A Prophet for the Poor

During the last salvo of the bloody West Virginia coal wars, fought through the 1910s and early 1920s, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin, having been paid handsomely by the mining companies, ordered his men to fly biplanes over striking Black and white miners and drop bombs filled with gunpowder and metal bolts on their heads. A pilot executing that order may have looked down before releasing his deadly cargo and spotted in the fray a young Black miner who, as a Holiness preacher, may very well have been praying. That miner survived the Battle of Blair Mountain and went on to have a daughter, who would later marry a navy man who had returned home from World War II only to find Jim Crow waiting for him. The couple joined the civil rights movement and, when they had children of their own, introduced them to the struggle. One of those children, William J. Barber II, born in the early 1960s, grew up to become the nation’s most prophetic voice on behalf of the American poor. You might say that the fight was in his blood.

Reverend Barber wears many hats. He is the president of Repairers of the Breach and cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign, both nationwide anti-poverty organizations, and the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. (I have participated in events with the Poor People’s Campaign and have promoted its work.) But in his latest book, White Poverty, Barber is simply a “watchman,” one who must “cry aloud, spare not,” as the prophet Isaiah exhorted. “I’ve written this book to ask America to look its poor—all its poor—in the face,” Barber writes.

That seems to be the perennial burden of the poverty writer: turning the heads of the comfortable toward all the ragged desperation just outside their gates. (“Here is a great mass of people,” Michael Harrington wrote in The Other America (1962), “yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them.”) Someone’s got to do it. Many politicians not only ignore the poor but, on the advice of their consultants, go out of their way to avoid saying the word “poverty” altogether. Elected officials tend to be rich—many members of Congress are millionaires—but pastors generally are not. Yet members of the cloth have also largely kept silent about American deprivation. “I am bothered,” Barber writes, “by people who say so much about what God says so little about, and so little about what God says so much about—especially the plight of the poor and rejected in society.”

The latest government statistics estimate that between 11.5 and 12.4 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2022, depending on the measure. That amounts to between 37.9 and 40.9 million people, or roughly the population of California. Still, Barber considers these counts too low. In 2022 a family of four was considered poor if they made less than $29,679 that year, but a 2023 Gallup poll found that most Americans believe such a family needs at least $85,000 to get by.

One can make the poverty problem seem smaller than it is by ignoring all those Americans who are poor in many ways except officially: people who aren’t hard up enough to qualify for public housing but will never be able to afford a mortgage; those who aren’t poor enough to receive Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance either.¹ Barber prefers a more expansive definition of poverty, one that considers someone to be poor if a $400 emergency would prevent them from covering their basic monthly necessities. Using that metric, he estimates that in a country of 337 million people, an astonishing 140 million are poor or low-income.

Most experts would endorse Barber’s position that the poverty line is drawn too low but would stop well short of his claim that “nearly half” of the country is poor. But Barber’s argument isn’t just statistical; it stems from what he has seen. He has met people living out of their cars while earning wages that place them squarely above the poverty line. He has noticed empty dog food cans in the kitchen of a family with young children but no dog.

As for the statistics, there is solid evidence that a lot of hardship is endured above the official poverty line. One study found that more than 20 percent of households with incomes 200 percent above the poverty threshold experience food insecurity. Medicaid covers roughly 40 percent of all births in America. In February and March of this year, the Census estimated that a quarter of renting households making between $50,000 and $74,999 a year would likely face eviction in the next two months. Findings like these help us understand why data that overlook millions of families floating uneasily between official poverty and actual security make Barber so angry.

The official poverty numbers “constitute a damn lie,” he writes. This is one reason Barber chose to focus on white poverty in his new book. Because if you believe that poverty is a minor problem, that it is primarily a Black problem, an immigrant problem, a southern problem, a Democratic city problem—a them problem—then it’s not a stretch to believe that the poor have only themselves to blame for their miseries.

A long line of Black intellectuals has taken up the subject of white poverty. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass wrote about the ridicule that poor, non-slaveholding whites faced before the Civil War, calling them “the laughing stock even of slaves themselves.” W.E.B. Du Bois famously described how white laborers were compensated for their meager pay with a “public and psychological wage.” Langston Hughes included “the poor white, fooled and pushed apart” in his poems, as did Toni Morrison in her novels. Barber considers white poverty as part of his project of building a mass movement for economic justice, one that rejects the notion that activism and civil disobedience “are only for Black people.” Like the Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox or Du Bois (especially in his 1935 masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America), Barber believes that racism drives a wedge between poor white and poor Black people, whose needs and interests are in fact deeply aligned.

