Poverty in Black and White

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Brian Lehrer: It is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Before we bring in our guest in this segment, Reverend Dr. William Barber, leader of the modern Poor People's Campaign and author of a new book called White Poverty, I want to play an excerpt from last night's Republican convention podium about a minute and a half. It's Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who had earlier been running in the presidential primaries himself this year talking about his upbringing and his politics.

Senator Tim Scott: I was raised by a single mom in poverty. We had plastic spoons, not silver spoons, but she taught me to work hard to take responsibility and reject victimhood. Thank God for my wonderful mama. I know this is going to offend the liberal elites. Every time I say it, it offends them. Let me say it one more time. America is not a racist country.

[applause]

Senator Tim Scott: No, we're not. If you are looking for racism today, you'd find it in cities run by Democrats. Look on the south side of Chicago, poor Black kids trapped in failing schools. Thousands shot every single year, including one of my former interns, Daquan, but there's good news, it's conservative values that restores hope. It's Republican policies that lifts people up. I partnered with the greatest president of my generation, President Donald J. Trump.

Brian Lehrer: That's what they're hearing at the Republican Convention. That was Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina speaking there last night. With us now with his take on the political moment and discuss his new book is Reverend Dr. William Barber, leader of the Contemporary Poor People's Campaign, as an heir to what Martin Luther King was calling his work at the end of his life in 1968. Reverend Dr. Barber led a Poor People's Campaign March on Washington last month.

He is a Protestant minister, social activist, past president of the NAACP North Carolina chapter, founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at the Yale Divinity School, and more. Reverend Dr. Barber is an author several times over. He's been here for several of his past books, including still very relevant to right now The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear. He has a new book, also highly relevant, called White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. Reverend Dr. Barber, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

William Barber: I'm glad to be here with you, my friend, and just also want to just mention the good people at Repairers of the Breach that we lead as a visionary and founder that holds so much of the work that particularly immobilizing and organizing that goes with the Poor People's Campaign, but glad to be with you today.

Brian Lehrer: I left out that one of your group's Repairers of the Breach, and I'll ask you to react explicitly to Senator Scott shortly, but maybe we should establish some ideas from your book first for some context for that. Your movement is called The Poor People's Campaign, and your book has the word poverty in the title, but I think you question what most Americans usually associate with those words, poor and poverty. Is that a good place to start?

William Barber: I think so. The Poor People's Campaign, the National Call for Moral Revival is one of the pieces Repairers of the Breach supports. We're one of the cold anchors along with the [unintelligible 00:04:33] Center, out of Union Theological Seminary President, Executive Directors, Reverend Dr. Liz Steel Harris, but this issue of poverty, and I'm glad we're going to come back to Scott's comments because I have a lot to say about that.

The book White Poverty is saying to us, number one, poverty is not a marginal issue. The reason we have not dealt with it is because we have focused on so many mythologies. One of the greatest mythology is that when we talk about poverty often or in the news, the first thing you see is a Black woman on welfare as the face of poverty, which is racist toward Black people and dismissive toward tens of millions of white people.

Their actual reality is that of the 135 million poor low wealth people in this country, 26 million are Black, which is in fact 58% to 60% of Black population, but 66 million are white. Sixty-six million. The largest block is white women in this country. The fact that we walk by there and dismiss that people use it as a way of marginalizing poverty. They use it as a way to suggest that people who benefit from certain social uplift programs are engaging in victimization because what they don't want to do is face the reality party.

We actually have lastly, a minimum wage in this country excuse me, that has not been raised since 2009, $7.25 an hour, and the measurement we use to measure poverty and the government is 50 plus years old. It was out of date when it was first born. It says that basically, if you make $13,000 a year, you're not poor. When you use the supplemental evaluation of poverty, that's when you get these numbers of 135 million poverty.

Because you're looking at poverty and low wages, people who are within 400 to 500 economic ruin. When we talk about poverty in that way, we're talking about the worker who has a manufacturing job but sleeps in his car at night in the parking lot, or persons who work in medical facilities that they can't even afford. We're talking about waitresses and waitresses that make $2.13 an hour by law plus tips.

We're talking about people who work every day of their lives and they don't have paid family leave, don't have guaranteed healthcare, they don't even have a guaranteed minimum living wage of $15 an hour, and they watch politicians like Tim Scott vote against them day in and day out right here in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Would it be right to say that you're trying to expand the definition of who is poor in America to many people who might be generally referred to in the media as white working class?

