The Poverty Industry

Like the prison industry in America African Americans make up a sizable component of the poverty industry. What is the poverty industry? It’s the workforce of charities, administrators, care givers, case workers, counselors, outreach workers and countless other employed persons, complete with unions, pensions, paid vacations, medical benefits and pay raises, that manage poverty.

When you consider that millions of people are projected to live in poverty their entire lives you easily understand how this will impact the society and spur into motion the needed services that must be produced, bought, sold and delivered, thereby creating these jobs, as well as hundreds of thousands of collateral jobs for even more workers not directly employed in the poverty industry.  Thus, poverty becomes big business; indeed another industry with seemingly endless customers.

There’s another projection and prediction, however, that African American better take particular note of; it’s the one that says families currently in poverty will more than likely be the families in poverty in the future.  African Americans, with minor exceptions, can certainly give an Amen to that.  And given the proven proclivities of the American mass market economy this scenario presents all the ingredients for a permanent and booming jobs producing industry with African Americans, once again, in the lead position of generating wealth, resources and comfortable livelihoods for others, albeit somewhat inadvertently and somewhat not.  And while some would argue that African Americans also get some of these jobs any serious survey will show that most of those jobs exists at or near the bottom of the hierarchy, rendering African American poverty industry workers virtually a paycheck away from being in poverty themselves.

So if the same people remain in poverty who, then, are the real beneficiaries of the billions of dollars pumped into the poverty industry annually?  Are the good people at the thousands of human services agencies the flip side of an unending industry that allows them to benefit from poverty in salaries, health care, homes and retirement plans?  Could it be that the real skill of this workforce is that of deluding themselves into believing that they are truly in the business of eradicating poverty?  Even if it costs them their own livelihoods?  These are very disturbing questions, particularly as we witness a profound shift of emphasis in human services from eliminating poverty to a mentality of “units of service” simply to maintain funding levels.

In 1964 president Johnson declared a war on poverty.  Subsequent presidents have declared war on crime, war on drugs, etc.  Each war declaration pumped billions of dollars into the respective industries tasked with combating and winning these wars.  Domestically speaking, it seems to me that any time presidents and politicians want to fail at something all they need do is declare war on it and throw some money at it.  While the problems remain and the wars rage on what emerges when the smoke clears is that those ugly and shameful maladies, those undesirable blights festering upon the society, now fuel the creation of millions of jobs vital to the American economy.  And once these jobs are in place the employees and their unions (if applicable) fight fiercely to keep them, creating an employment dilemma that depends on current levels of crime staying the same, addiction and poverty remaining the same or, in many cases, increasing so that expansion of services and facilities are justified, thereby creating even more jobs and alleviating nothing.

It’s fair to say that the people who enter the poverty industry as a career choice are good, caring folks motivated by a desire to make a difference and help others improve their lot in life, but would they toil in the vineyards of human suffering without monetary compensation?  While some do, most need the employment opportunity to support their own lives, which begs the question: at what point does it become clear that this so-called war on poverty has only succeeded at preventing the possible poverty of those who get the jobs?  Poverty itself gets passed down through the same generations of families and the only changes they see are the faces in the workforce that come in to manage their generational poverty.

In defense of these good people, however, it’s not that they support their lives through employment in the poverty industry that is the problem.  It is still the vast disconnect in American social and economic policy between its stated moral imperatives and the actual allocation of wealth and resources to remedy ills or right wrongs.  This disconnect is precisely what has exacerbated the plight of African Americans in our struggle to overcome our particular brand of American racism and inequality.  While the hateful rhetoric has diminished somewhat the systematic exclusion from wealth, power and resources needed by us to address our poverty in a powerfully self-directed way remains as strong as ever.  It remains also the single-most important reason why we, as a people, must secure our birthright of wealth.  Forty Million And A Tool is simply an umbrella philosophy, apparatus and strategy designed to accomplish unity among African Americans on just this one thing.  All else will follow.

THE HANDOUT GAME

After generations of African American poverty where families depended on welfare and various forms of social generosity, a mentality of dependence/entitlement developed that, coupled with a historically ingrained expectation of reparations for slavery, has unfortunately bred laziness in a great many of our people, just as the cruel and extreme deprivation of slavery, sharecropping and legalized last-class citizenship bred criminality; so much so that today many of us have become experts at what I call the “handout game” withing the poverty industry.  Because of these lingering conditions and the results they’ve produced welfare has been the central and , in many cases, the only springboard from which African Americans hoped to advance, but because welfare benefits in the last 50 years have remained at 1970’s cost of living levels, recipients must supplement their benefits one way or another.  Some take on babysitting jobs or do other “off the books” work; some commit petty crimes, while others creatively invent one catastrophe after another.  Whatever the route taken, all of the recipients learn to master the ins and outs of the handout game to supplement the fast decline of the once almighty benefit card.  They all know the game and they all feel from time to time that they have no choice but to play the game.  The cycle is vicious, debilitating and habitual.

