White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy

The Rev. William J. Barber II is one of the nation’s foremost civil rights and anti-poverty leaders. Although African American, he has always insisted on a multiracial agenda in his activism.

Now, in White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, the charismatic preacher focuses primarily on poor whites. These include people trapped in low wage jobs, as well as those with disabilities who have slipped through the government’s threadbare social safety net.

“This is a book by a Black man about white poverty in America,” he explains in the Preface. “I want America to face white poverty because I know that change is possible, and I maintain this hope.”

Despite the conventional wisdom, he writes, the “basic fact of American inequality remains hidden in plain sight: white people are by the far the largest racial demographic among America’s poor. . . . There are more than twice as many poor white people as there are poor Black people in this nation.”

In researching the book, Barber traveled the country widely, meeting with people in deep economic and physical stress—some people of color but mostly white—offering them what hope he could, at the same time drawing on their resilience. The ambitious itinerary took him from rural, Eastern North Carolina to San Francisco’s Tenderloin district; to Texas; to Binghamton, N.Y.; to an encampment outside Seattle; and to the mountains of Appalachian West Virginia. There, he met with scores of struggling but determined people.

Barber undertook this arduous travel even though he walks with two canes, due to the debilitating form of arthritis “ankylosing spondylitis,” which struck the former college football player in his 30s, causing his spine to bend forward at his shoulders.

Mostly, however, Barber undertook this journey because he wanted to put human faces on the damning economic and social data he and his co-author and longtime colleague, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who is white, collected and aggregated.

“The history of America, like the history of the world,” Barber writes, “is filled with stories of powerful people who’ve stolen from the poor and used their power to pit poor people against one another so the masses would not rise up against them.”

Federal Reconstruction following the Civil War, he recounts, was a particularly hopeful period for the people of both races in the South. In addition to the liberation of all African Americans, formerly enslaved men were enfranchised. For their part, poor whites who were subsistence farmers no longer had to compete with enslaved laborers.

In the dozen years of Reconstruction (and the Populist/fusion era that followed), there were efforts to unite poor Blacks and whites in the region in a viable, two-party political system based on their shared economic interest.

But Barber writes, the Reconstruction experiment “faced increasingly powerful and immoral opposition. Many former Confederates saw Black citizenship and interracial alliances—these fusion coalitions—as inherently illegitimate, not to mention morally repugnant. They organized the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize white people who they viewed as race traitors. They attacked Black leaders.”

Ultimately, poor Blacks and whites were again locked into lives of poverty, the former by the re-enslaving convict labor system, and both races by sharecropping, which made them completely dependent on wealthier whites for survival.

Barber calls this period of history the “First Reconstruction.” The “Second Reconstruction,” he says, was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. There were monumental gains, to be sure.

But to a great degree, the political impact of that effort was, like the first, undermined by white supremacy. When Southern Democratic parties were forced by activists to re-enfranchise Black voters, racist whites fled to the Republican Party, becoming the mainstay of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” The result of that political transformation is evident today.

“As long as poor white people continued to believe that protest is for Black people only,” Barber writes, “they remain isolated and susceptible to politicians who blame someone of a different race who is more or less in the same predicament as they are.”

Now Barber is calling for a “Third Reconstruction,” based on a political coalition of the poor and economically disadvantaged. But again, he warns against racism used by the modern white ruling class to prevent this latest experiment to succeed:

“White supremacy is as poisonous to white people as it is to people of color. It dehumanizes the people it claims to elevate; it uses the very people it claims to champion.”

Barber’s thesis would come as no surprise to previous generations of white, Southern progressives, like W. J. Cash, who, in his 1941 classic, The Mind of the South, wrote about “the peculiar attitude of contempt with which upper class white men regarded the mill worker.” Bosses told their white workers that they should avoid biracial unions; they were somehow advantaged because “they represented a uniquely pure and superior race.”

Or as President Lyndon Baines Johnson observed decades later: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

Despite the odds—and history—Barber remains hopeful.

“I take on white poverty as a declaration that Black people may have problems,” he writes, “but we are not the problem. Other people face the same struggles we do. It doesn’t make any sense to try to fight this battle on our own.”

One small caveat: For all its obvious value as an effective organizing tool, given its constituency, White Poverty’s widespread use may await a more affordable paperback edition.