William Barber: Exactly, because that is one of the misdirections. I've been thinking a lot about how extremists and persons who call themselves conservative. I really don't think that's a good title, but certain politicians, whether it be J.D. Vance or Tim Scott, and they will say working class Americans, but what they don't want to deal with is that 52 to 55 million of those working Americans make less than a living wage because the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour.

They are working poor, they are low-wage workers, and any of the best economists in this country will tell you, you have to measure that to talk about poverty, to deal with it, and look at who else would be extremely poor if we did not have certain things supplement them. In this country, the way we do our military spending, you have persons who have been in the military and served this country who then have to go on food stamps. You just think about that for a second. They have to end up on food stamps.

During COVID, we call people essential workers, but then treated them like they were expendable. You're essential, but we're not going to pay your living wage, we're essential, but we don't have a guarantee to healthcare, or we may give you some Medicaid expansion during the high times of COVID, but as soon as it's over, we're taking that back. We may give you some child tax credit and reduce child poverty by 60%, but as soon as we see that there's some ending of COVID, we're taking that back as well. What we're saying is expand understanding of poverty and low wages.

We're saying you have to look at race and poverty. Not either or, but both and. This is not a way to dismiss dealing with the issue of systemic racism and policy racism, but as a moral leader, as a religious leader, or a servant leader, I cannot go to Appalachia and East Kentucky and visit, say, white coal miners in East Kentucky, some of whom I've known who have died since we've been in this movement who have watched politicians allow their coal mines to be taken over by multinational companies and do away with their union rights.

I can't go in those areas and then ignore that and we can't ignore it in America either. When Dr. King, who actually started The Poor People's Campaign because of welfare rights, women came to him and they were Black and they were white, and they were women of all different geographies and races, and they said poverty has to be listed as one of the three evils. We suggest today that systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism have to be seen as five interlocking injustices that require a multiracial movement to address them.

The first thing we have to do is stop lying about the reality of poverty in this country and deal with these facts. Over 135 to 40 million people are poor low-wage. Poverty kills 800 people a day, 295,000 people a year. There are over 87 million people either uninsured or underinsured. There are millions of people every morning who can get up and buy unleaded gas and can't buy unleaded water. These are some of the realities that exist in this country that do not have to exist and we could really be talking about abolishing poverty, not just adjusting poverty.

Brian Lehrer: Reverend Dr. William Barber, our guest author now of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. Listeners, our phones are open at 212-433-WNYC. If you want to call in or text, 212-433-9692. To get explicitly to what we heard at the Republican Convention last night and the clip we played from Senator Tim Scott, I guess you've already indicated that you who came to prominence in North Carolina, and Senator Scott from South Carolina have somewhat different takes on racism in America or the role of government and politics in lifting people out of poverty. Where would you start?

William Barber: There's so much there and Tim Scott is an interesting person. He loves to talk about being raised poor and being Black. He even has talked about how he believes in the ideas of Dr. King and the thing we have to learn, though, where these politics of learned misdirection is to unpack what they're saying. Now for instance, we had heard that they weren't going to be divisive. What he just said was very divisive and not only divisive, it's not true. It's just a lie.

Persons who have needed to be lifted up through certain social uplift programs are not engaged in victimhood. They are trying to survive. We live in a country that gives more corporate welfare to corporations than we ever have given to poor people who merely need some food stamps just so they can survive. I've met white women in Appalachia who work low-wage jobs, who have to sell tacos on the side of the road during the course of the week in order to put a fund together to support one another during the course of the month.

That's not victimhood. Those are people that are victims of policies because there's senators in that same state or Congress people like Tim Scott. On the one hand, tell people to vote hard, but Tim Scott voted against living wages. He voted against raising the minimum wage to a living wage of at least $15 an hour index with inflation which in 1963 at the March on Washington, remember Dr. King and all of the folks gathered there, they wanted to raise the minimum wage of $2 an hour index with inflation, which, if they had the minimum wage would be about $17, $18 an hour today.

What he's saying is such a mismatch of he needs to be fact-checked. The reality is he needs to be fact-checked. The programs that were put in place that help lift people up like food stamps, like public housing, have actually reduced poverty or at least reduced abject poverty in some major ways. When social security was put in place, it reduced white poverty by a large, large percentage. You think about people like Tim Scott, when they see things even like social security, they see that as a social welfare program rather than a nation being responsible.