Another component of the handout game within the poverty industry is comprised of predatory lenders who entice the working poor with advanced handouts in the form of loans, often due in two-week intervals against one’s paycheck and inflated by huge interest rates.  You’ll find cities all across America littered with banners containing these enticements in storefront windows, pawn shops, check cashing establishments and furniture and electronics rental businesses.  Come tax time there’s an all-out assault on the working poor to fleece them of portions of their much needed tax returns by offers of quick or immediate cash when, in fact, they do nothing more than tax the money again as they prey upon the ignorance and desperation of those most in need of sound financial guidance.

Forty Million And A Tool can not only get us out of the broken promises business, but the handout business as well.  In the process of securing our birthright of wealth, however, we need to clearly distinguish the kinds of things that wealth will automatically remedy or eliminate and the kinds of things that require education, character, spiritual grounding and excellent decision-making skills.  For instance, wealth can automatically eliminate the problems we have in the areas of housing, education, health care, food, clothing, daycare, transportation, entrepreneurial endeavors and insurance of all kinds, just to name a few.  The kinds of things that wealth can’t and won’t automatically eliminate are criminality, drug addiction, violent behavior, teen pregnancy, single-parent households, bad judgement and all forms of stupidity.  In short, wealth can eliminate material poverty, but it can’t transform one into a quality human being.  Forty Million And A Tool insists that we strive to achieve both.

THE FACE OF POVERTY

As a child I remember the pictures on television of starving black children called Biafrans.  They looked like human skeletons; you could see their ribs as if they were on the outside of their bodies and they’d appear so weak from hunger they couldn’t even raise a hand to swat at the flies landing all over them.  Today when I see similar depictions of children from South America or South East Asia I often wonder what became of those Biafran children.  Is their poverty still prevalent now?  Did any of them ever attend school?  Are there any success stories and, if so, why aren’t those stories shown to us on television?  And last, but not least, why is it that the poster children of poverty, indeed the very face of poverty throughout the world, African and other people of color?

An easy answer to the last question is simply that the so-called white people of the world possess and control most of the world’s wealth.  Another answer is perhaps a more subliminal one; one that massages the minds of whites and people of color alike to believe that the salvation of people of color lies in the hands of the white people of the world – that this is the natural order of things.  One could easily get that impression as they watch the advertisements of groups like the Christian Children’s Fund, World Vision, Save The Children, Feed A Child Partner and others.  When these organizations film their appeals for our money you never see little white kids in abject poverty even though we know that white kids are also starving right here in America and in other parts of the world.  Could it be that showing starving white children would confuse the message of a dark world perpetually dependent upon a white one?  You be the judge.  What do the images say to you?  My personal view is that the world is still reeling and living in the aftermath and residue of 500 solid years of Euro-American Jim Crow style global domination with the oppressor nations desperately fighting to maintain a paternal stranglehold on its former slaves and subjects through economic and technological deprivation backed by the point of a gun and military might.  Those who cooperate will qualify for “foreign aid” and/or “allied protection.”  Those who don’t run the risk of being branded a terrorist state and their people live in squalor under “sanctions.”

It’s a variant of the message given to African Americans ever since our war driven and politically expedient so-called emancipation: “you will never become our equal – don’t even try.”  President Abraham Lincoln said it best with these words:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races   that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people, and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the black and white races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And insomuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

You can easily glean from this statement that if Lincoln had lived and the Union army prevailed as it did, the southern whites and slave holders who comprised the Confederacy would’ve been spared from fighting what has come to be known as the “second civil war,” but which we know as the Reconstruction period. America would’ve gone straight to Jim Crow and probably to a labor system for ex slaves worse than sharecropping.  Since slaves were property and had no mandate or wherewithal to support their own lives it’s accurate to say that poverty for ex-slaves and their descendants began with the Emancipation Proclamation and subsequent waves of freedom notices.  That we should live in poverty was driven by race then and is driven by race now because it’s the same poverty.  Some may disagree with this assessment.  I’ll simply offer this analogy: when someone deliberately and maliciously burns down a house it’s called arson and it remains arson until that house is rebuilt.  If the house remains rubble for a thousand years the cause of its condition does not change.  On the other hand, if the victims of said arson do nothing but wallow around, point at the rubble and at the perpetrator, especially when they have the ability to repair/re-build their house and put a roof over their heads, then at some point those victims will lose not only the sympathy and support of the world, but also the moral high ground on which their house used to sit.

