Rev. Dr. William Barber II on tackling systematic racism and combating poverty

the words poor or poverty. There's always a heavy focus on making the country work for the middle class, to grow the middle class, which of course is important and true, but the stark realities there are a hundred forty million poor and low income people in this country, and if we don't figure out how to mobilize around poverty, to name it, expose the truth of it, and fix it,

we won't be able to break it. My guest today is someone who has been working on this moral cause for a long time and is truly one of the most extraordinary servants of the people that I've ever met. Reverend Dr William Barber the second has spearheaded some of the most influential moral movements in our time. Since he was young, he's held positions of community leadership. Was president of Local and Double a CP Youth Council at age fifteen and is now on their national Board of Directors.

He launched the political Fusion organization Repairers of the Breach, created the Ascendant impactful movement called the Poor People's Campaign in the tradition of Dr King, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's Genius Granted for his work on furthering the moral movement against inequality. I have personally found his words

and stands inspiring. His integrity and faith have moved him to insist the political systems and political figures, including me, actually listened to the voices of the core and the dispossessed. He truly lives the call to stand for the least among us. Reverend, thank you for taking time to be with us. Thank you so much for Pete, and thank

you for your campaign, your tenacity. You were among the first on the national debate platform of any party to acknowledge the work of People's Campaign and to actually say that if we were going to have debates in this country by where we are, where we're going, we had

to put the issue of poverty up front and center. Well, I think one of the most powerful things that you've done is open America's eyes on just how many people fall into that category of poverty or low wealth nearly half of the country, and in politics are taught to talk always about the middle class and never about the poor. Although that line has become thinner and thinner over time, and it's had me thinking of the fact that there's no scripture that says, as you've done unto the middle class,

so you've done unto me. I wonder, in your experience mobilizing and empowering people to tell their own stories, what you think is giving this movement the ability to reach more people than it has in the past. Why is there more attention to poverty than there had been? And uh and how much further do we have to go before you would be able to say that the system is really able to hear those who are crying out in this way. My coach ship up in Roctor List still.

Harris and our team decided that first of all, you have to believe in the agency of poor and low wealth people number one. Number two, you have to do your homework, to be quite honest. Maybe I didn't realize it was as bad when we started, because I've always heard thirty nine million, that's what you're here for, the million. But what we found out is that people are using a way of calculating that that's fifty five years old and wasn't sufficient at the time. When we saw this

number a hundred forty men. We all fell back in our seats and said, what in the world. And because most of this is invisible, you know, people don't realize it. Sixty one percent of African Americans are poor and low wealth. That's twenty six million people. Thirty some percent of white people are poor and low wealth, but that's sixty six

million people. Poverty has a forty one percent more of an impact on Black people from a percentage perspective, but from a actual raw numbers perspectives, there are forty million more poor and lower white people than there are Black And the line that has been used by those who don't want us to deal with poverty has often been that it was a marginal issue, that it did not cut to the heart and soul and center of our democracy. And then we had to say, there's an interlockingness between

systemic racism and bio systemic racism. I mean all forms of racism, not just towards black people, but and not just one form. P the suppression police violence and answering, conser ration, resegregation of public schools, mistreatment of our Latino brothers and sisters, emmigrants, continuing mistreatment of our indigenous community. But you had to connect that the systemic power, and then connect the system and powered into the nivel of

healthcare and ecological devastations. And then that has to be connected to a serious analysis of the war economy what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. And then you had to connect that to the theology, the false theology. And so you asked me, what help does mobilize truth? And then we went to them in We didn't start from the top like a bunch of organizations saying we're gonna speak on band for the Poor, bringing truth, bringing an analysis,

and showing people why they need to be connected. And because of that Mayor, we've had tremendous mobilization. We had the mass Poor People's Assemblar Mall march on Washington. We were going to be on Pennsylvania Avenue June twenty, twenty twenty. That didn't happen. We were gonna say, okay, we'll wait. It was poor and lower people said no, you're not No, you're not gonna wait. We're gonna go digital. Some of them said we can't wait because we might die. Seven

hundred people are dying a day from poverty. Let me ask you about that experience, because so much of the tradition of these demonstrations is of course about gathering people

together physically. And I wonder, as a vetter of traditional political organizing, or I should say, as a veteran of traditional moral organizing, what lessons have you learned or what conclusions have you drawn about what it will be like in the future as we have both digital and physical gatherings, continuing to do this kind of organizing and bear this kind of witness. It's another two. It doesn't mean we don't do the other. We're clear they're going to do

