“If we think we have ours and don’t owe any
time or money or effort to help those left behind,
then we are a part of the problem
rather than the solution to the fraying
social fabric that threatens all Americans.”
—Marian Wright Edelman
Sometimes, we can’t help but marvel at this blessed, collaborative journey we’re on together. It is rare indeed when a philosopher from the halls of academia and a broadcaster from the public arena can become one voice, one mind, and one heart committed to raising consciousness about—as our mutual hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently phrased it—“things that matter.”
We have traveled thousands of miles together, conducted countless media interviews together; we’ve sat in homes, walked through communities, and spoken at town hall meetings together. And now, here we are, collaborating on our first book together on a subject that matters to us deeply.
We are concerned about poverty in America because it has impacted our lives, our outreach, the missions we’ve embraced, and our roles as democratic thinkers.
For my dear brother, Tavis, poverty is not an abstraction; it was the story of his childhood. He didn’t grow up associating poverty with Black ghettos, run-down barrios, or slums. Tavis, the oldest of ten kids, grew up in a Bunker Hill, Indiana, trailer park with mostly poor whites. His working-poor, struggling parents, Emory and Joyce Smiley, and his grandmother (Big Mama) ran a strict Pentecostal household in a space that wasn’t built for 13 people. When Tavis’s aunt was murdered, the Smiley home became the safety net for her four children. He still recalls the humiliation of going to school in hand-me-down clothes and shoes with cardboard stuffed in them to cover the holes in the soles. His success today did not, perhaps cannot, erase the imprint of poverty from his psyche.
Poverty matters deeply to my abiding friend, philosopher, and Princeton University Professor, Dr. Cornel West. His father, Clifton L. West, Jr., a contractor for the U.S. government; and his mother, Irene B. West, a teacher and later a pioneering school principal, were actively involved in the early Civil Rights Movement. Often, when reflecting on his formative years, Doc tells me he was inspired by the “sincere black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party, and the Black theology of James Cone.” As student-body president at John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento, California, Doc organized protests demanding Black studies courses at his and other local high schools, as well as marched in civil rights demonstrations. Doc has been a champion for racial and social justice since childhood. Grounded in the traditions of the Black Baptist Church and music, Doc has always been concerned about fighting poverty both at home and around the world.
Poverty matters to us because it mattered to Dr. King. Our work and witness are inspired by his words, “I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to identify with the poor, I choose to give my life for the hungry, I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity.” For us, ending poverty is squarely rooted in the legacy of a King who fought against poverty until his dying day on April 4, 1968. Lest we forget that, Dr. King’s final trip, his final mission, was to go stand beside the poor sanitation workers in Memphis who were fighting for better wages, bargaining rights, and safer working conditions. Dr. King’s last battles involved the eradication of poverty.
In 2011, we launched Smiley & West, a weekly program from PRI that gave us the opportunity to take some of our private dialogue to public radio. We envisioned a down-to-earth format with “real-people conversations” similar to the ones heard at the local coffee house, cocktail party, barbershop, or beauty salon. To that end, a portion of the show is called, “Take ’Em To Task.” It’s a segment where listeners call in to turn the tables on us and ask questions or challenge the ideas, issues, and actions we pursue.
Edith was one of those “Take ’Em To Task” callers who challenged our position on poverty. She’d heard us preach about it, complain about it, and challenge politicians and other leaders who we felt either made it worse or weren’t doing or saying anything at all about it.
“Well,” Edith asked us, “what are you two prepared to do about it?”
It was a question we took to heart. We asked ourselves, “What more can a philosopher and broadcaster do about poverty?” The answer was surprisingly simple. Do what we do best—use our public platforms to raise consciousness and raise the issue of poverty higher on the American agenda.
With our mutual passions stoked, we made the decision to inaugurate “The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience,” an 18-city bus tour that began on August 6, 2011, designed to highlight the plight of America’s poor of all races, colors, and creeds.