You talk about Tim Scott, he comes from a state where the governors and the legislature have stood against voting rights and have passed voter suppression laws. Not one time has he even said that he would support restoring the Voting Rights Act that was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. That has allowed more than 1,000 voter suppression cases to be filed and promulgated throughout this country and mainly in the South. He comes from the South, but one-third of all poor people live in the South.

One-third of all poor white people live in the South, and you don't hear him in any way talking about living wages and union rights and fully funding education. He has in South Carolina something called a quarter of shame where students are just suffering. He's talking about cutting public education and not funding public education. Just because he happens to be Black and stands up in an audience and says America is not a racist country.

That's wordsmithing. America as a whole country is not racist, but there is plenty of evidence of policy racism whether you look at it in terms of housing, whether you look at it in terms of in wages inequity, in the way in which environmental injustices impact community. Even beyond that, this is what I want to say to Tim Scott. You get up and say that at an audience to get an applause, but you are also dismissing the millions of white people, the hundreds of thousands of whites in your own state who are the majority of the persons that benefit from what you call welfare.

The majority of the people that benefit from social welfare programs are not Black. They are actually white. The fact of the matter that he would racialize poverty is again, one of those mythologies that we live in, and then would suggest that his mama taught him to not be a victim. I would bet you if they were poor and you go back and really fact-check his history, they benefited from government programs in some way or another to help them make it through life and to get where they are or where he is.

Brian Lehrer: Ken in Wilmington, Delaware, you're on WNYC with Reverend Dr. William Barber. Hello, Ken.

Ken: Yes. Dr. Barber, homage to you and your mission. Let me take myself off speaker, please. Hi, can you hear me better?

Brian Lehrer: We hear fine. Thanks.

Ken: Thank you. I just want to amplify something that Dr. Barber has been amplifying and really honor that as a focus. I only heard a snippet and that's Dr. Barber when you were talking about white poverty. What I see is that you're allowing people to recognize something familiar that binds us together in hope and the political message is in the other direction, which is mischaracterizing something that looks familiar to bind us together in fear. I think the greatest gift to the current political discourse is exactly what you're doing.

It's the healing language that counterbalances the distress language because you don't cure distress with distress. You cure distress with whatever it is that you call it, Dr. Barber. It doesn't matter what I call it, but you're healing distress with the right thing. I want to go off the air, but hear you talk more about A, how do you amplify that message robustly enough so it affects how people vote and B, how can we get you around the country so everybody hears it and I'm really [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Reverend Dr. Barber?

William Barber: He's exactly right. Dr. King said in '65 at the end of the summer of the Montgomery march, the greatest fear of the greedy oligos in this country would be for the masses of Black people to connect with the masses of poor white people and form a voting block that could fundamentally reshift the economic architecture of the country, which is one of the reasons these mythologies are out here. One of the mythologies we talk about in the book is that only Black people want change. You only have commonality if you are of the same color.

Another mythology is that poverty is just a Black problem. All of these are ways of pitting people against one another. We talk about how in the book that oftentimes people have offered people whiteness rather than a cure for the issues of poverty and low wages. J.D. Vance, he did that in his book when he talked about coming from Appalachia, but then he blames the problems of the Hillbilly on their personal morality and not on the public policy that actually continues to extend poverty.

To my brother's point, we're in a place now where the flip side of those horrific numbers, 135 million, 140 million poor low-wage people in this country, 800 dying a day, 295,000 a year. The flip side of that is that poor people now make up 30% of the electorate across this country. Battleground states where the marginal victory for the presidency was within 3%. Poor and low-wage people make up over 43% of the electorate. There is not a battleground state where if just 10% of poor and low-wage people organized around an agenda.

When we had that massive assembly on DC, we didn't come there with just a venting march. The voices you heard were poor and low-wage people from across the country, not people speaking on behalf of them. People of every race, color, creed,and sexuality. They laid out a 17-point agenda to say that if you want these votes there, 87 million poor and low-wage voters in this country, 57 million voting in the last election, 30 million were infrequent voters. We're reaching out to 15 million of them to say, it is time for you to demand to be heard, and you have the power to unite together around an agenda.

If you vote in such a way, you can force our society to talk about you. Right now, you can have presidential debate after presidential debate. One of the reasons we saw the debate, the reason we had as a failure was not the personality of the two candidates or who maybe flubbed the word or who told a lie, was that the commentator didn't ask one question to them about how will you address this reality of poverty, the fourth-leading cause of death? How will you address the issue of living wages? What poor low wage people are doing in the movement are coming together and saying, wait a minute, we hold this massive voting block.

