WP1: On White Poverty
A rundown house with the ceiling caving in, pack rats scurrying through the walls and leaving droppings on everyone’s pillows, roaches nesting in the growing stack of dirty dishes in the sink because the water bill wasn’t paid for in time, meal worms hosting a family reunion in the last box of cereal but it still has to be eaten because the food stamps for this month have not come in yet. This sounds like a potential opening scene to the year’s newest horror film, but it’s not; this was the reality for my family and many others out there.
To this extent, I have experienced the crippling and deprecating impact of poverty; it has stared me in the eyes and laughed in my face. Honestly, this is the first time I have had to really reckon with this aspect of my life and communicate it to others through writing. In coming to terms with my identity, I had never felt the need to acknowledge how poverty has impacted my life or share it with others; why should I? I mean, my family and society at large have conditioned me and everyone else to hide these things. The expectation that people must conform to the standard white family model has caused the suppression of people’s fully realized identities and issues of classism. The impact that whiteness has on the image of poverty in America and possible ways to navigate issues of identity will be explored through an examination of my lived experiences in poverty and the ways that colonialism has informed the concept of classism.
In order to understand how colonialism influenced classism it is important to look at the interactions of racial identities with the economy and how these interactions formed the basis of our social organization. The economic disparities between elite/middle-class white people and lower/working-class white people was a source of tension within the white population. Out of fear that lower-class whites would develop class consciousness and oppose the slave-owning and ruling class, elites promoted whiteness as a unified racial identity that would promise privilege under the form of white supremacy. The creation of the white racial identity was also motivated by the desire to justify enslavement; whiteness was made into an economic tool that granted Europeans benefits through colonialism. The dependence of the colonies on the economic transactions of the slave trade forged a structure of capitalism that relied on the suffering of the oppressed to produce the wealth of the oppressors.
Capitalism and colonialism worked together to reinforce white hegemony, the condition that the white elite must control social, economic, political, and cultural systems and that society must be centered around a standard of whiteness that all groups must conform to. In James Baldwin’s piece, On Being White and Other Lies, he touched on the paradox of whiteness and how in creating this concept that sought to assert control over black people and define their identity, white people ultimately deprived themselves of the power of being able to define their own identity (Baldwin, 1984). Through organizing the country’s social structures solely on race, people were effectively bound to a concept of “whiteness” that could not be escaped, a concept which envisioned white people as being free and economically advantaged. As a byproduct, whiteness was assumed to ensure economic and social stability. This being considered, my existence as a white person seems somewhat of an anomaly; the economic conditions I was raised under contradict those expected of the standard white family. However, the associations with what it means to be a standard white family fail to take into account discrepancies in the cultural upbringings of the entire white population and indelibly ensure that within one’s white identity, no other cultural identities or backgrounds may be formed or acknowledged. The assumption that anyone’s race should indicate their economic condition is harmful and has been informed by centuries of racism and colonialism that affect both those who are the target of oppressive systems and those whom these systems are intended to benefit.
Whiteness/white supremacy, colonialism, and the class structure that was generated by their interaction all work to perpetuate the harmful and deceitful view of poverty in America. The prevalence of the white ruling/middle classes in popular culture discouraged dialogue on the experiences and lives of minorities and lower/working-class whites. This lack of representation created a “culture of silence” among the economically oppressed, and as reasoned in Macedo’s introduction in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, [the oppressed] were kept “submerged” in a situation in which such critical awareness and response were practically impossible ( 2005, p.28).
In the attempt to conform to the elite white identity, poor whites lose awareness of their class condition and its deviation from white hegemony, causing their poverty to go unrecognised and unresolved.
My family has fallen victim to this behavior; my parents were well aware that they were not financially equipped to raise a family, but their desire to so desperately resemble a respectable middle-class family convinced them otherwise. My parents fell into the trap that colonialism set and they spent all their energy trying to hide my family’s economic reality from my sister and I and the rest of society. White supremacy/white privilege and white poverty are two systems that coexist in post-colonial society and “[t]he paradox of these experiences is that, while poor whites bear the historical shame of being part of the initial ‘wounders,’ they also carry the identity of the ‘wounded’” (Sibanda, 2018). The social organization that colonialism generated assumes whiteness to be monolithic; this assumption contributes to the “wounded” identity that poor white people carry and it can be something that creates a sense of shame and self-hatred. This mentality has and still does cause a lot of confusion when coming to terms with my identity, because while poverty has shaped and informed so much of my life, it isn’t a part of my identity that gets acknowledged or realized by society under the facade of whiteness.
In trying to resemble the perfect white family, my family had effectively denied the rest of our existence outside of whiteness. On a larger scale, this denial contributes to racial systems of oppression that prevent nonwhite people from being able to get out of poverty as well as classist systems of oppression that keep white people themselves bound to their economic condition. White hegemony has conditioned our society to neglect white poverty and in doing so, it has created the harmful and untrue belief that poverty must be a non-white problem and therefore does not need to be dealt with. This view of poverty in America prevents cross-racial approaches toward solving the problem and keeps all racial groups trapped within this economic cycle.
The view of poverty and the experiences of others within systems of oppression in America have been heavily influenced by the concept of whiteness. It is important to realize the intersectionalities of class and race present within the social organization of our country in order to navigate this power whiteness holds and the conflicts it poses toward other socio-cultural identities. Colonialism has conditioned us to hold the belief that race transcends class. While this belief dominates our society, it is also true that there are multiple axes of power and oppression that operate in America. Although class and race are related in that they enforce inequality, they are not interchangeable systems of oppression, instead, they interact and create many different experiences of poverty and violence.
My identity as white will always carry more weight than my experiences of being poor and this is something that simultaneously benefits and harms me.
My whiteness gives me the privilege to live my life freely and advantaged, and at the same time, it does not allow for the acknowledgment of my other identities. When whiteness is used as the sole indicator of one’s being, it only furthers subscription to oppressive systems and discourages the fight against poverty. In James Baldwin’s essay, Nothing Personal, he entertained the idea that the experiences of the “poor whites” who are “enslaved by a brutal and cynical oligarchy” share more in common with the experiences of black people than with white elites (Baldwin, 1960). The possibility that class could resemble a cultural identity beyond the lens of black and white may be a way to tackle the white supremacy influenced view of poverty, but only as long as this is accompanied by a critical class and critical racial consciousness. Developing and applying these consciousnesses does not discount the experiences of white people living in poverty; instead, it notices the coexistence of oppressive systems in America and allows for the uniting of cross-racial interests against those of the elite. For the oppressed, to carry out acts of liberation, “[t]he solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppres- sion, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves’” (Freire, 2005, p. 74). This transformation starts with the dismantling of the systems of oppression that base their foundations on the concept of whiteness. Change can only start once our identities are accepted and the power structures that created them are realized and subsequently destroyed.
For now, I will not fight the rats, roaches, and mealworms of my childhood, but will learn to accept and appreciate them.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Nothing Personal. Beacon Press, 2021.
Baldwin, James. On Being “White” … and Other Lies. Black Writers on What it Means to be White, Schocken Books, 1998.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition ed., The Continuum Publishing Co, 1993.
Sibanda, Octavia. Wounded citizenship: the post-colonial city and poor whites, Anthropology Southern Africa, p.15–24, 2018. DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2017.1406809
