|
Thank you for this perceptive thread. I have been getting increasingly angry at the "Poverty is All Racial and If You Don't Agree With Me I am Going to Attack You and You are Not a Liberal" threads here on DU since the hurricane struck. From the tone of them, it seems to me that they are almost all by rich white people playing a game, whether they know it or not, that I call, briefly, "I'm One of the Good Ones--I 'Get It'--(So Don't Expect a Donation)." Over the past several years, I have learned what poverty and lack is; I grew up middle class, used to be middle class, and now lower middle class and by yearly income, am actually poor. I never thought it would happen, but since Bush, I live here permanently now, in poverty. I am a white woman. I do not start off the discussion with an abstract approach that charts the effects of segregation, and lead to the foregone conclusion I wanted to reach anyway; I begin my awareness of poverty and the pressure of not having enough money, by waking up each day.
I loved your closing comments about how this is likely a deliberate attempt to paint it as a racial issue, exactly to cause divisiveness and pin it all on black people; this is actually my opinion, too. Which is the largest single group on welfare/General Assistance? White women (with children). Which is the largest single group filing Affirmative Action discrimination claims? White women. I believe the pretense that Affirmative Action is a "racial" "quota" is maintained exactly so that people will not realize (and research) how America itself has been helped by the myriad of laws and regulations that make up Affirmative Action. The Americans With Disabilities Act, giving wheelchair-access, is after all an Affirmative Action law (Civil Rights Act of 1991).
Most poor people are white, and I have read studies that claim that the per capita poorest people in this country are not black at all, but are the totally cut-off, dirt-poor whites of Appalachia, who do not register on most statistics, because they do not apply for government programs, either because they are so poor they don't know about these programs, because of shame, or because of lack of access. Apparently DU is unaware of them because they were not hit by a hurricane recently; that's what it takes. When the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina shows New Orleans exclusively, as if this were a local event, and not the mainly poor white crowds of the devastated in Mississippi and more rural Louisiana, then you know it is a manipulated narrowing-down of the same type they did with Sept. 11th, which suddenly "only" happened to New York City. Also, recent Census data proved that college-educated white women are paid less than not only black males, but black women. Black women are paid more than Asian women. Not a blip on DU. Lots of "Who Gives a Fuck About the Dead, Raped White Woman?" though, which no group of males stopped or even complained about. So much for "being against bigotry" and "facing the truth."
Threads about poverty and economic fear on this site, which I have posted on, drop with almost no posts or interest, but the "I am Fighting for the Negro" parlor game gets lots of posts. They actually ask, "If they had been white, would the response have been different?" then answer "OF COURSE," like assholes, and I want to ask these people, "Are you on Rush Limbaugh's illegal drugs? When has the Bush Administration ever, even once, done anything to help any of the American people? When have they done a domestic thing?"
Poverty is getting worse for all of the American people, it is spreading, the jobs are gone, they are not there anymore (I live in the Midwest, badly hurt by this corporate trend), and as Barbara Ehrenreich was just explaining on C-SPAN2, talking to some creepy asshole from the Wall Street Journal, now poverty is reaching to the employed population, who regularly work for poverty wages now. I remember reading a Census statistic from Molly Ivins some years ago, that one-fourth of those who work full-time, 40 hours a week at minimum wage jobs, are homeless. Also, the poverty statistics are fake, the number of poor is actually much higher, as they are always changing the official poverty line, lowering it to ridiculous levels. I know that I am now reaching a stage where my money does not extend and pay everything as before--and I never buy anything! It is all bills--utilities, insurance, up and up--and I know what it is to go day after day with only one meal a day, have not been to a dentist for many years, I know the fear of anything in the house or car going wrong, because it will not get fixed.
I'm sick of reading these phonies for whom poverty, (besides being a boring, "not fun" topic), is a total abstract, a "test" they have devised for your "liberal quotient," when for those of us who suffer it, it is a neverending stress and pressure and increasing misery. You claim people don't face the facts by not calling it racial, I tell you, you face nothing, it is all abstract reading material to you, and I pray that all of us middle class and poor people will unite as one, and face the far harder reality to face, and that is that they have now made it a global corporate system with its own "government" (NAFTA/GATT), located wherever, and it has never been harder to fight. I don't know where it will end, or how.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