Forty Million And A Tool will never forget the cause of African American poverty and will never allow anyone to sugar-coat the truth of the African American road to poverty, but we will also look every African American in the eye and tell them to stop waitin’ and beggin’.  We now have the ability to change our condition virtually overnight, even as our leaders publish and point to annual statistics lamenting the excruciatingly slow pace of black progress.  Included also in these reports are statistics showing the ever-widening gulf within Black America between those of us who have wealth and those of us who don’t.  Finally, of the many strategies in these reports that we are exhorted to employ as a way to reverse trends and close gaps, taking our birthright of wealth from the American economy is not among them.  We need to ask our black leaders why that is?

Look, here’s the deal: whether we like it or not we were born on the African American team; the team that tragically descended from slaves and the team that still catches much hell as a result of the slavery-to-Jim Crow-to systematic discrimination-to the current get yours/I’ll get mine journey we’re on now.  In keeping with the concept of “the team,” in this sense, our leaders can be regarded as the management and coaching staff entrusted with the responsibility of building a winning franchise, devising a winning strategy and putting a winning team on the field, yet we come in last place year after year.  Forty Million And A Tool, in this scenario, is simply an attempt to call an emergency huddle and suggest a play.  Accept it or reject it, but at least put it in the play-book.  Any play, call it “razzle-dazzle” or a “hail Mary,” can produce a touchdown.  One thing is certain – the African American team as a whole are so far behind we can’t afford to keep playing perpetual catch-up.

I believe our ancestors will applaud the 150 plus years of energy and effort spent to secure just the proverbial “forty acres and a mule” promised to them or some equivalent, but I suggest to you, my people, that if they were in the position we’re in now, we and all of our descendants would never have to work for someone else ever again.  They had the foresight, but especially the insight, that their entire people were under siege and that any liberation efforts were efforts to alleviate the slavery and the suffering from all of them, not just a select few.  However, they were not in the position we’re in, but that didn’t stop them from great and monumental attempts at liberation.  This they did under the most hostile, barbaric and inhuman treatment, both physically and psychologically, that white America saw fit to inflict upon them.  Those conditions do not exist now.  Therefore, we dishonor them every minute we remain dependent and we dishonor ourselves every minute we remain divided and broke.

Our peoplehood in America has largely been characterized by the fact that in order for us to have just a semblance of normal American life we were forced to create the black “equivalent” of everything white: the black clergy, the black press, the black middle-class, black colleges and universities, black Hollywood, black baseball (the Negro Leagues), black twitter, black associations of all kinds – even a Congressional Black Caucus and a Black National Anthem.  All of this and more because of exclusion, not the natural outgrowth of a racially tolerant and harmonious society.  These monuments and expressions of blackness are reactionary and inherently divisive and artificial, but borne of necessity for the survival of a vanquished people.  Yet, even today we cling to them, we fund them and, to a large extent, we still need them.  This alone should tell us two things: 1) that we’re capable of mobilizing wealth and building institutions 2) that we’re somehow abandoned that urgency which makes it possible.  We engaged in all this blackness without coming away with a permanent black budget backed by black wealth.  Now when we speak of social justice it’s neatly couched in today’s politically correct language of “social justice for all Americans,” as if we’ve long ago gotten ours.  I’m all for social and economic justice for all Americans, but not at the expense of African Americans.  Not anymore.

Forty Million And A Tool is not interested in participating in the poverty industry and not interested in receiving money from the government to help manage the poverty of African Americans.  We are only interested in ending the poverty of African Americans, but without courageous and unyielding leadership from within our own ranks our poverty will be as enduring as the universe we live in.  In this highly uncertain and dangerous post 9/11 world and with white domestic terrorism once again on the rise our best approach would be to take another page from our ancestors and look to the strongest among us; those whose influence we’d welcome and whose capable hands we’d trust. Our unique history in America, if it has taught us anything, has taught us this: the one thing our oppressors have always feared is our unity and our oneness because it’s the only liberation attempt that will succeed. Today, I call it Forty Million And A Tool. Can I get a huddle?