White Poverty

“Barber is simply a ‘watchman,’ one who must ‘cry aloud, spare not,’ as the prophet Isaiah exhorted. ‘I’ve written this book to ask America to look its poor—all its poor—in the face,’ Barber writes. That seems to be the perennial burden of the poverty writer: turning the heads of the comfortable toward all the ragged desperation just outside their gates… Today voter suppression, a widespread sense of powerlessness from years of being held down, and the decline of unions have combined to undercut the political power of the American poor. Reverend Barber wants to change that. In exploited, left-behind communities where others too often see only desperation and misery, Barber sees power. Where others see division, Barber sees the potential for unity. And where others descend into hopelessness, Barber expresses a prophetic imagination. “It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order,’ the theologian Walter Brueggemann has written. It’s what a watchman does.”” – Matthew Desmond - The New York Review of Books

Reverend William J. Barber II is a Protestant minister, social activist, professor, and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. President of Repairers of the Breach, Barber will lead the Poor People’s Campaign’s March on Washington in June 2024.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is founder of the School for Conversion and assistant director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.