The triple threat Venn Diagram bubbles of race, class, and social identity have conspired to define us as a nation since our founding. As we sit on the eve of our Bisesquicentennial in 2026, Americans are more divided and disturbed than ever before. Who are we? What have we become? Is this the legacy we really want to leave behind for our children? The much discussed (but never fully owned) “Project 2025” has planted seeds and borne fruit in the first quarter of this year. Big government is being dismantled, full departments removed, hundreds of federal employees rendered irrelevant, all for the sake of efficiency.
It’s the myth that poverty has been the beast of burden primarily for people of color that stands as the thesis of Reverend Dr. William J. Barber III’s remarkable 2024 book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. His subtitle might seem audacious at first glance, as if he can solve the social consequences of poverty once the long-held beliefs that its provenance rests in the hands of the serving class. Surprisingly, Barber doesn’t cite one of the more important poverty-related scriptures as one of his guiding principles. While some might read “The poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11) as surrendering to the purpose and inevitability of a lower class, and by default people of color, it actually serves as a clarion call for activists to do something for people in need. We will always have opportunities to alleviate poverty’s conditions. Its status may transform and mutate over generations, but those suffering the spiritually empty consequences of poverty (empty cupboard and cold heart) will always have their needs.
Barber, a sixty-one year old Protestant African-American Pastor, comes to this thesis with impressive bona fides. He’s a social activist, professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He is the president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He notes:
“…[P]overty is… everywhere. And while it disproportionately weighs on Black and brown people…white people are by far the largest demographic among America’s poor.”
Barber immediately latches onto “the culture of poverty,” the notion that those who find themselves in destitute straits might just immediately surrender to its inevitability. For every Ronald Reagan originated notion of an African-American “Welfare Queen” (1988) or Barry Goldwater excoriating linking the welfare state to the rise in crime in the mid-1960s, there was the notion of “White Trash.” Think of Erskine Caldwell’s tawdry 1932 novel Tobacco Road or John Steinbeck’s more compassionate and masterful 1939 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. Near the end of his preface, Barber is very clear about why he is writing about white poverty:
“I take on white poverty as a declaration that Black people may have problems, but we are not the problem.”
For Barber, “whiteness” is a false identity. Why are some many people our nation purports to elevate still carrying the burden of poverty? For Barber, it’s a matter of what he calls “moral fusion,” not a question of right or left wing, but rather simply right or wrong. Whether it’s the North Carolina mountain folk of Mitchell County, an all-white chapter of the NAACP formed in 2013 in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, or Eastern Kentucky coal miners singing “Which Side Are You On?,” the common link is visibility. For Barber, we “…have been pitted against one another by politicians and billionaires who depend on the poorest among us not being seen.”
Barber draws from the sublime grace of African American poet Langston Hughes’s 1935 classic “Let America Be America Again,” in which the poet invokes himself as “…the poor white, fooled and pushed apart…the Negro bearing slavery’s scars…the immigrant clutching the hope I seek…” It’s Barber’s mission here (successfully reached) to emphasize that this search to identify and reckon with poverty is a shared experience. Ninety years later, a variation of Hughes’s title takes on a twisted 180 degrees different in the threatening chant of “Make America Great Again.”
White Poverty offers some fascinating delineations of the specific myths we need to abolish. Chapter 3, “Pale Skin Is A Shared Interest,” discusses the unfortunate role religion played in providing convenient definitions of race: “The plantation system created white people to separate them from the Black and Native…force-fed them a thousand stories…why being white was superior…” Barber reminds the reader that white supremacy is as poisonous to white people as it is to people of color. It’s unavoidable to not see contemporary reflections of our 2025 political landscape when we read of southern white supremacy candidates of the 1870s promising to “take back” their country.
We can only understand our current condition if we remind ourselves of the past. That’s obvious. Barber reminds us of Michael Harrington’s landmark 1962 study on poverty called The Other America. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of two Americas, where millions drank from the milk of prosperity while others lived daily with the fatigue of economic despair. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, in its infancy before his assassination in 1968, was a full embrace of poverty’s devastating impact. Shine a light on the darkness and expose its flaws. Turn the rocks over, let the termites flee, and transform the barren land into rich, fruitful, growing soil.
Myth #2, “Only Black Folks Want Change In America,” is easily proven wrong. The Martin Luther King of 1965 was more radicalized than the man who had a dream just two years earlier. The Selma to Montgomery march, in March of that year, was for voting rights and so much more. Barber, via King’s story, reminds us that the southern aristocracy and segregation was intended to separate poor black and white people and hide the fact that their common bond- financial security- would never be in reach. One needs only to see the Rogue’s gallery of oligarchs seated behind President Trump at his January 20th 2025 inauguration to conclusively understand a line from Bob Dylan (coincidentally in a song released in 1965):
“Money doesn’t talk/ It swears!”
As White Poverty continues, Barber keeps reminding readers of history and its tendency to either repeat for those who ignore it the first time around or fade away if not given attention. Myth #3 reminds us that poverty is not just a black issue. The Freedom Riders on Greyhound Buses were a coalition of black and white. However, in the mid-1960s “…we were trained by the media to imagine poverty as a Black problem.” Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society missions explicitly blurred the lines of racial identity. Thirty years earlier, Dorothea Lange’s photographic portraits of “Migrant Mother” and James Agee/Walker Evans’s journalistic masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men reinforced truths we might not have wanted to remember. Louisiana governor Huey Long’s promise (again a vestige of the 1930’s)“Every Man a King” and a chicken in every pot just wasn’t true.
Barber’s final myth to explode, “We Can’t Overcome Division,” invokes Catholic journalist and social activist Dorothy Day, who asked that we have “…a revolution of the heart…that must begin with each one of us.” Facing poverty is about understanding stress and listening to hidden wounds. Poverty is worst in populations replete with feelings about antigovernment and led by reactionary conservatives. Extremism in politics was fomented by billionaires who fed on the racist fears of a primarily white populace. Barber is working here to breach the divide and help with a reconstruction that was tentatively started in post Civil War America, dormant for a hundred years, and still struggling.
If the first reconstruction started with the Emancipation Proclamation, the second with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the third with “Black Lives Matter” and Covid in 2020, Barber is determined to keep on keeping on, head through the unknown future, and build a rainbow coalition. Barber certainly could not have predicted the chaos that’s been the result of this current presidential regime, the confluence of an unelected oligarch being given free reign over all aspects of our lives as Americans with a delusional president riddled with a persecution complex and obsessed with seeking vengeance. White Poverty is, however, a remarkably prescient text, required reading to offer some sort of hopeful solace when accepting it’s always darkest before the dawn isn’t enough.
