Suffused with his biblical imagination and on-the-ground stories, the book also reflects on Barber’s leadership of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays Movement and, later, the national Poor People’s Campaign. A corrective to our ways of talking about poverty, White Poverty is also a call for bottom-up organizing and shared connections among all poor people in an era of democratic renewal emphasizing racial and economic justice.
For Barber, this kind of “moral fusion” movement is both a strategic necessity—essential to building the coalitions we need in order to exercise power—and a historical fact. White Poverty looks to the Reconstruction Era’s cross-racial coalition building, particularly in the South, to give white people in the present a claim to a lineage of justice seekers and endow the movement with unfinished purpose. In alliances between newly freed Black people and whites who recognized their economic fates as linked, the momentum for political change grew to such intensity that its enemies resorted to violence—such as the 1898 Wilmington massacre, which saw Wilmington’s fusionist government ousted by white supremacists—to preserve their order. Later, these coalitions were revived again in the civil rights movement, a kind of Second Reconstruction. Barber calls for the revival of fusion among poor people across the nation—a Third Reconstruction uniting people of diverse backgrounds together in struggle. Fittingly, the Poor People’s Campaign launched its latest season of outreach this June.
Schaller and Waldman are far less sympathetic to the plight of poor white people. “Since the rise of Jacksonian Democracy nearly two centuries ago,” they write, “rural Whites have enjoyed what we call ‘essential minority’ status because they have been able to extract concessions from state governments and especially the national government that no other group of citizens of their size possibly could.” This outsized power stems in part from malapportionment of the Senate. Enshrined in the Constitution, this form of representation gives a state like Wyoming, the least populated state, the same right to political representation as California, the most populated. As a result, government money that might have been spent on say, urban hospitals, gets sent to subsidize rural postal routes or airports. Schaller and Waldman make a similar argument about the Electoral College and the reversal of power that would be assured by replacing it with the popular vote. At the same time, they note, rural white people “are the only significant part of either party’s coalition that has no coherent set of demands, for all the power they hold.”