Broken Promises and Open Hostility: Organizing Poor Whites in America
By Rev. Sarah Monroe
And we in
poor white communities rarely have the language to articulate our own pain and our own suffering. We have “don’t tread on me” slogans and we have the “rebel” confederate flag and we have pent up rage and anger, but we don’t generally have a strong analysis of why we are poor or why we are victims of things like police violence.
For so long, we have bought the lie of white supremacy, for so long we have believed that if we just worked hard enough, we would make it. We have, in the words of Will Campbell (one of the few veterans of the civil rights movement who did go back and organize among his own people — poor white Southerners) the “freedom to flounder, to drift, to wander westward in a frustrating search of what had been promised but never delivered — a secure life in a land of plenty.”
The black community and other communities of color know exactly what they are up against. They have centuries of, not just suffering, but of organizing, of analysis, of resistance. Slavery and genocide, in which even poor whites were complicit, left no question in anyone’s mind as to what non-white people were up against. Those of us who fled Europe often came from resistance movements there, but we failed to create a coherent resistance in the promised New World for precisely that reason: because we were made promises and we believed them. We did the dirty work for empire and expected a reward we rarely received.
Instead, we are left puzzled in a world that is increasingly poor, increasingly bereft of basic resources, increasingly victimized by state violence. While the white middle class still precariously live the dream, even their numbers are shrinking and the promises of American capitalism and greed are exposed as a lie.
Poor whites are left isolated, told over and over that their suffering or poverty or death is their own fault. Pundits — including their better-off neighbors — say what they have always said in America about poor people: they should just die. Homeless camps are spilling over every riverbank, the prisons are so full they can’t fill the demand of the justice system, addiction stalks every poor community. An aging white woman told me recently, as we stood at the deathbed of her son;
“No one cares if people are dying, unless they are middle class white people.”
The root of ignoring poor white people comes from the same source. White supremacy — the air we breathe as white people — teaches that white people are superior, and is pervasive even in liberal ideology. Which means that poor whites are unforgivable. Whites who don’t “make it” fundamentally challenge the ideology that built this country.
I wonder if the vast number of poor people in the United States might find a way to unite, as poor people across race share experiences of prison and poverty and violence and terror. I wonder if poor white communities can learn how to organize.
It is true we have bought the lie of white supremacy — even in our poverty, clinging to a hope that our lives really do matter in a system that beats us down while continuing to promise us uplift if only we are smart enough, work hard enough, take enough personal responsibility. It is important to note:
white supremacy is not simply an ideology, it is a material, economic policy that decides who has access to the means of life, and poor white people rarely make the cut.
In the case of Noble’s death, Black Lives Matter activists showed up in protest at the Fresno Police Department, not only for people of color shot in the region and country, but for the poor white kid as well.
(we know that wont happen)
opcorn2:
