On Monday, Oxfam released a
study which predicted that the richest one percent will control over half of the world's wealth by next year. The
80 wealthiest people in the world own $1.9 trillion, the amount shared by those in the bottom half of the world's income spectrum--3.5 billion people. Monday was also Martin Luther King Day. I found it somehow both tragic and fitting that we should be reminded of the dire reality of global economic inequality on the day that we reflect on Dr. King's legacy.
Poverty was a central focus of Dr. King's work; he saw the right to work as a fundamental human right. And it is too little recognized that shortly before he died King was working on what he called the "Poor People's Campaign," which was centered in D.C. and designed to bring attention to joblessness and income inequality in the US. In a radical position for his time and today, King wrote that, "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."
Dr. King is not often thought of as an anti-poverty crusader, just as he is not often recognized as an anti-war activist. Yet by placing him in the box of the "civil rights movement" we foreclose the true overlap between civil rights for black Americans, economic inequality for all Americans, and violence perpetrated by the US against its citizens and the world. An examination of Dr. King's legacy as a whole reveals that he was well aware of these complex intersections that function to deprive people of their rights.
King intended his anti-poverty work to include all races of Americans, and he began his thoughts on the topic by acknowledging that, "there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States." This observation continues to hold true today. While a higher percentage of black Americans live in poverty, a larger number of white Americans still do--19 million white vs. 7.8 million black Americans lived in poverty as of 2011. Facts like these fly in the face of common stereotypes of who poor Americans are. Inequality impacts all Americans and we all have a responsibility to do our part to bring about a more just society.
Dr. King concluded his thoughts on poverty by saying:
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
If the "curse of poverty" had no justification in the 1960s, it certainly does not now. Yet income inequality today is
worse than it has been since the 1920s--definitely worse than when King was alive. The economic inequality we face today is deeply alarming--80 people own the same amount of wealth as 350 billion! Yet this reality can too often just seem like the way the world works. Thus, in 2015, it could not be more imperative that we reflect on Dr. King's legacy--his entire legacy, not just the version co-opted by mainstream society--and renew his efforts to eradicate poverty.