The New White Poor are Not Honey Boo Boo, They Sleep in Their Cars and Shop at Trader Joe's

White privilege extends to all white people in America. Black and brown folks have to deal with both the colorline and other types of inequality in American society. Attending to our needs, while doing so with a respect for the struggles of all people necessitates a practical focusing of energy where the white poor are viewed as an interest group that should be attended to by the white community.

Moreover--and I do believe black and brown elites are more correct than not in this choice and instinct--there is a deep belief, one hard taught by American history, that poor and working class whites will consistently choose to serve the interests of rich white people because of the psychic wages that are paid to them by Whiteness. As such, why focus the limited political capital of the black and brown community in a time of crisis on solving a "white" problem?

Poor and working class whites may have much in common with poor and working class people of color. But, their greatest allegiance is doing the work of white racism against their own immediate class interests. From Bacon's Rebellion forward, with some notable deviations, this has been one of the key themes in American history.

However, the new white poor are not the stereotypes drawn from the exploitative TV show Honey Boo Boo.

They are the former middle class and non-college educated whites who worked in the skilled trades or as low-level municipal and public functionaries. Many of them are invisible as they couch surf with friends, or move back in with their aging parents or other relatives. The new white poor lost their homes and are living in motels (if they are lucky). Other members of the new white poor are sleeping in their cars, one of the last possessions that marked them as "middle class", after their IRA's and 401k's are drained, the credit cards maxed out many months ago.

The new white poor are the students in some of my classes who share with me how they are using their student loans to support their parents; thus they must pass their courses or the whole family will be homeless. The new white poor are  those college students that universities are having to accommodate with showers, lockers, dorms, and other supports because  many of them quite literally  have no where to go when the school day is over, and when the academic year has ended.

The new white poor are not toothless rural folks sitting around smoking meth and making moonshine as they are depicted in the American popular imagination. They are your neighbors, in the suburbs, rural areas, and our cities, that are right next door, and trying to get by while maintaining their dignity.

The type of white poverty stereotyped by the lede photo on NBC's news item is a caricature that is easy to mock and deride. Those poor white people are an alien Other. "Respectable" white folks (and others) mock them, because poor whites represent a basement below which the white middle class imagines they cannot fall beneath.

It is much harder to minimize and ignore the now poor white folks who are the former members of the middle and working class that shop at Trader Joe's or Target with their SNAP cards and pittance of remaining unemployment monies, praying that no one they know sees them, and then get back into their paid off SUV and drive to a parking lot to sleep for the night with their kids, and who then wake up early the next day to wash up in the McDonald's bathroom.