We can unite together. In most places, if just 20% of poor low-wage folk would mobilize around agenda that have voting the last two elections, they could change the outcome and in battleground states, it's much more powerful. We put together this, lastly, the 17-point agenda from ending poverty to fully funding public education, to fighting for living wages in the union and so forth and so on. You can go to poorpeoplescampaign.org and pull it. It's drawing people together, whether they be in the Bronx or whether they be in Appalachia, whether they be in the Delta or whether they be in East Kentucky. People are seeing the power of their coming together in a moral fusion way to bring this together around issues.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you'll succeed at this where others have failed. Don't you think it would be fair to say that class-based movements aiming for racial unity against economic inequality keep being tried and keep failing in this country? They keep ranking down along racial lines largely because too few white people see their interests as aligned with those of any Black Americans. They too often think Black Americans take from them in government spending rather than they all benefit from basic social programs.

William Barber: That's the mythology. That's why we wrote the book. That's why we're going into those areas did not make those same mistakes. That's why you cannot go, for instance, in the south and try to build a union movement and not deal upfront with the racist trichology that will go on. You have to deal with it upfront. You have to be willing to pull people together. One of the great things about this moment is, we're not talking about having to mobilize 100% or 50%. For instance, in Michigan and the last election, the margin victory is about 10,000 votes.

There are over a million poor, low-wage voters. Less than a few percentage points organized could shift in North Carolina. That's how Obama won in 2008. We didn't endorse candidates. We endorsed issues. In Kentucky when poor and low-wage people that we met without in East Kentucky, Harlan County, Hudson County, heard the truth and organized and joined with people out of Louisville, they took out an incumbent Republican Governor who had cut healthcare, who refused to fight for minimum wage increase.

Who fought against their union rights and they won in Kentucky. We didn't endorse a candidate. We endorsed issues. Several of the counties that were considered red counties or whatever you want to call them, you go look at the voting map, they flipped. It is possible in a moral fusion movement, but what you have to do is deal with these mythologies upfront. Then you have to recognize the power that you have is not about mobilizing everybody, but what we do know from the new data that's out, that poor low-wage people, that's $50,000 a year or below in a family of four tend to vote progressive when they vote.

If you look at Georgia, for instance, the last election, if you pull out poor low-wage folk that voted for progressive ideas, you have a different outcome in Georgia, both in the Senate and in the presidential race. If you look at other places where you saw Trump, you look at it in Pennsylvania, pull out poor and low wage vote, but didn't recognize that. For instance, in Pennsylvania, the margin victory was about 40,000 but some two million, almost two million poor and low wage infrequent voters didn't even vote. In Wisconsin, the margin victory was about 20,000, but over a million poor and low wage voters did not even vote.

This is the largest potential swing vote in the country. We know the mistakes of the past, we don't have to keep making them. One of the things that Linda Lingle has said is that anybody that's serious about moving progressive politics in this country that does not take seriously the power and potential power of poor and low wage voters and talk to them and reach out to them in a diverse way, is committing a political suicide, if you will.

Brian Lehrer: Susan on Staten Island, you're on WNYC with Reverend Dr. William Barber author now of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Hi. Thank you, Brian. Dr. Barber, it's an honor to speak with you. I would like to suggest a change in focus. I think instead of saying that we're subsidizing the low wage of the worker, we should say that we're subsidizing the excess profits of the owners of these companies that pay such low wages.

William Barber: Exactly. We do that in all of our reports. We did a piece called The Souls of Poor Folk. In our analysis what we looked at is that actually is even worse than you just stated. The corporate people actually utilize the subsidies that are sometimes provided for poor and low-wage working people as a way of not having to pay it themselves so that they can gain more profits. What we are saying in this movement is when you can give $2 trillion of tax cuts to Corporate America, but then you cannot ensure that 55 million people make a minimum living wage, then that is a form of corporate greed and corporate welfare and a subsidy that is in fact wrong because it's going in the wrong direction.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in because I want to get to one other thing and we're going to run out of time soon.

William Barber: All right.

Brian Lehrer: You're a Protestant minister. I want to play a clip of Donald Trump's new running mate, J. D. Vance. This is from the old anti-Trump, J. D. Vance when he was on the show in 2016 for his book called Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. As you know, he came from white poverty, referred to it earlier in a white evangelical culture and community. He had this take about that at the time.

