http://www.chicksontheright.com/how-racism-played-an-important-role-in-this-election-the-lefts-dismissal-of-white-poverty/?utm_source=FED&utm_medium=FED&utm_campaign=FED

How Racism Played An Important Role In This Election

“When you’re white… you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”

I was driving home from work when I heard a clip of Bernie Sanders saying this in a debate against Hillary. It struck as incredibly important. In a quick flash of truth, the left had revealed itself.

The left’s most recent narrative of identity politics has entirely conflated poverty with institutional racism. “Black and Hispanic people in America are poor because of undeniably institutionalized oppression.” Questioning this truth is a product of your white privilege. 

Where then, does this leave white poverty? 

In a blatant refusal to answer this simple question, the left has chosen to ignore white poverty altogether. It simply does not exist. The liberal narrative tells us that black poverty in the United States is caused by the aftereffects of slavery, Jim Crow, and biased incarceration. It also tells us that when you’re white, you are showered in privilege. When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.

Lisa Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California, stated the following in an article from October of last year: 

There is such a disconnect between the people in power in this country and the rural poor. It’s a negative feedback loop. If you’re deciding who you are going to admit to Harvard and you see they grew up socio-economically disadvantaged from rural America, the knee-jerk reaction is, ‘We don’t want those people among us. They’re racist. They’re uncouth. They’re unsavory.

In other words, the same institutions of higher learning that profess to value diversity and inclusion as their highest tenets don’t want to admit you if you’re from a white, rural, poor community, because the very thought of you does not mesh with their delicate sensibilities. 

A few targeted google searches for clear statistics on white poverty did not yield useful results. I was disappointed, but not surprised, by the fact that it wasn’t necessarily easy to come by. White poverty isn’t at the top of academia’s current research list, as it does little to further the current liberal narrative. I did, however, find a Miami Herald article that shared an interesting glimpse into the poor white America that liberal ideology has forgotten:

As it turns out, our deeply racialized view of poverty bears no resemblance to reality. Though it’s true that African Americans are disproportionately likely to live below the poverty line, it is also true that the vast majority of those in poverty are white: 29.8 million people. In fact, there are more white poor than all other poor combined.

Owsley County (Booneville is the county seat) is the epicenter of that poverty. Median income here is less than $20,000. The obesity rate is 50 percent. Life expectancy: 71.4 years, more than seven years below the national average. With 36 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line and 98.5 percent of its population identifying as white, it is the poorest — and one of the whitest — places in America

Liberals have chosen to cast aside the white poor, nearly 30 million of them, as acknowledging their experience, or very existence, throws a wrench in the “white privilege” agenda. This dismissal has robbed these individuals not only of their place within social discourse, but of the resources and solutions their communities need. 

There is an interesting irony to the fact that the white, rural poor felt that a billionaire from New York City was their one chance to gain a voice within our national discourse; a voice that had been all but snuffed out by an administration and Media Complex who for the past 8 years has told white Americans that they are nothing but privileged, implicitly racist, and abhorrently toxic.

I am in no way discounting that poverty among minority communities is a significant problem. There is absolutely no denying that many Hispanic and African American communities are in need of real solutions to combat the poverty and violence that cripple their ability to thrive. What I am saying is that by constantly attributing these problems to institutional racism, and by refusing to acknowledge a reality that is so diametrically opposed to their existing agenda, the left has abandoned 30 million white Americans living in poverty. 

Racism, therefore, may have played a significant roll in the outcome of this election. Just not in the way they want us to believe it did. 

For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll mention that I am not poor: my family is decidedly middle class and while we often pinched pennies and cut coupons, I never went without. Nor am I entirely white: my mother is Mexican, my first language is Spanish, and I did not step foot in this country until 2002. The experience of white rural poverty is not my own, but it is an American experience that I refuse to ignore.

Sent from my iPhone