In the article linked below, Black journalist Chauncey DeVega zeroes in on some "inconvenient facts that upset the dominant narrative about the color line and poverty in America."
With incisive critical analysis, he "outs" Republican hypocrisy, using the Lauren Boebert family as a scathing illustration of how low-income whites are generally treated better than people of color in similar economic circumstances. Then at one point he says:
Republicans deploy a narrative that depicts poor and working-class white people as being especially [. . . ] deserving of government assistance [ . . . ]. Alternatively, when judged to be politically advantageous, those same elites will quickly erase the white poor and working class, ignoring them as inconveniences whose very existence highlights the inherent inequalities of capitalism and other structural failings of American society.
While I would criticize the article in general for feeding into the Hillbilly Ellegy stereotype, his pointing out the erasure of poor whites and that "white people constitute the largest group of poor people in America" is important. That truth needs to be made clear to every American for the strategic reasons that he mentions in the article. (Please click on the link to read what he has to say, which is far beyond what I could ever summarize here.)
As a poor white person in the 1960s, and 70s, it bothered me that our media and politicians always seemed to want to erase people like me. But Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta made a point of including us in their movements and in their understanding of poverty. And now Rev. William Barber's Poor People's Campaign is carrying on and expanding that tradition. Isn't it extremely telling, that these great Black and brown leaders have been more inclusive of poor whites than the "mainstream" of white society has been? That's why I have always looked up to people of color for the wisdom and leadership essential to achieving the changes our country needs.
P.S. The Tennessee Justins are awesome.
Here’s the link to DeVega’s article:
www.salon.com/…