the physical. There's a place for it. But as they at rust and told Dr King, sometimes in the movement, you have to learn how to do jazz, and you know what jazz is. You got to learn. They got improvised. That's exactly right. And in the improvision you learned you actually create something unique. And so we thought, if we had a hundred fifty thousand people to tune in on

doing twenty if that would be great. We had two point seven million people, we have four hundred thousand people to take action that day and send the moral platform for the healing of the nation. Jubilee Justice poverty platform, four hundred thousand people sendate the governors and all of them let slay this in We had fty tho people just take the picture to say, look, we're here and

it's still growing. So one of the things we've done we have something called in Polar's Moral Political Organizing Leadership Institute and summit and all over the country we have trained clergy advocates in POLO where people in the same room we train them on history, we train them on economics. But what we've learned is that we can now use this too and powerful ways. And it actually worked better for us because we wanted people to actually see and

hear the voices of poor and low impacted people. And what was powerful is you to say, have a mayor peak, come on, or Danny Glover, and the Danny Glover would say did you know? And they would give the statistics and then they say, but those are just numbers. Now let's hear from the people who make up those numbers. And people would come on and tell the story, and then a person impact would say, this is why we demand and would lay out the demands. And there's so

much power in that. I when I came to visit in Goldsboro. One of the speakers at the event that you gathered together had lost her son and was able to show that her son would probably be alive today if medicaid had been expanded in her community to serve

her community. And you know, I've been talking about medicaid for years, and it was different to be in this conversation with her bearing this kind of witness and this pain that was caused by a policy that often gets talked about in these dry terms or in terms of these statistics. Well, you know, man, that's one of the criticus I've had the political world. You know, you can go back years. I mean, the way past Trump and we had these debates, poverty was never at the center.

But one of the things I'm so I've pushed politicians on it, we pushed them on, is why do you talk about healthcare and not have people standing around you who need it? You know, thank for instance, in the soil all of these southern states denied the Affordable Care at you know, the Obamacare, turned down Medica expansion. I've asked myself time and time again, why is it that Democrats in the South have not had press conferences with

the people that are effective by that. In my state, five hundred thousand people, three hundred for six thousand white, hundred and fifty some thousand black, thirty thousand people formally

connected to the military. Why not have press compers and let them talk, you know, in the midst of COVID, why not have virtual press conferences with impacted people who are suffering, who are dying, who are scared to go to the hospital because if they do, they might end up with a bill for sevent or five thousand dollars if they get treated for COVID and they can't, you know, make these two things. I think we have to put a face on it and we have to expose what

I call the death measurement. What moved us about George Floyd. Everybody talked who did this and who's doing And let me tell you, the hero of that was that little girl that he held that camera the whole time, and she put her face on it and a borce on it. That's what moved people. And so what happened. People got to hear him say I can't breathe, but then hit the image of what was being done to him struck a cord because so many people working in places without

the protective equipment feel like I can't breathe. His words became shorten, and we have to take this away from just being numbers to being about people. You also, you came up as a leader in the n double a CP speaking out for justice for Black Americans. Your movement of fusion politics is multiracial, multidenomen national. But what is the best way to think about this parallel set of facts?

And on one hand, poverty is something that unites so many low income, low wealth white people, black people, and people of other ethnicities and races. And on the other hand, being poor and black is not the same thing as being poor and white, and these racial experiences really are different. How can you practice fusion on the one hand and on the other not get caught up in the ideology of color blindness, which I think we've learned is an

illusion that there's a mistake. No, you can't use that, and that's why you have to put people in the room where they're telling the same stories and the interaction will come to intersection will come first of all. We've always had to do that. It was the abolition movement was diverse, and Frederick Douglas could talk about it from the first spective of being a slave. In the civil rights movement, you had the second reconstruction if we are

fusion black and white. So Rabbi Headshaw and Dr King could come together, but even Dr King took the lead as a black person talking about how what was happening to black people was also hurting white people. Right, It's kind of like the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and you just don't leave it off the table. Now, I'm gonna say something gonna be a little controversial. In some ways, what he said in Montgomery is more powerful than his closing at the Marching Washington.