Although several major media outlets credited us in 2011 for helping to place poverty on the national agenda, our intent wasn’t to be first out of the gate on this issue. Our goal was to put a human face on poverty so that the persistent poor, near poor, and new poor will not be ignored or rendered invisible during this unprecedented wave of economic downturn. At this juncture, it was clear to us that too often people weren’t connecting the dots between the new face of American poverty and the extraordinary decades-long increase in wealth inequality in the American economic system. The Great Recession and the avalanche of home foreclosures that followed are only one part of the story. We believe that to do more, you have to know more—more of the truth.
Veterans; former factory, marketing, and construction workers; single mothers; married couples; fathers; and teens were just as anxious to tell their stories as we were to hear them. The reaction to our tour bus ranged from welcoming and grateful to hostile and picketingd—and we would have it no other way. One group of protesters in Detroit insisted that the sole motivation of the tour was to bash President Barack Obama.
Admittedly, it would have been nice at that time to hear the President and other prominent leaders in public discourse just say the words “poor” or “poverty.” Instead, we were getting an overdose of sound-bite politics but unsound public policy on poverty in America. Although many of his Republican critics would like us to believe differently, President Obama didn’t create the Great Recession, nor did he create poverty. Even POTUS isn’t that omnipotent.
After the tour, we aired Poverty Tour highlights as part of a weeklong special on Tavis Smiley on PBS to a very positive reception from viewers, yet we were nagged by the thought that we hadn’t explored the complicated layers of poverty deeply enough. These feelings intensified as we listened to certain politicians cruelly and crudely disparage the poor. Beyond sound-bite competitions, these candidates for high office, protected with gilded lives of wealth and privilege, seem to know nothing about poverty or the poor. They claim to be concerned about the middle class, but they must have missed the memo; the new poor are the former middle class.
To continue this important conversation, we decided to bring together some of the best minds in the nation to unpack the conundrum of increasing poverty in the richest nation in the world. This intention gave birth to “Remaking America: From Poverty to Prosperity,” the January 12, 2012, symposium held in Washington, DC, at George Washington University. The gathering featured such distinctive thought leaders as Suze Orman, Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Majora Carter, Roger A. Clay, Jr., and Vicki B. Escarra; it was broadcast live on C-SPAN.
While ironing out details for the symposium, we were contacted by a major publisher about translating our experiences and observations from the Poverty Tour into a book. Although this wasn’t something we had planned, the invitation resonated. We were very disturbed and disappointed by much of the media coverage about poverty. Most seemed to focus on the job loss fueled by the bailout of America’s “banksters” and home foreclosures. Such conversations were myopic, giving the impression that our woes will end as soon as the economy bounces back. Let us be clear: An economic uptick or recovery will not solve what we witnessed while traveling across this country. Bouncing back won’t reconfigure the nation’s embedded equation that keeps the rich richer and the poor poorer.
We not only met the faces of poverty on the tour, we were also exposed to poverty’s historic legacy and evolution. Poverty is not the stepchild of the Great Recession; poverty has always been a part of American life. It is a state of being that this country has valiantly faced at times, but, more frequently, recoiled from in fear and condemnation.
The fact that one percent of the nation’s richest individuals controls 42 percent of the country’s wealth is a stunning revelation in the wake of a recession. But, through the lens of history, we see the institutionalized precedent of greed meticulously entangled in this nation’s very fabric. In fact, one could argue that America was a corporation before it was a country.
The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago. Those in jeopardy often maintained their middle class identities by holding fast to the belief that every generation was destined to live lives better than that of their parents and grandparents. Isn’t that what the big-screen television in the living room meant?
We met the casualties of this exploded myth.
And we discovered a surprising playing-field equalizer. No matter how successful those who were raised in poverty become, they are haunted by the fear of reliving it. Those who have actually experienced poverty in their lifetimes are better equipped to cope than those who have not. For the first time in decades, the American dream for millions has turned into a nightmare, leaving them shattered and struggling to survive. A nation that now has the blues must learn from a blues people or it may not endure.
What stays with us are memories of a wide-eyed generation suddenly paralyzed by their downsized American Dream. Just a decade ago, Americans were able to satisfy their lust for the celebrity lifestyles of the rich and famous. But, again, poverty isn’t a 21st-century phenomenon.