Most poor people in America are white, of course, though a larger proportion of Black and Hispanic Americans live in poverty. Yet many white people have a difficult time admitting they are or have been poor. On multiple occasions white people have told me that growing up they “were poor but didn’t know it.” I always find this slightly amusing, since no Black or Hispanic person has ever said such a thing to me. When they were poor, they knew it. Black and Hispanic poverty can be harsher than white poverty, but I also believe that white people sense that acknowledging their poverty means on some level denying their whiteness. “It is understood,” Frantz Fanon once quipped, “that one is white above a certain financial level.”

The experience of surviving economic hardship provides, in Barber’s view, the primary basis of solidarity among the poor. “If you can’t pay your light bill,” he jokes, “we’re all Black in the dark.” But then why do so many poor white Americans continue to support politicians who refuse to expand Medicaid, strengthen unions, invest in public education, or fund affordable housing? To remain faithful to economic elites while appealing to a broad electorate, the right advances policies that enrich corporations and the upper class while at the same time developing or amplifying cultural narratives that stoke social division.² Tax cuts for the rich; abortion restrictions for the rest. And perhaps nothing has been more effective, more intoxicating, and more ruinous in this effort than racism.

In his now classic book Why Americans Hate Welfare (1999), the political scientist Martin Gilens compiles an impressive array of data showing that, contrary to popular opinion, Americans generally support “almost every aspect of the welfare state.” However, that support falters when the public mistakenly assumes that most recipients of government aid are Black. This is why fewer Americans supported the Affordable Care Act when it was referred to as Obamacare. It’s why a study published last year found that merely asking people to think about immigration made them less likely to support redistributive policies and charitable giving. Whether they have bought into a kind of zero-sum thinking whereby nonwhite gains require white losses, or they have assumed that nonwhite people are lazy and a drain on society, many poor white Americans continue to endorse policy agendas that directly harm them.³

Yet throughout his life Barber has witnessed these old, tired schemes break down. Once, during a meeting with Kentucky miners, Barber learned about politicians who came to town “talking about how gay people were supposedly threatening their values” while empowering multinational corporations to conduct mountaintop mining without any consideration for the miners’ well-being or environment. “These assholes who told us our [gay] kids were going to destroy the community have handed it over to companies that are willing to blow up the mountains,” a miner told the reverend. Another added: “They’ve been playing us against one another.” In these moments Barber glimpses a possible path forward. Recognizing that “white folks are potentially the single largest base for a movement of poor people,” he seeks what so many before him have sought: a way to unite poor and working-class people across racial and political divides.

Barber plumbs “the evidence of white poverty’s violence so we can see through the cracks in a broken system” and push back against forces that undermine “political coalitions across lines of race and class.” This entails overcoming resistance from both the right and the left. If the right sows division through the culture wars, the left engages in a politics of grievance that emphasizes our differences at the expense of recognizing our shared struggle. Barber reserves his harshest criticism for elites who resist reaching across social divides because their authority (and often their careers) is rooted in representing a narrow set of issues. For the rest of us, he offers a gentle warning against identity politics that pull us inward.

One can find plenty of people railing against identity politics in the op-ed pages these days, but they usually sound like grumpy professors lecturing to undergrads. Barber seems to issue his argument from a folding chair in a church basement after a potluck. “No one ever wins a competition of trying to prove that their pain hurts worse than someone else’s,” he writes. “There is a leveling effect to the graveyard, where all who’ve been beaten up by this world’s evils are equally dead.” This isn’t the censorious “seminar-room mode of activism” common in academia.⁴ It’s the warmhearted work of community organizing, the stuff of sitting on porches, getting arrested for demanding health insurance for the poor, and listening to an older woman tell West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, after he refused to support a higher minimum wage, “I knew your momma.”

Mass movements, by definition, must include people who don’t see eye to eye on everything. When we picture the kinds of folks who could join us under such a big tent, our minds often fly to the extremes, causing us to recoil at the thought of shaking hands with those types. But Barber isn’t interested in locking arms with January 6 rioters any more than Dr. King was with Bull Connor—though, it should be said, crazier things have happened. During the Great Depression, Black communists were joined by ex-Klansmen in their fight for political and economic reform.⁵ And Barber once found himself riding in the back of a truck with a Confederate flag bumper sticker when he was campaigning with white Republicans to reopen a rural hospital. Barber doesn’t seek compromise with violent fringe groups on the right, but neither does he have use for political purity, where working with someone on a specific issue requires aligning on all others as well. As the old refrain goes, in politics there are no permanent enemies and no permanent allies—only permanent interests.