1. D. Vance: What I worry about is that as a lot of these folks are no longer going to church and no longer thinking about the ways that they can make their own lives and make their own families better that a lot of these other forces have moved in. Where the church could be in some ways counteracting it, where it could be providing support to folks who are addicted to folks in broken families. It is doing that some of the time, but I think that it's not doing it nearly as much as it used to. Though I don't think the problems in the white working class are by any means, all the church's fault, I do think the church could be doing more to reverse them.

Brian Lehrer: You conclude it's hardly surprising that into this vacuum steps Donald Trump. What does the Trump phenomenon have to do with all that?

1. D. Vance: In some ways, I think Trump provides that sense of community that many in the white working class would have if they actually went to church. If you think about a Donald Trump rally, it's basically a lot of extraordinarily loud, extraordinarily raucous preaching, and it makes you feel good and you get to cheer along with the crowd at a very fundamental social level.

I don't think it's all that different from a really big mega-church sermon. I think what's different ultimately is the substance of Trump's message is a problem. Frankly, I think if folks went to church a little bit more, they may not be as excited or as attracted to the social experience that Trump provides.

Brian Lehrer: J. D. Vance here in 2016. Reverend Dr. Barber in our last minute, I don't know what he would say about any of that today, but I wonder what you were thinking listening to that clip.

William Barber: That it would take about an hour to unpack all of the untruths and misleading things that he just said. One thing can be said is evidently he went to that rally and got converted into the very thing that he criticized. That's problematic. It's sad to compare Trump rally to church, but then to say that the problem of people in Appalachia, is that they don't go to church. The highest number of people are in the Bible Belt. My co-author, co-editor, Jonathan Hargrove, came out of the very places he's talking about Appalachia. He was raised in the church. He knows the lies that people are even told in certain kind of church structures where they were offered whiteness.

They were offered blame. They were offered fear. The fact of the matter is that's been part of the problem. The southern strategy for instance, was deeply rooted in a false theology that taught division. The church of Jesus Christ actually says the labor is worth as high. I'm quoting from the founder now. I'm not for J. D. Vance or Trump, but what the scriptures say. The church of Jesus Christ is supposed to teach good news to the poor. You're supposed to stand up to injustice. You're supposed to challenge nations and say that when you don't care for the least of these, you are violating God himself or God's self.

Isaiah 10 in the Bible says, "Woe into those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights." The church is not supposed to measure the temperature of the room but change the temperature of the room. The church is supposed to be on the forefront of social justice and saying that healthcare should be a human right because Jesus healed everybody he met and never charged a copay. He never made healing a matter of what your job was. He always made sure that He challenged the injustices of the system. J. D. Vance to suggest that the problem of people in Appalachia, their poverty is because they don't go to church. They're lazy. He's saying basically to the so-called corporate world.

I came out of this and we don't know how much help he actually received to come out. Now that I'm out, put me as the face of talking against programs, put me at the forefront of the face for tax cuts for the wealthy. Make me the face of trickle-down economics. Make me the face of criticizing poor people and blaming them. Poor people and low-wage people don't need to be blamed. They're the most moral and strong people in this country who get up every day, work hard every day for less than living wage, work hard every day in a system that oftentimes is pitted against them. What they need is not somebody to tell them they're immoral, they need some people that will challenge the immorality of the system.

Let me point out last immorality. Every Congress person, including Vance when he went into the Senate, he got free healthcare. He got top-dollar wages. Why is it that these persons will get elected and then they don't want their constituents to have the same thing they have just because they got elected? That is utter ridiculousness and so to bring Jesus, I'm glad when people bring Jesus into the conversation. Actually, they bring religion into the conversation because then we can talk about it from this standpoint.

How is it that you can put your hand on the Bible and be sworn into office and then not know that there are more than 2,000 scriptures in the Bible that speak to how we should treat the poor and the least of these as a matter of public policy, and not just scorning people and suggesting that their poverty is their fault? Poverty in this country is not because of personal immorality. It's because of public policy. We can change it, we can abolish it, we can fix it, but we've got to organize around it and challenge the very kind of language that you've heard this morning from Vance and from Scott.

Brian Lehrer: Reverend Dr. William Barber, his new book, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. Thank you so much.

William Barber: Thank you so much. Take care now.

 

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