With history as our guide, we can chart the moment Americans got addicted to credit cards and the quest for the American Dream became a shopping mall–like adventure. Spending a cold night camped out in a parking lot to be first in line when a store opens and getting trampled by a crowd competing for “the sale of the day” doesn’t even seem to matter. But deep down we knew we’d never attain the lifestyles we saw on television. As brainwashed, robotic consumers armed with unending credit, we sought to transform our living-large fantasies into reality. Now, our supersized ambitions have been downsized.
The “new poor” find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder at the welfare office, food pantry, or thrift store with people they used to disregard. As the politicians they elected predict a doomed “entitlement nation” and boast of shredding the poor’s safety nets, the former middle class tries to reconcile these contradictions by clinging to the belief that this is a temporary destination, that somehow “they” are still better than “those people.”
How do we get folk to understand that there is no “they,” there is no “them”? Too many Americans are falling through gaping holes scissored out of America’s safety net. Income inequality is real. There is an institutionalized divide between the wealthy and the poor, so that what we now have are the rich and the rest of us.
We are at a critical turning point in America, and we are obsessed with the ambitious goal of changing how we think about, talk about, and act on the issue of poverty and the poor. This book is an unapologetic affirmation of the rising tide of restlessness the world over. The Occupy Wall Street movement is the most recent example of the tsunami of moral outrage and resistance that has now washed over 82 countries and five continents.
With nearly one in two Americans now living in or near poverty, everyday people of all colors have grown weary of the unmitigated greed of the mega-wealthy minority who have steered the economy, not into a ditch, but over a cliff. The rich and powerful’s political emissaries are losing their hypnotic effect on the people lying mangled at the bottom. Because economic injustice in America has been overshadowed by greed, because unequal taxation benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else, because our political system has become so paralyzed and acquiescent to the culture of greed and moral decay—the poor are fighting back.
True democracy focuses on the public interest; it defends the common good and protects its citizens— especially the weak and vulnerable. We maintain that no democracy can survive without the powerful notions of compassion and public service. The level of wealth inequality in this country has gotten so far out of hand, the quantity of compassion so thoroughly diminished, that the very future of American democracy is at stake. And that’s not hyperbole.
This book serves as a counterpoint to neo-liberal apologists, conservative right-wing pundits, and corporate media puppets who luxuriate in dismissing, demeaning, or denying the reality of America’s poor. The faces of poverty are no longer solely relegated to the easily maligned Black, red, or brown people. Poverty of all colors abounds unchecked in our cities, suburbs, and rural communities with ever-growing shameful numbers of impoverished children joining its ranks. Poverty is no longer confined by class or color; like an unrestrained and deadly virus, it doesn’t discriminate.
The Poverty Tour reaffirmed our respect for the dignity and humanity of every American—especially the unemployed and the underemployed. If Dr. King were alive today, he’d still unflinchingly use his prophetic voice to declare a deficiency of will to do what’s right by our fellow citizens. Just as he did in life, Dr. King would denounce the poverty of opportunity, poverty of affirmation, poverty of courage, poverty of compassion, and poverty of imagination in our modern times. In the spirit of Dr. King, we wish to enlist your help as we attempt to unsettle, unnerve, and unseat the powers that deny and downplay the rights of poor people in this nation and in the world. We’re not Dr. King—or even trying to be—but we do believe that the very future of this democracy is inextricably linked to how seriously we heed his call to care for and concern ourselves with the plight of the poor.
With history and a host of preeminent and everyday voices offering honest testimony and compelling analysis, we make the case for radical social transformation. We try to demonstrate how the elimination of poverty is possible if and when we break from traditional paradigms and map a new course based on shared humanity and shared accountability.
This manifesto, backed by stubborn facts and damning statistics, will erase any doubt that we are just experiencing a crisis in our country; we are dangerously close to cementing a permanent American catastrophe.
We set out on a journey to raise America’s consciousness about poverty. Along the way, the fight-back of poor people emboldened us.
This poverty manifesto is our tribute to them.