I have a Dream was a close that he did it in a a Rocket Mount Detroit Watchman in the Black preaching it's like a closing, it's lifting people. I have a Dream was him saying we don't have to stay in this nightmare. There's a way out, and it's a power for prophetic anthem of belief in the midst of disbelief and despair. But at the end of the Semmer to mountgom remark when he's pushing Johnson to do something

he doesn't want to do. Remember they did not want to take up the voting rights at the people forced to in a non election year. Most of the people that have been elected had not gotten elected to pass a voting rights act. But this moral fusion movement of black and white, and brown and gay and straight, and young and old and all came together. They made it to mountin government. The King on those steps in his

speech starts talking about the first reconstruction. He starts talking about what was happening when black and white people came together in the South to build a new political base, and how it was torn apart because the wealth, if the aristocracy can cause them, saw the power of black and white poor people coming together. And he says, when poor whites can't eat the racists, give them the psychological

bird of racism. And he he lays out how every time in history there is the possibility of poor blacks and poor whites coming together to form a political base that could change the country and change it for plytically, the aristocracy soul's division. He says that division is not just about just like on color, it's about power, and it's about economics. All of this division we see and all of this money being spent to divide is not

just the ignorance of one person. It is a strategy called the Southern strategy that was implemented in the sixties and when Kevin Phillips implemented it and gave it to Richard Nixon and everybody following him. You know, Trump is just the latest one to use it. He's not the first one to use it. And he uses it in such overt ways. You're not supposed to tell everybody what you're doing. That's his food to The Southern strategy was used by Regan, used by Nixon. Didn't somebody say that

Trump said the quiet part out exactly. See when Wallace ran for the presidency, the people on that side of the out saw his arguments were powerful, and his arguments could guarantee the South, and that could anti you a hundred and seventy electoral votes out of a race to two seventies. But he was too loud to embrace it. So Nixon said, we have to find a way to do what while this is doing, but not sound like him.

And so le at Water said, the way you do that is you talk about economics and school and busting and but my pointy, not the king saw the other side, Dr King said, if they're paying this much money and fighting this hard, we need to look at the demographics. And when Dr King looked at the demographic he saw that there was this possibility for poor white people to

come together and dealing with race and poverty. Connected was the Lincoln Now, another thing about Dr King is that he was quite impatient with showing moderate liberals and progressives. Letter from Birmingham Jail was largely about this in patience. How's your patience right now? You see a political system with Republicans Democrats, You've you've pressed on that them in

many ways. What what level of patients or in patience do you think is called for in a moment like this, Well, I think anybody the profits in the Bible were always impatient. So there has to be a certain impatience in your soul and in your mind and in your body when it comes to how people are just disregarded. It's bactually when you understand that it doesn't have to be that way. To see how long are we going to be comfortable

with other people's death? You have never hesitated to speak to the policy implications of the moral teachings of faith as you understand it. And one of the things that really surprised me in the course of campaigning for president was how much appetite there was, certainly among progressives for

more of a conversation about faith. And I always tried to be very careful to make clear that I believed, as a as a political figure, that everything I didn't said had to be for people of every religion and of no religion, but that we also shouldn't be shy to talk about the policy implications of our moral choices

and the moral implications of our policy emergencies. And yet I think there was an assumption or an expectation among a lot of the people that I talked to that it was only in the political right that you would see a lot of conversations about how faith and politics intersect.

I wonder if if you agree with that, first of all, and if so, why would it be that maybe more the left side of the aisle or the spectrum is more reluctant or allergic to talk about the role and interaction of faith and policy than than what we've seen,

especially on the cultural right, throughout my lifetime. Yeah. Well, I I pushed back a little bit with you because I don't use that language, and I think we have to walk get away from it because it was language that was deliberately put in our social fasorus to create false interpretations that in language of left and right. And to be quite honest, when you actually look at orthodox theology, there is no language to better in any of our

holy books. My grandmother used to say about being a Christian, it's like being pregnant. You are you are, and she said, and you don't get to just choose. You have to follow what Jesus said is the politics of God. So you don't get to say you are somehow right Christian, you know, a left Christian. Those terms are not really there.