The history of poor and working-class struggle in America has been a history of white against Black, citizen against immigrant, urban against rural—a history of fighting over scraps. But there have been powerful moments when people overcame these divisions in the interest of class solidarity. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a committee of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that formed in 1935 and operated as an independent organization from late 1938 to 1955, created a campaign around the mantra “Black and white, unite and fight.” Unlike the overtly racist AFL, the CIO asked its members to pledge to “never discriminate against a fellow worker on account of creed, color, or nationality.” During a 1935 CIO union drive, a white steelworker urged his coworkers to “forget that the man working beside you is” white, Black, or Jewish. “[He] is a working man like yourself and being exploited by the ‘boss’ in the name of racial and religious prejudice.”

The CIO rank and file understood that their fight was not with fellow workers belonging to different racial groups or political parties but with corporate elites pulling the strings. If this was accomplished nearly a hundred years ago, when racism was much more brazen, it surely can be accomplished today, as the multiracial organizing efforts that gave rise to the Fight for $15 have shown. “It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the power of the old myths,” Barber writes. “But when we listen closely to the songs of America, fusion is all around us.” Those songs can be difficult to hear these days, with story after story about how divided we have become. But might all the talk of division itself divide? And might our divisions, as they deepen, also deepen our commitment to overcome them?

Our political news and commentaries are offered by people who, I suspect, haven’t spent much time in the North Carolina High Country. Barber looks around and doesn’t only see a polarized nation. Truth be told, neither do many other community organizers with whom I’ve met over the years, people who have worn out their shoes hustling for ballot measures and collecting signatures. Those agents of action recognize that we are far less divided in the bleachers of a Friday night football game or the post office line than we are on social media or political talk shows. And they recognize, too, that many of our beliefs are not as intractable as they first seem.

Social science is beginning to affirm what old-school organizers have long intuited: that face-to-face conversations can soften prejudices and change people’s attitudes about welfare policies. A respected study published in the American Journal of Political Science reported the results of a 2019 experiment that sought to increase support for enrolling unauthorized immigrants in Medicaid. Canvassers knocked on doors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. During some visits, they shared a story that elevated the perspectives of unauthorized immigrants; during others, they had a brief conversation about an unrelated topic. Four months after the study, voters exposed to the viewpoints of unauthorized immigrants were far likelier to voice support for a plan to include those immigrants in government health care programs. We don’t need to subject ourselves to extensive training to have effective conversations across racial or political divides. But we do need to find the courage to leave the comfort of our neighborhood and media bubbles. This is why the community organizer George Goehl calls one-on-one conversations “maybe the most fundamental organizing of all.”

Barber doesn’t see red and blue counties so much as unorganized ones, “where the largest bloc of voters isn’t Republican or Democrat, but rather poor people who often do not vote.” In the last two presidential elections, over 60 percent of nonvoters lived in households making less than $50,000 a year, but most people in that income bracket who did vote went for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. This is why Barber thinks that poor people are the new swing voters, “the sleeping giant that, if awakened, could decide the future of the nation.” After all, the poor have the most to gain from policies that establish a living wage, expand affordable housing, and promote workers’ rights.

Will poor Americans come out in force to support the Harris–Walz ticket? Harris has given them some reasons to. In a major speech in August, she argued that “no child should have to grow up in poverty,” promising to address the nation’s housing shortage with the construction of three million new homes by the end of her first term and to restore and expand the extended child tax credit enacted temporarily in 2021, an initiative that cut child poverty nearly in half that year.⁶ These policies would bring much-needed relief to millions of struggling families. Yet political quiescence among poor and working-class Americans has long vexed Democratic candidates. When John F. Kennedy visited West Virginia during his presidential campaign, he encountered, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “the incredible pauperization of the mountain people” but “with hardly a sound of protest.” Today voter suppression, a widespread sense of powerlessness from years of being held down, and the decline of unions have combined to undercut the political power of the American poor.

Reverend Barber wants to change that. In exploited, left-behind communities where others too often see only desperation and misery, Barber sees power. Where others see division, Barber sees the potential for unity. And where others descend into hopelessness, Barber expresses a prophetic imagination. “It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order,” the theologian Walter Brueggemann has written. It’s what a watchman does.