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

By William J. Barber II. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024. 288 pages. $22.99/hardcover; $22.09/eBook.

The issue of white poverty is a critical one for our nation, says William J. Barber in his latest book. Until we can change the dominant narrative that automatically conflates poverty with race, until we can name the reality that there are 40 million more white people in poverty than there are Black people, until we can find ways for poor people to unite around their human and economic needs, poverty will be an ever-growing cancer in our midst, and attempts to improve the lives of struggling Black people will founder.

If our nation’s main problem is race, then two possible approaches—from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum—are blaming People of Color or designing race-informed policies to address past and present discrimination. However, if our main problem is poverty, wherever and in whomever it may be found, then the solutions must go deeper. They have to address the impoverishment of rural communities and Rust Belt cities—including all their inhabitants—that drives unemployment, housing insecurity, and hopelessness: creating a breeding ground for drug addiction and attraction to right-wing populist ideologies among poor white people.

Although a Black preacher in the civil rights tradition may not seem like an obvious author for a book on white poverty, Barber turns out to be a powerful advocate. A moment’s reflection will remind us that this was the direction Martin Luther King Jr. was taking at the time of his assassination, a new emphasis that made some people deeply uneasy. Barber revived MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign in 2018, picking up his unfinished work to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country; it now has groups in around 40 states.

Barber tells this story more fully in an earlier book, The Third Reconstruction. In White Poverty, he revisits the Moral Mondays movement he led in North Carolina in 2013. Every Monday, an interfaith and interracial group would gather at the capitol to demand that the state budget be a moral document. He tells of the unsettled response of the powerbrokers: “Where did they get all these white people?” Politicians had learned how to deal with and neutralize a Black minority; a coalition of Black and white people demanding justice together was something altogether different.

Barber suggests that poor people, the segment of the population that is least likely to vote, could be a powerful bloc. Though they rarely hear any politicians promise to address the issues that are constricting their lives and are disproportionately affected by barriers to voting, whether by design to limit the Black vote or by general issues of access to transportation and work-hour inflexibility, they are potential swing voters, and they can be mobilized. He notes that in 2016 Trump won every income bracket above $50,000 by one to four points but lost every bracket below $50,000 by more than nine points. In the Kentucky governor’s race of 2019, a Democrat won in an upset, partly through the mobilizing work of groups like the Kentucky Poor People’s Campaign in poor, rural traditionally “red” counties. In Florida, a state that Trump won in 2020, a $15 minimum wage referendum got more votes than either he or Biden did.

I was particularly struck by two points that Barber makes. While the terrible damage of racism must be confronted and rooted out, he calls us back to its original purpose: racial identity was invented back in our nation’s colonial times to divide poor people from each other. Thus, in its largest sense, being truly antiracist calls us to the task of revisiting that history and affirming the shared rights and needs of poor people, regardless of race.

He also notes that Black people have always had the church to help develop spiritual and cultural resources to resist both racism and poverty. The sermons and speeches that poor white people hear, in contrast, are often twisted to justify the very social order that is making their lives unlivable. In an epilogue, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove describes a meeting with an elder of the Mississippi Civil Rights era who wept when he reflected on poor white Mississippians: “We had Dr. King and Malcolm. We had Medgar Evers and Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer. . . . But those poor white folk—they ain’t never had a champion.”

They now have one in William Barber. Though he doesn’t offer an easy prescription for counteracting the corrosive messaging of the far-right that they are being offered as a substitute for real policies that could improve their lives, he lays a solid foundation for that work. I commend the book to all Friends.

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Pamela Haines is a member of Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting. Author of Money and Soul, her newest titles are Tending Sacred Ground: Respectful Parenting; The Promise of Right Relationship; and a third volume of poetry, Tending the Web: Poems of Connection. Her blog and podcast can be found at pamelahaines.substack.com.