White Poverty
How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy
William J Barber author Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:WW Norton & Co
Published:19th Jul '24
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When most Americans think of poverty, they imagine Black faces. As a teenager, Reverend William J Barber II recalls seeing Black mothers interviewed on television whenever there was a story on food stamps or unemployment; poverty, then as now, was depicted as an essentially Black problem. In a work that promises to have lasting repercussions, Barber—now a leading advocate for the rights of America's poor and the “closest person we have to Dr King” (Cornel West)—addresses white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that might just be the key to mitigating racism and bringing together the tens of millions working-class and impoverished whites with low-income Blacks. Recognising that angry social media posts have replaced food, education and housing as a “salve” for the white poor, Barber contends that the millions of America’s lowest-income earners have much in common, and together with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, provides one of the most sympathetic and visionary approaches to endemic poverty in decades.
"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....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.”" -- Matthew Desmond - The New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781324094876
Dimensions: 218mm x 147mm x 28mm
Weight: 402g
288 pages