There's a way to care about and address poverty in every community where it manifests itself without positing that poor whites in America suffer with no help while poor blacks, Latinos, and new immigrants benefit from a slew of government programs. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of writing Sen. Jim Webb did last week, or Ross Douthat did before that, or Daniel Foster did when he wrote about Douthat's column. All of these authors write about poor whites as if they haven't gotten assistance from the government, but poor minorities have. Douthat and Foster were concerned with college admissions and a study that showed lower-income whites were not given extra consideration over their wealthier counterparts. Webb's concern was with non-black minorities and new immigrants whom he says affirmative action was never meant to help. (He also asserts that decades of affirmative action have marginalized white workers, but fails to show how. Such an assertion ignores that the current recession is worse for communities of color, especially black communities, in just about every way possible.)
As Adam explains in his post, Webb is wrong on a number of points. Nearly every anti-poverty program from the New Deal helped poor whites at the specific exclusion of poor blacks and descendants of slaves. It's also true that affirmative action and civil-rights legislation from the Johnson era was specifically written to include ethnic whites and new immigrants. But more important, Webb shows through all of his writing, and as Douthat and Foster show in their recent pieces, that they care less about poverty than they do about whiteness.
There's a lot of interesting work to be done teasing out what it means to be white in America, in particular about who gets to be part of mainstream whiteness, which usually also means the middle class, and how the categories of middle class and whiteness have expanded from merely meaning Anglo-Saxon to include many ethnicities excluded before. No one denies that the Scots-Irish immigrants, Italian and Greek immigrants, and immigrants from the former Soviet bloc had a rough go of it when they first came to America. But all of that points to the ugly truth about race in America, and that's that whiteness is defined in opposition to blackness. We romanticize white lower- and working-classes' rural poverty and demonize urban poverty among blacks and Latinos.
All the authors above tried to use the mere existence of a black middle class to deny the fact that race and class still correlate very highly, in ways that can only be explained by discrimination and the persistence of poverty among many white communities to deny the fact of white privilege. That social mobility in America is a myth should concern everyone. (And I'm a little suspicious of why it concerns conservatives only after someone points out the racism within the conservative ranks.) But that is a separate issue from addressing the structural and legal barriers in place for generations that specifically excluded blacks from even getting to share in the dream.
-- Monica Potts