And then secondly we have to know the history. I mean, in order to commit genocide against the people who are already here, the native people, somebody had come up with the theology to concentrate that, in order to enslave people, somebody had to come up with a theology that would allow that to happen. Racistm and not just about name calling. It is about power. Systemic racism is about power and policy. It never is just about name called. The name calling

comes to cover up the policies. So what happens is you have a group over here calling names and burning crosses, but there's a group underneath that that's enforcing policy, changing policies, right, and they can often say we're not with that group right over that. So but but in order to do this, in order to have this capitalism rooted on slavery, you had to have these fourth and evil economics, and that

is when the end justifies the means. And so if the end is prospered and wealth, it doesn't matter how you get it. The second thing we had to have was six sociology, and six sociologists says that something is wrong with two people being in the same place as equals simply based on color. And then you had to have bad biology. And bad biology is what Cornell West talks about in one of his early book, Propery Delivering, where a French scientist actually came up with this notion

that you could determine brain size by skin color. M And then the last thing you have to have is heretical ontology, and a radical ontology is that God meant it to be this place. And so we have to remember that the church split in America before there was a Civil war in the church before there was a civil war in the nation. Almost every major denomination had split in America by eighteen for the over the issue of slavery. And there was an argument one time, do

you baptize the slave? Yes, you're baptized because it makes some better slave. Then there was an argument, no, you can't baptize them, because that's honoring their humanity. I mean, And you can find this stuff not in some backwoods build it, but in the stacks of the Lafe, Breads of Horror and Yale. And do I mean people really spent time, may have Pete messing us up. There was

a whole system behind it. And there's something parallel about this junk science and about the theology, right, and that both taken and orderd by human beings that create the social and political where they look at this political order

and then they create this immutable excuse for it. And whether it's the will of God or the laws of science, or both of them taken together, is a way to make it sound like these things that were created by people, and that means surely could be torn down by people, right, but makes it look as though they were just part of the order of the universe exactly. And one of the things that happened to meet in seminary that has

made me so passionate around this issue. I'm so intense about being against any form of codified racism or codified sexism or codified homophob Because one of our fathers in the ministry got the Bill Turner. He assigned us to preach pro and anti slavery sermons, to go into snacks that doke and find it. But the black folks had to preach the pro slate, and we almost had a mutiny until he explained. He said, I want you to

understand how intentional this was. I want you to understand the argument so you can unpack the argument that the foundations of slavery and the rationales still exist in our political and you need to be able to hear it when you don't hear it. In other ways, you need to be able to hear it when it's not said as overtly and as outright as it was said other years ago. But you need to know it because it

has not gone away. So after we got over our initial you know, resistance, we put ourselves in the idea I have a sermon and I put myself into it. And when I was preaching that sermon, you know, I said, my God, if I didn't know better, I'd be convinced. So this was really sophisticated work, yes, sir. And then the other thing that happened is the white kids in the room were all crying. But they told me afterwards was we could imagine people that look like us preaching this.

And then they said, but I've heard that, so they recognize in it the n a of things that are with us right now, right exactly. They recognized it in conversations that they heard. But also many black folks said, that's why some of our people got convinced. You know, everybody didn't like Dr King was put out of his own denomination. People get back, yeah, for being They told him to wait, why is it? Because they too had been affected by this systematic and intentional and sophisticated form

of presenting racism as the way of God. You know, but also we need to look that same kind of thinking not to the same effect was done to poor white men who didn't have land because they were left out. There was theological thinking around keeping women and saying they weren't you shouldn't be voting, the dismissing of Native people.

And see, one thing we got to understand is when you see someone like Trump, Trump, it's just an iconography of the too often repeated American reality, as Neil Painting likes to say from Princeton. But the world is changing, the demographics are changing, and a lot of people are going through this traumatic experience is that they're having come to terms with having been lied to all of their life.

So let's let's fast forward a little bit. Let's imagine there's people in in office, in legislature, in the Congress, in the White House who are more friendly to policies that tackle systemic racism, to dismantle some of these patterns of generational poverty. But we know it's not just going to be as simple as electing the right people and everything gets better. Right, Where where does the movement and

where does the energy have to go? If Trump is part of the history books now, but we still have this glaring need right in front of us that obviously built up over the years, no matter who was in power and has gone through these these reversals, these fits and starts, these improvements and setbacks. What what will it take for a third reconstruction to happen where it would actually be different. This time, we need to tell the truth.

