I wrote White Poverty, with my dear friend Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, to unpack the mythology around poverty. The book says, We have a problem. Throughout our country—Houston, DC, Detroit, New York—we have a problem. It’s not just a Black problem, and it cannot be marginalized anymore. We can’t blame the poor. 

We have people who are poor, and it is not their fault that they’re poor. They work hard every day. In one state we found that a person has to work 106 hours a week at a minimum wage job before affording rent on a basic two-bedroom apartment. So it’s not immorality, and it’s not laziness. 

I wrote this book as a Black man, as an African American, who, by the way, is of Tuscarora and White ancestry as well. But I wrote it as a Black man to highlight the issue of poverty through the many White eyes that I have met, for example, from Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia. Too often when the conversation about poverty happens, it is automatically marginalized as though it’s a particular people’s problem rather than an American problem. 

More than 40% of America’s adult population and 50% of our children are living in poverty and low wealth. We had a whole season of presidential debates, but not one debate was focused on what 40% of the people are wrestling with. 

Politicians say the economy is great. The state of our union is great. But 295,000 people die from poverty every year. When 9 people died from vaping, we had congressional hearings and a White House policy gathering. 

Not one president has called a summit to address the crisis, the emergency, of poverty. Poverty is now the fourth leading cause of death and has killed more people than respiratory and many other diseases. 

When we had 500 people dying a day from COVID-19, we were in an “epidemic.” But when hundreds of people are dying a day from poverty, it’s not talked about in our politics. It’s not discussed in our debates.  

We’re in a position now where several pieces of legislation could fundamentally shift poverty. If we passed living wages, universal health care, an expanded child income tax credit, and earned income tax credit—which, by the way, Ronald Reagan supported—if we did those things, we could basically abolish poverty. My book White Poverty attempts to lift the voices that often aren’t heard—those who call attention to this emergency and refuse to engage in the marginalization that too often happens. This marginalization is indeed by design. 

How can this lack of action be explained? We must consider what has been the greatest fear of racist and greedy oligarchs and others in this country. After the Civil War, when poor and low-wage Black people came together with poor Whites and figured out that the Civil War had been fought to benefit wealthy Southern landowners, together they changed the South. Poor Whites united with former slaves, and they used a strategy that was called Fusionism to form coalitions in places like North Carolina. Together, they rewrote state constitutions. They helped bring the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments into existence by whom they put in office.  

But the response to that was a reactionary movement. The movement claimed to be one of faith, but the real message was, We need to redeem America by putting it back in the hands of racism. 

Throughout our history, reactionary forces have fought change militarily and with violence. They did it by stacking the Supreme Court. They did it by putting people in the presidency who didn’t win the popular vote but were instead elected through the Electoral College. And they overturned progress because they could not handle Black and White folk working together. 

In 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Selma to Montgomery march, it was diverse. King never described voting rights as being just a Black issue. The first activist killed was Black, Jimmie Lee Jackson. But two Whites were also killed, James Reeb, who was a Washington, DC, Unitarian preacher, and Viola Liuzzo, who was from Detroit. When protestors finally marched—Jewish, Muslim, Christian Catholic, White, Black—all came together. And when King stood on the steps of the Alabama Statehouse and spoke, knowing that he might get shot, I think he gave his greatest speech. 

In that speech, he went back to the first reconstruction. Using his own words, he talked about the fusion coalitions. And he said the greatest fear of the Southern aristocracy and oligarchy is for the masses of Negroes and the masses of poor Whites to come together and form a new voting bloc that could fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the country.  

Now what was the response to this? The Southern Strategy, which convinced many poor Whites to join the Republican Party. Nixon’s Southern Strategy said, in essence, We must keep the fusion coalition from ever happening, we must engage in positive polarization, and if we get caught, we gonna lie. 

The goal was to create a new racist revolution out of the South by intentionally dividing White and Black people. The White poor were told that their problems existed because all of the poor Black people who were getting all this free stuff. The programs of the war on poverty were indeed also helping the White people in Appalachia and in Alabama, but the strategic racial division worked to some degree.  

White Poverty is an attempt to expose the myths of poverty. The truth is, the only way to address this is by reinvigorating the moral fusion coalition. Right now, in America, poor and low-wealth people represent 85 million votes. Of those voters, 50 million voted in the 2020 election, and 35 million didn’t vote. 

But for every state in the South, if more poor and low-wage voters set out to vote, they could change every election. That’s why I wrote the book. To say we have to face the emergency of poverty, but we’ve got to face it as one people. That is the promise of the fusion coalition today. 

William J. Barber II is president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and a Charles F. Kettering Foundation senior fellow. 

From Many, We is a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy. Queries may be directed to fmw@kettering.org.