessly living off welfare indefinitely. These two sets of people have nothing in common: not their use of welfare, not their use of recreational drugs, not their sense of dignity, not their concern for their children, not their ideas of personal responsibility, and certainly not the neighborhoods they live in or their skin color. Poverty becomes an exclusively black or brown problem not because poverty doesn’t exist among whites, but because the whites who experience poverty are (for the most part, and there are some notable exceptions to this) not viewed as poor, but as noble struggling Americans. This is even how they view themselves, which is why you have a bunch of white folks who rely on social security, medicare and medicaid (all government welfare programs) to make ends meet showing up to tea parties bitching about all the other folk getting fat off the American welfare system. If actual use of the American welfare system isn’t the problem, then what is? And what exempts these folks from being lazy, shameless leeches if we aren’t actually talking about use of the welfare system?
The point is that the experience of poverty in America for whites and people of color are very different. Not only are the circumstances for poverty often very different (there are racial/racist reasons why poverty remains so high among black and brown communities), but how we view poor white and poor black/brown communities is very different. Our language on poverty in America has become so distorted precisely because of race—political discussions on poverty often have far more to do with race than they do with income or how people live—and it has played a huge role in continuing inequality along both class and race lines.