A Noxious and Celebrated American Pastime
People Mired in Poverty Are Demonized and Disposable and Capitalists Know Why
U.S. poverty is a wonderful thing celebrated by white capitalist overlords like Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, also a Republican, who claimed inflation must be tamed by seeing more people lose their jobs and join those mired in poverty.
President Joe Biden, a member of the Democratic Party, which advertises itself as a progressive, forward-thinking bunch concerned about all people including the dirt-poor in the U.S. reappointed Powell as Fed Board Chair and is proving to be Bill Clinton on labor issues in the U.S.
The nation’s two national political parties enjoy and seem to benefit from beating up on poor people, demonizing them as lazy, hedonists, intellectually depraved or deprived. But look at who make up a big share of poor and homeless people in the U.S. and the picture is more gruesome.
Regardless of conclusions of reams of academic study of U.S. poverty, the undergirding problem is race, and always has been. U.S. capitalism developed by white people who enslaved Black people is intentional in its ongoing devastation of Black Americans.
In the U.S. a large, disproportionate chunk of people mired in dire poverty are African Americans, Black and Brown immigrants, and historically marginalized people. At any given moment there are 40 million people in poverty in the U.S. and Black Americans make up a disproportionate share of the those in poverty at close to 20 percent.
There are numerous reasons why the U.S. capitalist setup walls off Black Americans from prosperity let alone happiness, but control of Black people is likely a driving factor. When the country’s founding fathers, many of whom enslaved Black people, created the Declaration of Independence, a pro-war puffery statement, they were only talking about wealthy white men’s right to pursuit of happiness.
Nicole Hannah-Jones and authors of The 1619 Project provide detail about the organized efforts by powerful white people to keep racism alive, devaluing Black lives forever.
In The 1619’s chapter 18 “Justice,” Hannah-Jones notes that following the Civil War the federal government compensated white enslavers “for their loss of human property,” while developing new ways to control freed Black Americans. (As the several authors note — most enslaved people had nothing and were fleeing horrendous conditions when emancipation first tool hold).
Instead Hannah-Jones, citing historian Keri Leigh Merrit declared that “With the advent of emancipation, Black Americans became the only race in U.S. ever to start out with close to zero in capital.”
The efforts by the federal government, a brief period called Reconstruction, faltered because lawmakers in Washington, D.C. were eager to appease and bring back into the fold white southerners, thereby dooming generations of Black Americans to Jim Crow and festering economic inequality.
Today’s dire numbers — showing Black Americans are disproportionally mired in poverty and homeless are not by accident as The 1619 Project shows, and the consequences have become more dire over time.
Regarding homelessness as of 2019 federal government data, The Root reports:
More than half a million Americans experienced homelessness in 2019 — a number that has slowly ticked upward in recent years. Of the families that make up that number, the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress finds that 52 percent are black.
Of an estimated 568,000 Americans who were without shelter last year, individual black Americans comprised 40 percent of the total, despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population, ABC News reports.
Homelessness also equals dire health consequences with little to no state or federal assistance. The Affordable Care Act is modeled on the private health insurance industry and offers no plans for people who cannot pay some kind of premium. Medicaid is a federal-state insurance program available to a limited number of people in poverty and leaves out the working poor in almost in every state in the country.
The predicament is such that homeless people in the U.S. are despised and disposable and that goes ten-times for the Black American in poverty.
For example, in New York City the U.S.’s most unequal and uncaring city it is not stunning that Jordan Neely a young Michael Jackson impersonator down on his luck and in need of health care and housing was disposed of on the subway by a white former Marine, while onlookers cheered the killing.
New York City’s Black Mayor Eric Adams, also a former NYPD chief, at first praised the former Marine and mocked Neely as a dangerous lunatic. It took protests to force the centrist Adams to do an about face and call for charges to be brought against the former Marine. Also not stunning are the right-wing groups hate groups who are funneling boatloads of cash into the former Marine’s defense.
There are solutions to poverty that are not as expensive as funding U.S. wars. They include universal health care, universal basic incomes, housing for all, as well as reparations for the descendants of the American enslaved. None of those measures should be done alone and together they represent an enormous investment toward righting the nation’s wayward, suspect ways.