We need to have a major, I believe presentation to really lay out the state of America and why we can't continue to like this give America is going to be. And it doesn't need to be about democratic or republican

or left of it right. It needs to be about how can we say we are a nation that we establishes justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and shoots domestic tranquility and believes in equal protection under the law with probably what will be fifty percent of our people in poverty because of COVID, So I think we don't need republican life. This is an FDR moment. This is an Abraham Lincoln moment. This is our Edmonds

Pettis Bridge moment. This is our nineteen twenty women stuff Rich moment, and whoever is leaving the country needs to see it at that and help the country understand that because we only go forward together and we have to refuse to take one step back. And lastly, we have to lift up the American people. This is a moment that I think American President and senators need to do what Dr King did at the March and Washington. I'm not talking about this speech. I'm talking about the picture.

Go look at that picture at the March and Washington, and those are all the people standing around at the kame. It's white people up there, black people, even as an officer of the law up there. And it sends this picture that this is about all of us, that racism is not just against black people, it's against democracy. Poverty hits all of us and destroys the answers of who

we are called to be as a democracy. And I think the President would do well of and put people around and have a big thing with people who are impacted and let them say we are America and we're going to accept this in the more. And so if you fight me over healthcare, you fight this is who you're fighting. You know. The thing I find so beautiful in that image is that it takes very seriously the

idea of the president's relationship to the country. We pack so much into that word of president of the United States, but to really be of I mean, what's in that preposition that does so much work? And if it means that the president is somebody who calls forth the entire country or elevates the voices from within the country. It could be it could be the most powerful thing. We do it in war. If we do it the kill, why don't we do it to live? We need to

take seriously this most powerful word. We we the people, and we need to send a warning to the nation of what happens if we don't fix these things. But then offer the hope and not notice. I didn't say optimism because the optimism I don't have a lot of that. But hope, theologically, hope goes through this spair, not around it, nor does it not. You have to hew out of the mountain of despay a stone of hope. It does not dismiss the despair. It actually puts it all out there.

You have to be honest about the problem. It helps us uncook our self from the sense of apathy and what cannot be in and what's not possible. We keep talking about compromises, but what about courage. There has to be something that you don't compromise on. And I look at the fact that everything we hold dear today. If you use the line of progressive a hundred years ago, somebody said it was impossible, but they're always had to be a remnant that wouldn't accept that. They're one of

the things I read it every week. I mean my Bible, you know. I listened to jazz music. I listened to some hip hop sometimes because sometimes the brothers in the street are more prophetic than sin some other folks. But I also every week read that part of the Declaration of Independence where it says, after a long train of abuse, the people have the right to alter the government. In fact, the Declaration of Independence almost suggest that is unpatriotic to

have a long train of abuses. Racism qualifies as a long systemic policy drive racist as a long train abuse. I think poverty has a long train of abuses. I think not paying people are living ways. And it took black for four hundred years to get to seven dollar. We can't wait another for hun to get fifteen because we started out of zero. So it's been a long

train of abuses. Yeah, some things we have one chance to shift now, and people are gonna be so looking for the shift, they're not gonna accept not addressing them. And if we don't address it, we might lose this country. And what I mean by that is when people protest in a country, that means they still love it enough because they still believe change is possible. What you don't want people to do instant of up on protests and just not care, because, as my grandmother used to say,

an idle man is the devil's workshop. Instrikes me that there's an act of trust that's embedded in the act of protests, not necessarily a trust that an institution will do the right thing on its own, but a trust that it's somehow possible to make it change. Yeah, And the first part of protests is for your own sanity.

It's because if somebody steps on your toe and you lose the ability to say oh, or if you if you put your hand on the hot stin you don't move it and you go to the doctor, they will check your whole nervous system because they say something wrong with you. And so my hope is in the midst of all of this pain, it will produce that power that sometimes comes into mr pain, and that is the power of a remnant coming together to say, not on our watch, it doesn't have to be like this, and

we are not going to die needlessly. Maybe the time has come for us to take seriously every breath we have and decide that we no longer have any breath to waste on foolishness, that every breath we have needs to be used for the furtherance of love and truth and justice and humanity. There was so much in that conversation that I know I'll be reflecting on. He spoke frequently about the importance of speaking truth to power, about

telling and hearing the truth. Reverend Barbara lays out the truth about poverty in this nation, about systemic racism, about religious and political activism, and politics generally. This kind of moral call is something that I believe will resonate more

and more in the decade ahead. And if we can collectively say not on our watch to those who won't speak the truth, those who are content with morally shocking realities in our country, and if we can say that to ourselves when we're getting too comfortable, then we might live to see this country become a much better place for all. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.