Wingnuts have sabotaged the War on Poverty fiscally
since its inception. They have also poisoned the water in terms of
stoking racism, sexism, classism, and anti-government sentiment such
that the American people have become increasingly hostile toward
supporting programs that provide aid to the poor. On Sunday, January 12,
I wrote about
how wingnuts led by Ronald Reagan tried to put an end to the War
on Poverty and launch a War on the Poor in 1980 by dramatically cutting
social programs. They continued dismantling the social safety net with
the unfortunate cooperation of Democrats in 1994 as they pushed welfare
reform which passed in 1996.
But, ending poverty is about far more than changing the
income level of people who are lacking funds. Poverty is the result of
differences in the power structure of a nation. It comes about as a
function of inequality bred of discrimination, deliberate inequities in
educational and employment opportunities, and the way society structures
itself. The question becomes, “Is the nation a meritocracy where
everyone has an equal chance to cultivate their talents and work toward
success if they exert the necessary effort?” One of the things the poor
took from Lyndon Johnson’s message about a War on Poverty was that they
were going to be getting equal opportunities, an end to marginalization,
and that their voices would be heard. However, the backlash against
their push to be equal was immediate and absolute.
The series that PBS produced entitled, “America’s War on Poverty,” is stellar. One of the segments, “Given a Chance,”
tells the story of Mississippi Head Start workers attempting to start
their Head Start programs for the first time in 1965. They met with
roadblock after roadblock. First, when they invited both poor white and
poor black children, each was eager to participate. However, when the
white families found out the black families were going to be attending,
they dropped out. Then, Senator John Stennis, a segregationist Southern
Democrat, heard rumors that Head Start workers were using program funds
to *gasp* push for civil rights. Since this was several years prior to
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, there was still a great
deal of activism at this time. He demanded that an investigation be
instigated, and in the meantime, funds would be pulled from his state’s
Head Start programs. His demands were met, and just before children were
to start school, every site lost funding. Of course, the rumors were
false. Yes, the Head Start workers were agitating for Civil Rights. No,
they were not using Head Start funds to do it. Undaunted, the Head Start
workers put together volunteer donations of food and other supplies
from the community and held their classes anyway. But, they couldn’t
hold out forever. Eventually, they took busloads of children directly to
Washington, DC to protest for reinstatement of their Head Start funds.
The national embarrassment led Senator Stennis to relent and the
programs were refunded. So, even a program as innocuous as Head Start
was racialized and nearly undermined in one state. This is but one
example of the headwinds anti-poverty activists faced when trying to
institute grassroots change in local level social and power dynamics.
One dissertation by Ken Oldfield, “VISTA Program: Political
Alteration of a Poverty Program,” later published in the Journal of
Volunteer Administration, and exceptionally difficult to access, tells
the story of how anti-poverty programs were quickly neutered even as
they began. His own work focused on the defanging of VISTA (Volunteers
in Service to America), which many of us know today as AmeriCorps. At
its inception, the program was run by young college students, of course
in the 1960s, a time of student radicalization. These students took the
mandate of the War on Poverty seriously: maximum feasible participation
(and leadership) by the poor. Alongside the poor, these
volunteers were political, demanded change, and worked on behalf of the
rights of poor people. Quickly, the leaders and power structure of
various cities where VISTA volunteers protested and disrupted reacted in
alarm. They did not care to see poor people making demands. They
liked things just as they were. Very quickly, poor people were taken
out of positions of power in VISTA and program administrators recruited
retired people rather than young radical college students as volunteers.
The goals of the program were transformed from systemic change like
addressing slumlords and dangerous neighborhoods to teaching people how
to read. While noble, it was easier to bog poor people down in their
constant battle for literacy. Mastering the achievement gap would be a
never-ending, attention-sucking goal, making radical and immediate
changes to things like policing patterns in the ghetto, unsafe housing,
or inferior schools a distant, unattainable vision to this day.
Community organizers have hundreds of tales
of similar containment of the poor. The famous organizing “school” at
Highlander, the notorious antics of Saul Alinsky, and the work of
countless others was aimed at changing more than just how many dollars
the poor had. They wanted to see the nation actually build a
meritocracy. They wanted to ferret out injustice. Keeping the poor in
their place became increasingly important in the 1970s. Recently, Igor
Volsky at Think Progress wrote
an excellent piece on how Republicans have fought against the war on
poverty since its inception using racism, sexism, and anti-government
rhetoric. In his article, he describes how Richard Nixon tried to blame
race riots on the War on Poverty. This was no accident. He wanted to
associate public protests with riots thereby neutering the power of the
community organizers.
Today, we see remnants of the community organizing era that
characterized the 1960s, and to a lesser extent, the 1970s. Wingnuts have managed to marginalize their work by associating them
with radicalization and belief systems that fall outside the
mainstream. They continue to fear the power of an organized mass of poor
people. The efforts to smear President Obama for being a community
organizer are in keeping with this tradition. We may be seeing a renewed
period of organizing centered on inequality. If so, it will represent a
renewal of a true War on Poverty.
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