Who are the Poor?

WHO ARE THE POOR?
By Willie Baptist and Liz Theoharis

Who Are the Poor and Why?

We believe that the crucial questions to do with building a social movement to end poverty, led by the poor as a united and organized force are: ‘who are the poor?’, ‘why are they poor?’, and ‘how do we unite the poor?’ Any discussion of poverty and the poor that tends towards a very narrow definition falls into the stereotypes and images that are projected by the forces that are arrayed against us. To not have an accurate estimate of who are the poor and why would have us all descend into subjective and divisive personal judgments of who’s poor and who’s not. To leave out people who are in fact poor is to fall into the trap of the Powers That Be and their representatives that says that we should only be concerned with ‘extreme poverty’ and not all poverty. If you can’t get the basic necessities of life, you’re poor. A narrow definition further isolates and the divides the poor. When you have a narrow definition of poverty, it leads to separating the homeless poor from the day laborer poor from poor artists, obscuring what people have in common, when the task before us is to unite all the poor. The division of the growing ranks of the poor upholds the powerful stereotypes, which blind the main mass of the people from understanding the cause and cure of all poverty.

A number of research groups and think tanks have taken up the question of who is poor, and we should consult this analysis, as well as our experience of economic human rights documentation over the years. For instance, the Economic Policy Institute points out that a family with a single wage earner with 3 children has to make at least $14 per hour to secure the basic necessities of life, not just food but housing, clothing, food, electricity, transportation, etc. People making below $14 are poor [ ]struggling to survive. The conclusion of that study points out that nearly 60% of the workforce makes under $14 an hour. This represents a potentially huge and powerful social force that [if we help it take action together can] unsettle the thinking and consciousness of the American people to end poverty. It is important to have an accurate estimate of who are the poor to know what our strengths are. This will enable us to create plans to unite the poor across color lines and carry out our mission.

Leadership [of] the Poor

The social position of the poor gives them the least stake in the economic status quo. And given the current economic and political direction of society this position of the poor anticipates the position of the mass of the population. Both these and other circumstances make the poor, whether they are aware of it or not, the leading social force for ending poverty and accordingly changing society. Our mission to unite and organize the poor is essentially to raise their consciousness of their social position and thereby giving them greater mass influence and impact. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once stated,

“The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize . . . against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life…”

The poor and dispossessed today differ from the poor and dispossessed of the past. They are compelled to fight under qualitatively new conditions and to creatively wield new weapons of struggle. In other words, the socio-economic position of the low waged, laid off, and locked out is not that of the industrial poor, the slave poor, or of the colonial poor of yesterday. The new poor embody all the major issues and problems that affect the majority of other strata of the country’s population. Its growing ranks are filled with people economically “downsized” and socially dislocated from every walk of life. Therefore the massive uniting and organizing of the poor across color and all other lines has “a freedom and a power” to create the critical mass of the American people needed to move this country toward the abolition of all poverty. Dr King called this leading social force the “non-violent Army or ‘freedom church’ of the poor.”

Presently, we are experiencing the wholesale economic destruction of the so-called “middle class” in this country. This is huge in terms of political power relations and of strategy and tactics. This “middle class” is beginning to question the economic status quo. The point here is that the economic and social position of the poor is not one to be pitied and guilt-tripped about, but that it indicates the direction this country is heading if nothing is done to change it. Poverty is devastating me today. It can hit you tomorrow. The crisis of healthcare is currently the cause of half of all the bankruptcies in this country.

If poverty is to be ended the minds of the bulk of the nearly 300 million people that make up this country need to be changed. The united actions of the poor across color lines serve greatly to break down the stereotypes and unsettle the thinking of the mass of the people. That’s why we need to know who are the poor and why are they poor. An accurate assessment enables us to counter such divisive notions as only addressing the needs of those in “extreme poverty.” Strategic clarity on this question sharpens and strengthens our commitment to meet our mission, and not to retreat from our mission. We are building a big movement to solve a big problem, and we need a lot of leaders, coming from different social strata bringing different social skills and resources to carry this out.

Use of Economic Human Rights as the Main Tactic

“We have moved from an era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – May 1967

The tactic of utilizing the demand, “Economic Human Rights for All!” allow us to raise the basic question of why does poverty exist in the richest country in the world. And to raise another basic question of what is the relation between the growth of poverty in the United States and its growth worldwide.

Economic Human Rights offer a framework to unite poor and working people across color lines into a common struggle, appealing to certain core values of the US tradition and culture. These core values are [drawn] from the historical struggles in this country to define and redefine the meaning of its founding creed. In underscoring two of most important historical influences on the thinking of the American people, the poor white abolitionist John Brown once stated, “The two most sacred documents in the world are the Bible and the Declaration of the Independence. It is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children pass away by a violent death than that a word of either should be violated.” The US Declaration of Independence anticipated and influenced the formulation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states,

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [human beings] are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

History teaches that the success of any social struggle requires moral and political legitimacy, that is, a mass public sentiment that the struggle is right and just. Today that legitimacy for the struggles of [the]poor is not going to come from the federal government, nor from any section of the Powers That Be as have happened on certain occasions in the past. History and our recent experiences show that legitimacy can come from reference to the emerging international struggles of the impoverished world majority, from reference to those core values of the US that affirm the basic human rights to life, and from reference to this moral affirmation in international documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed by all the member nations of the United Nations.

Economic human rights are therefore a powerful source of legitimacy for our struggles and the urgent and basic issues that unite us as poor folks. Utilizing the struggles of the poor along with documentation to expose the fact that every issue of poverty in a time of plenty is a violation of human rights [as] a tactic can be an effective means to awaken the consciousness of the ‘sleeping giant’, the mass of the American people.

Leaders who are poor

Central to the uniting and organizing of the poor as a social force is the identifying and training of massive numbers of leaders from the ranks of the poor. This has to be our point of concentration at this initial stage of building a movement broad enough to end poverty. However, for this very reason we must challenge every person committing themselves as leaders including those coming from other important social ranks to be trained as leaders as well. Only leaders can ensure the development of leaders. This is no easy task. [This task is difficult especially when developing leaders who are committed to uniting the poor across color lines as the leading force of a broad and powerful movement to end all poverty. This is not easy because it goes against everything we have been taught in this society about why poverty and who are the poor.]

Here we must understand the strategic difference between leadership of the poor as a social group and leadership of individuals from the ranks of the poor as well as [from] other ranks. History and our hard won experiences have taught us a lot in this regard. Leadership of the poor as a social group is secured through [primarily] united actions and organization. The development of individual leaders is secured through [primarily] political education and training. The content of the development of individual leaders is the acquiring of the clarity, competence, and commitment necessary for the development of the leadership of the poor as a social group united around their immediate and basic human needs. For example, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who initiated the organizing of the historic Poor People’s Campaign, was himself not poor. However he was a highly insightful and trained leader committed to organizing the poor across color lines and giving his life to the struggle to end all poverty everywhere. His words and work contributed greatly to the development of both kinds of leadership, social and individual. A very important lesson for us today from his life, especially his last years, is that we can and must develop “many Martins” especially from the ranks of the poor.

Discussion Questions:
1. Who are the poor?
2. Why are the notions of “extreme poverty” coming from representatives of the Power That Be dangerous?
3. Why are the poor, poor?
4. What is the difference between the poor today and the past?
5. Why is the economic destruction of the so-called “middle class” important?
6. What are the two meanings of “leadership of the poor”?