The white face of American poverty

If anyone alive today merits Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights mantle, it’s the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. Cornel West, the theologian and independent presidential candidate, calls Barber the “closest person we have to Dr. King.”

Barber’s national stature has been steadily rising. He preached at President Biden’s 2020 inaugural prayer service and spoke at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival.

And now Barber has taken a dramatic — and some might say surprising — turn toward connecting with whites in poverty.

In June, the minister addressed thousands on the U.S. Capitol steps for the Poor People’s Campaign, dressed in his trademark purple and black robe. “Like the Prophet Moses, honored by Jews, Muslims and Christians, led the people out of bondage of Egypt, it’s time to rise,” he thundered. “Like the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel’s vision, we’ve got to rise. Like the ancient vision of the prophet, when the stones that the builders rejected became the chief cornerstone of a new reality, we have got to rise.”

A former president of the North Carolina state NAACP, and former senior pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., Barber is founding director of Yale’s recently established Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.

Barber’s broader moral authority and prophetic vision first gained national attention in 2013, inspiring thousands in North Carolina, especially during his “Moral Mondays” marches.

On the front steps, and sometimes in the hallways, of the state’s General Assembly in Raleigh, demonstrators denounced Republicans’ “regressive legislation.” Along with poverty and racism, the grassroots progressives’ agenda spanned a broad spectrum that Barber calls “moral fusion.” These include voting rights, worker’s rights, climate issues, immigrant rights, gay and transgender rights, criminal justice, homelessness, and “common-sense gun control.” Some demonstrators, including Barber, were arrested while protesting peacefully.

From pulpit or podium, his stentorian voice denounces injustice and economic disparity with righteous indignation. His penetrating stare seems to be looking into America’s soul.

“He’s the best I’ve ever seen in connecting with an audience,” recalled Arnie Katz, a lifelong activist and a Moral Monday march regular.

In his new book, “White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy,” Barber attacks a “constellation of myths,” chiefly that American poverty has a Black face. Blending compassion and pragmatism, he argues that by one measure, the U.S. has 40 million more poor white people than poor Black people. It is scandalous, he says, that nearly half of Americans, Black and white, are poor or trapped in low wage jobs.

Barber says this myth “obscures the poverty of tens of millions of white people. Until we face the reality of white poverty in America, we cannot comprehend what is truly exceptional about the inequality that persists in the richest nation in the history of the world.”

For 150 years, he recounts, race has divided whites and Blacks from uniting over common economic interests.

Clearly, he writes, “racism persists, making rates of poverty higher in communities of color. But the same lie that blames Black people for their poverty also prevents us from seeing the pain of poor families who have been offered little more than ‘whiteness.’”

“We are,” he writes, “pitted against one another by politicians and billionaires who depend on the poorest among us not being seen…by cable news and social media memes and politicians who depend on tired narratives to rally their base against imagined enemies of their ‘values.’”

White supremacy, he says, is a myth “as poisonous to white people as it is to people of color. It dehumanizes the people it claims to elevate; it uses the very people it claims to champion.”

Throughout the book, Barber recounts his nationwide travels, visiting mostly extremely distressed white people in diverse locations like eastern North Carolina, the Appalachians, the streets of Binghamton, N.Y., San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and Washington state. His anecdotes offer hope to sufferers like the working poor, some with two or three jobs, or the disabled who have slipped through government’s threadbare social safety net.

Recently, promoting “White Poverty” at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, near Duke University’s East Campus, Barber exuded a quieter form of charisma. Over 200 people gathered in the African American congregation’s modest sanctuary. Flanking him was Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, his co-author and longtime colleague, who is white.

“We’ve worked on this book all our lives,” Barber said, recalling what Rev. William Turner taught him in Duke Divinity School: A personal relationship with God should result in a quarrel with the world’s injustice; hope is borne out of struggle.

His book’s thrust, Barber reiterated, is that “poverty is not a Black issue; it’s an American issue.”

Still, Barber’s presentation was hopeful. As “White Poverty” explains, “At a moment when so much public attention is focused on division, the shared experience of poverty has the potential to unite a movement for genuine change, which is what this book is about.”

After his talk, I asked Barber how he felt being compared to Martin Luther King Jr., whom he often quotes and cites in the book.

Was he burdened, inspired, humbled?

“Dr. King was an important prophetic leader, and anyone engaged in teaching or practicing public theology should learn from him,” he said. “But we should not limit King to being a Black leader as opposed to a human rights and moral leader. Nor ought we compare every Black man who tries to practice public theology with King alone.”

Barber noted the welfare rights that women and many others called for the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. “I’ve tried to learn from all who came before — William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr and Pauli Murray.”

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and the author of seven nonfiction books, including “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed.”