Dr. King got it: Poverty isn't all black - or white

[LuckyTheDog]

I have been thinking about this column all day... very good stuff...


http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/13614795.htm

The barber leaned close so the white folks couldn't hear.

(Snip)

Not that I didn't know there are white poor. To the contrary, I knew that while poverty on a percentage basis is far greater among blacks than whites, there are, in terms of raw numbers, more poor whites than poor anybody. And this region, where I will be teaching journalism until June, is among the poorest and whitest in the country.


(snip)
I find myself fascinated by how markers of poverty can be simultaneously so familiar and yet so unknown: the unmarried teenage dropout soon to be a mother, the service worker missing teeth, the uneducated woman dying of emphysema, sneaking a smoke in her hospital bed, the rough man who lives between scrapes with the law, the young guy buying a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor before noon. All white.

We are so comfortable thinking of people like them as archetypes of black dysfunction. It's jarring to be reminded that they are, in fact, archetypes of dysfunction, period, and that dysfunction, no matter its color, should trouble us all.