Privilege, Plight & Poverty: What Fox News Doesn't Tell You About Those Black Folk

*I dedicate this blog to Rusch Limbaugh, and I offer you his perspective on Poverty:

"The angry white man, quote, unquote, has been intimidated into thinking it's not even okay to be angry about that [social welfare].  You're not supposed to even get mad about the fraud.  You're just supposed to accept it as, "Well, you know, what are people gonna do?  If they can't get a job, they gotta find a way to live somehow."  So if you get angry about this, you're just an angry white man. So we're expected to shut up and let the fraud go on uninterrupted.  But you know what's taking place, I'm convinced of this, I think there is a taxpayer-paid education in America that's not talked about, and it's happening in millions of homes and apartments all across the country.  The education I'm talking about is the one that children who are living with a single parent who fraudulently takes welfare or unemployment or food stamps or disability.  The children of those people learning how it's done."

Well, Mr. Limbaugh, when you examine society from a place of privilege it's easy to discount impoverished people as "lazy," "fraudulent" or "incapable of following rules," but its rooted much deeper than that.

poverty is cyclical & generational; people typically remain within the socioeconomic class of their parents. rarely do people jump tax brackets (there are exceptions but it isn't the norm). Nobody wants to be poor. You don't receive a prize for cheating the system & i'm sure pulling out an EBT card doesn't hold a candle to the satisfaction of flashing a Black AmEx card. Single parent families don't choose to struggle in some conspiracy to instill the same struggles in their next of kin. equating the struggle to survive with "educating" your children to cheat the system is a ridiculous & laughable assertion. 


capitalism is designed to keep the rich rich & the poor poor. slavery was a precursor to capitalism; without slavery, and now poverty, capitalism would cripple. the economic system in place is not designed to encourage and foster upward social mobility. Capitalism does not work when everyone in society is thriving. The entire basis of capitalism is competition and effective exploitation. when you're born in the middle class you have access to resources the working class is fighting to attain. above all else, you are born with privileges and luxuries that often you don't even recognize. school funding is allocated based on property taxes, your community defines your education and shapes your perspective of the world. aside from that, corporate subsidies & corporate welfare (100 million) in comparison to social welfare (59 million) is nearly double the amount. so why is it that we're so quick to lash out at fellow struggling Americans opposed to companies like Walmart who are using tax payer funding to clean up areas to erect new stores that steal from small business in that same area? here's a video breakdown examining this welfare comparison

I want to offer a comprehensive examination of poverty in order to deconstruct the racial & privileged perceptions of poverty. i had an interesting upbringing. being of two distinctly different races & hailing from two vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, I hold a perspective of poverty that includes both the privileged middle class (I wouldn't know that fascinating minds like Rusch Limbaugh even existed hadn't fox news faithfully echoed in my household growing up) & the struggling working class viewpoint. My aim in this is to try to help my peers in the middle class not only sympathize with the impoverished, but to fully conceptualize with and acknowledge plight & privilege and where they fall on each spectrum.

Before we can talk about poverty in a historical context, we have to shed our privileged mind set. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, a sociologist that has largely shaped perceptions of poverty and blackness within the discipline, offers the best holistic perception in abandoning the discourse behind Herbert Hoover's "up by the bootstraps" philosophy that is a cornerstone of capitalism and the flawed ideology of those like Limbaugh: 

There is no question that nobody is self-made in America. All this mythology of the rugged individual has to be deconstructed. We've got to get at the heart of the essential lie that America was founded on this ethic of personal and private individual achievement.  

To put that in perspective that reflects modern times, I'll call on the knowledge of renowned journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell in a few excerpts from his book Outliers (amazing read, btw!): 

"Who we are cannot be separated from where we are from."

“It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”

"I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."

"“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”

Now that we've tackled privilege, it's time to examine the racial component of poverty. I'm going to try my best to be as concise as possible without negating key information.

*All of the following information is sourced from Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America By: Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer 

illustrating the racial dynamic of poverty:

1. Since 1940, the unemployment rate of African-Americans has been nearly twice that of whites. 

2. African-Americans are EIGHT times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. 

3. While 61% of black families possess absolutely no net financial assets, only 25% of white households are in a similar pinch. 

America was founded on the backs of minorities. From the millions of Native Americans that were uprooted and systematically exterminated to the Africans that were kidnapped and enslaved. Despite the toiling of both groups, America's wealth has never been concentrated anywhere other than the hands of the monolithic white man.  

American Indians never received compensation for being uprooted from their homes and imprisoned on reservations, Mexican-Americans were never compensated for being dispossessed and deported in the 1862 Homestead Act, Japanese-Americans weren't ever allowed to reclaim ownership of the land stripped from them during internment in the wake of Pearl Harbor, and African-Americans were denied the reparations promised to them after slavery, and dug themselves into debt through continued slavery otherwise known as "share-cropping." Each of these injustices lead to minorities struggling through poverty.

The Great Depression lead to all Americans, regardless of race, into a downward economic spiral. however, FDRs "new deal" was inherently racist and it created a new "middle-class" of suburban white families. unemployment insurance, minimum wage, workday limitations, veteran assistance, and housing all were crafted to reinforce racial domination. By disqualifying certain jobs that were held by minorities, they barred them from reaping the same benefits of the programs. for example, 40% of southern agricultural worker professions in the 1930s were comprised of black men, and maids a profession dominated by black women were also barred from receiving benefits. As a result 80% of African-Americans nationwide could not receive any benefits from the Social Security Act. 

After the second world war, the GI Bill was drafted. this allowed veterans to enroll in college, finance homes and small businesses, and purchase farmland. This program, more than any other, forged the middle-class. The dominant southern democratic legislature left the bill up to local Veteran Affairs offices, private banks, and universities to enforce in good faith. All of these institutions were staffed by whites who were intent on upholding racial heiarchy. to illustrate this, banks routinely denied minorities loans & made it policy, colleges barred black veterans from entering leaving underfunded HBCUs as the only option, and non-white veterans were channeled into menial & unskilled professions. In 1946 Mississippi, 92% of unskilled jobs were staffed by blacks, while 86% of skilled & semi-skilled professions were occupied by whites.

Back then affirmative action and welfare were white.

 

Redlining (the maps drawn out by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, and later adopted by the Federal Housing Administration) allowed racial segregation in housing based on New Deal Policy. most minorities live in inner cities while suburbs are predominantly white because of this phenomenon. suburbs were intricately designed to keep minorities out by policies reinforced by the government. so next time you decide communities like Granite Bay, Folsom, or anywhere else in Placer County is just inhabited by white people who work hard & deserve nice things while a drive 20 minutes southbound on 99 leads you to communities of poor people who are responsible for their circumstances, realize you both are a product of your environments shaped by historical and social injustice.