What White Privilege Looks Like When You’re Poor
Appalachian resident flaunts 'white privilege.'
Inevitably, when you talk about white privilege someone will ask the question, “What about poor white people? What privilege do they have?”
In January 1961, John F. Kennedy was inagurated [sic] as the nation’s thirty-fifth president. In February 1961, he signed an executive order for a pilot food stamp program, one based on the model previously used during the Great Depression. During his campaign, Kennedy had spent much time in West Virginia, and according to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, “was appalled by the pitiful conditions he saw, by the children of poverty, by the families living on surplus lard and corn meal, by the waste of human resources…. He called for better housing and better schools and better food distribution…. He held up a skimpy surplus food package and cited real-life cases of distress.” Kennedy saw people in need and used his power as president to address their crisis.
This week, the House Appropriations Committe [sic] released a draft of the 2015 Agriculture Appropriations bill. In it, $27 million is budgeted for a pilot program aimed at reducing child hunger in rural areas. “Sounds innocuous enough," writes MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff, “except the $27 million program was actually the committee’s substitute for a White House proposal which would have allocated $30 million to child hunger across urban and rural areas.”
Resnikoff goes on to point out that this doesn't mean children in urban areas will be completely left out of hunger reducing programs, as the “federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on the Summer Food Service Program, which provides meals to low-income children when school is not in session and they don’t have access to free or reduced school lunch,” and that there are specific challenges that face rural areas with regards to food insecurity. However, “the House committee’s proposal is likely to help fewer people of color than the White House proposal. And while rural areas may be unique in terms of the challenges they face, they’re not where most of America’s hungry are concentrated.”
They’re also among the whitest. . . .
To paraphrase this article a bit, setting aside the bazillions spent on the urban poor, which rural Americans, including poor whites, obviously would have no access to, and that it is only natural that politicians representing Appalachia would sometimes try to help their own constituents, obviously the real sin committed by the people of Appalachia is that they are “among the whitest.” Further damning Appalachia is that most of its residents simply struggle along quietly without needing to inflict savage violence and suffering upon each other and innocent passersby. Even stranger, Appalachian whites are not known for their fondness for periodically rioting, looting and burning everything around them to the ground, nor using the threat that they might someday do so again to extort billions more tax dollars, nor to use these and other actions and threats to bring about legal and de facto ‘affirmative action’/racial discrimination, like some exotic pest, snaking and slithering its way into every nook and cranny of what was once the world’s marvel of a middle-class-centered meritocracy, to create today’s borderless decadent violent simmering splintering multicultural carnival of the damned.
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