Barber On Politics: It’s Time To Talk Poverty

According to pastor and civil rights activist William Barber II, there’s one word that American politicians have refused to say in recent years –– and their refusal to do so has plunged the country into an ongoing political crisis, dividing it along racial lines and delivering it on a silver platter to a handful of ​“oligarchs.”

That word is poverty.

At a packed public event at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies on Hillhouse Avenue Wednesday evening, Barber spoke with Yale history professor David Blight on this theme and more in a wide-ranging discussion of the reverend’s latest book, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, which he co-authored with the writer and preacher Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

At the talk, Barber, who now leads the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, explained that the choice of topic, instead of honing in on ​“white poverty” in particular, was meant to show the possibility for broader solidarity among poor people of all backgrounds. 

“The more we investigated, it was almost as though there were those who wanted to make poverty a Black problem and only Black folk and brown folk wanted change, which is actually not the truth,” Barber said. ​“And so that’s the way in which the political system — Democrats and Republicans — get around dealing with the issue of poverty.”

The book — which Blight called, by turns, a ​“memoir,” an ​“act of testifying,” a ​“strategic playbook for a movement,” and a ​“prophecy” — is, in some ways, most striking for the data it brings to bear. Pulling from numbers reported by the Poor People’s Campaign (the social action group that Barber founded in 2018 in homage to the movement of the same name led by Martin Luther King, Jr. 50 years prior), the book makes the case that poverty is not only the biggest lacuna in American political rhetoric — it’s the defining issue of our times.

According to the Official Poverty Measure, which the Census uses, 39.7 million people were counted as poor in the U.S. back in 2017, and 95.7 million people were considered poor or low-income. However, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors cost of living into the calculations and which the Census also uses, puts that number far higher, at 140 million poor or low-income Americans. Barber says this is the number to go by. White people made up over 46 percent of the total, followed by Latinos at 27 percent and Black Americans at 16.9 percent.

The issues facing many poor Americans are too often ignored on the campaign trail, Barber said, and, as a result, huge swathes of the electorate get discouraged about the prospect of change and end up sitting out the political process altogether. ​“We also looked at why there was 30 million infrequent voters,” Barber said. ​“And the number one answer was, ​‘Nobody talks to us.’”

Facing a new era of turmoil, the best response, Barber said, is for policymakers to refocus on the pain and struggles felt by poor Americans and restore ​“morality” to the center of our politics. ​“We’re going to have to engage in some of this kind of moral imaginative activism in the days to come,” he said. ​“You have to do what’s called moral analysis, moral articulation, which means you get language that gives you a stronger way to talk, a bigger way than just left versus right and Democrat versus Republican.” On top of language, he said, you build a ​“moral agenda” and eventually translate it into ​“moral action.”

Then he told the audience what it would mean to take moral action on an issue like poverty:

“You take your Constitution or your Declaration of Independence and the Bible and scripture and you lay it like a grid on top of a piece of public policy, and ask ​‘does this piece of public policy establish justice? […] Does it promote the general welfare? Does it provide for the common defense? Does it meet the demands of love?’ And if it doesn’t, then based on the foundational principles of faith and democracy, it’s flawed and ought to be challenged.”