I got pretty angry today. I was reading an NPR article about Rick Santorum’s Iowa campaign stop, in which he was quoted as saying: “I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” … “I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”
Nice little sound-bite right? What a nice guy. Let’s give those poor Black people the dignity of work, right? We all know it’s African-Americans that take up all the space on welfare roles, right? (intentionally condescending, and if you don’t find that offensive, just keep reading)
I got pissed off. I talked to a friend who was less troubled by the comment than I was. I started to wonder if I was doing a “white guilt” thing, that alleged trap that white liberals like me can fall into when it comes to race issues and criticizing the Black community. Thinking about it made me realize, I have a lot of reasons that this really bothers me.
It’s the same dishonest argument that is made every time a Conservative is eager to run the social safety-net through the shredder. It’s easy for a politician to talk about cutting social spending if you convince White people it’s for “those other people,” and it doesn’t benefit you too. So you convince gullible White America that poverty is a problem of “those people.” It’s a way to split the electorate, and it works. Reagan wrote the book on it. It’s brilliant, and it’s blatantly dishonest.
When we are talking about welfare, what we are really talking about is poverty. The people out there for lack of education, bad circumstances, any number of social ills, -whatever- do not make enough money to support themselves and their families. Let’s make it even more interesting and talk about kids: it kinda nails the whole “people are on welfare because they don’t want to work” retort. Kids can’t work, and even if it is a matter of their parent’s poor values, whatnot, you can’t blame kids for that. I’ll be using the government’s own statistics from 2010.
According to the 2010 census, White children make up the majority of children living in poverty, or 53.6%. The poverty rate for Black children is roughly double that of White children, but go back to the previous sentence: the majority of children living in poverty are White.
(Bear in mind as well, poverty numbers don’t include people that technically fall into the middle class, but career set-backs or illness have them praying to God no one they know is at their local DSS office the day they have to go in. -Raises hand-)
So, yes, percentage wise, there’s significantly more African-American children whose parents are likely receiving welfare benefits, but there’s also 8.4 million White children living in poverty. Acting like social ills like unemployment and under-employment are the problems of one race is dishonest. Poverty doesn’t have a color, Mr. Santorum.
Clearly, I have a few reasons to get as angry about this as I did. It demeans people I care about, people I have worked with, and people whose work, in the community and elsewhere, I respect and admire. It’s acting as though poverty is a problem for one race, rather than another. It’s kicking sand in the faces of people who inspire me: Langston Hughes, Huddie Leadbetter, Hendrix and John Edgar Wideman. It denigrates the achievements of people who have been professors in classes that drove my intellectual curiosity.
When I worked for some years as a GED teacher, my young students heard the message in the media of poverty and race loud and clear. I got to know my student’s self-loathing. For all of their lives, hearing over and over poverty is their problem. You are poor because you are Black, -and you are Black, because you are poor. I’ve seen that sort of self-loathing narrative that’s the result of a dishonest characterization that made those kids feel responsible for their condition. It’s America’s cozy little economic version of “Stockholm syndrome.”
Even so, it’s not necessarily just that the old idea of the “welfare queen” (urban, female, Black, kids) is offensive. Santorum’s lie ignores 53.6% of the problem.
I was fortunate enough to have not grown up in poverty. I did however grow up around a lot of poverty. I grew up around rural poverty. I grew up around fire-bombed looking former industrial towns like Amsterdam, Johnstown and Gloversville. I grew up around trailer parks, and ramshackle houses on roads a couple cars a day might drive on.
Even in grade school, it’s pretty easy to pick out the kids whose parent/s probably took a check, or bought milk and Spaghetti-O’s with WIC and Food Stamps. Those were the kids the took a lot of abuse in school when their clothes weren’t right. Those were the kids I didn’t really wanna be like. I made sure I had Reeboks (often with my own money, from allowances and odd jobs), and not the shoe from K-Mart. I hated my “hand-me-downs.” The poor kids didn’t stay in my district long, they had to move when their parents moved. The poor kids got in trouble and got in fights. In seventh grade I had a crush on this punk-rock chick, whose hellish childhood probably could have been a made-for-TV movie, or a best-selling memoir.
When I was a kid, it was an earth shattering crisis, when one day, a check my father wrote bounced. I remember feeling terrified, overhearing the discussion between my mother and father. As I got older, I really got aware of poverty. I got a car and drove around back-roads: small towns, no jobs, no manufacturing, and raw, ugly poverty. Urban poverty is very visible, because our cities are very segregated. You can drive around any major city and you find a run-down neighborhood and the face of urban poverty. That face is usually black. Rural poverty, you kinda have to go out of your way to see. It’s diffused. Its face is very white.
So yes, Virginia (Rick), White poverty exists. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania, but I’d bet you see rural poverty there too.
Maybe you need to get out a little bit more. Or at least read a couple statistics.