I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why class and poverty have become things that Americans just don't talk about as basic social issues. This was an important discussion during the new deal and then again when LBJ revived the new deal with the war on poverty.Now the social debates are focused on race, gender and LGBT issues. Those to some extent cut across class and economic status. I have written some diaries on the subject but have never really come up with a perspective why we can't talk about race/gender and poverty/class at the same time. I have come across two articles that offer some interesting ideas on how public perceptions are being manipulated to equate being poor with not being white.
Hey, Media: White People Are Poor, Too Despite routine portrayals of poor people as black and Latino, most poor people in America are actually white.
According to Census figures in 2013, 18.9 million whites are poor. That’s 8 million more poor white people than poor black people, and more than 5 million more than those who identify as Latino. A majority of those benefiting from programs like food stamps and Medicaid are white, too.
But somehow our picture of poverty is different, and the media tends to tell us a different story. A recent New York Times story, “Cut in Food Stamps Forces Hard Choices on Poor,” included only pictures of African Americans and Latinos from the Bronx, N.Y., and a number of Southern states. In October, the Times published another story about the impact of states’ rejection of the Medicaid expansion that’s part of the Affordable Care Act.
The images accompanying that story were also all of black or Latino families. Was that because only blacks and Latinos receive Medicaid? No.
People of color are disproportionately poor, 27% of blacks and 25% of Latinos. Only 9% of whites are poor. However, when those percentages are translated into actual head counts that produces 30M poor white people. Out a total of 45M Americans living below the poverty line that means that far and away most of the poor are white. The media have managed to render those 30M people virtually invisible when discussing issues of poverty and income.
The second article by Leonard Pitts Jr is a good bit longer. It is an exploration of the realities of white poverty in Appalachia.
White poverty exists, ignored
The article doesn't have any neat tidy sound bites to quote. It deals the complexities of impossibility and is well worth reading. Among other things it deals with the way that the white poor of the south have typically been portrayed by the media as people to laugh at rather than people to take seriously.
The white southern oligarchs were experts at setting poor blacks and whites against each other to make it easier to control and exploit all of them. That dynamic is still with us. White conservatives want to blame poverty on race. The meme is that the US economy works for white people. Ne'er do wells are using race as an excuse. The traditional progressives want to make it all a matter of class. It is because people of color are poor that they are targets of police brutality. This doesn't account for the black people who are economically well off who get the same treatment. What nobody seems able to deal with is the intersectionality of race and class.
The powerful images about poverty that were produced during the great depression by such artists as Steinbeck and Lange were those of poor white people. That likely had much to do with the willingness of white America to take the problems seriously. The Southern bloc in the Democratic Party was able to effectively cut people of color out of much of the benefits of the new deal. Now that the image of poverty has been cast in racial terms, it plays directly into the hands of the corporate interests who are continually pushing the country toward ever greater economic inequality.
Poor whites and poor blacks are still cut off from each other rather than being able to unite in common interests. That is a legacy of Jim Crow. In 2008 Obama's campaign faced significant hostility in much of Appalachia. Redneck racism is an enduring stereotype that is based on significant realities.
I have no idea how we bring class and poverty back to a place at the table of national policy discussion. I do know that it is no accident that they have been AWOL for many years. Realizing how the identification of race with poverty is contributing to this is, however a useful insight for at least understanding what is happening