Over the course of my Civic Issues blog, I have written about several issues that relate to poverty: over-policing, the school-to-prison pipeline, food apartheid, environmental racism. The common denominator is poverty but it perpetuates the other topics I have covered. Many of these issues predominately affect people of color (POC) because of racialized poverty.

Racialized poverty describes the higher rates of marginalization and poverty that low-income people of color face, particularly Black, Latinos, and Indigenous individuals. As of 2015, 22.5% of Latinos, 25.0% of Black people, and 26.1% of Indigenous people were in poverty compared to 11.9% of Asian Americans and 10.3% of white people. This is of little surprise, especially because Black and Indigenous people have faced more state-sanctioned violence than other racial groups. State-sanction violence such as over-policing and the prison industrial complex contribute to the higher rates of poverty among Black and Indigenous people in the US. Additionally, higher incarceration rates decrease household income which affects the trajectory of impoverished adolescence. 

Racialized poverty and the US racial economy are interconnected. This idea was conceived by many authors such as W.E.B DuBois and Richard Wright. They used Marxist analytics as well as racial and class politics to understand the formation of “Black ghettos” and both social and spatial marginalization of Black people. There are many tenets of racial economics but it’s mainly described as a “performative cultural project” that uses social constructions like race and gender to grant individuals privileges and status both socially and geographically. An example of this is housing market economies which see buyers and renters through a racialized and gendered lens. Most of the people who are denied access to buy or rent property are people of color and women. This relegates these groups to neighborhoods that are largely consisting of people of the same race/ethnicity.

In contemporary society, neoliberal politics characterize the way in which racial economies function in US cities. They prioritize shrinking the welfare state, privatization of government functions, and aggressive competition, all of which exacerbate marginality- and poverty-producing racial economies. 

These are all interconnected issues. As long as institutions of white supremacy continue to oppress people of color, racialized poverty will continue. There are some communities that have been trying to fight against racialized poverty through intercommunalism, a Black Panther Party (BPP) ideal that focuses on “maintaining the health and vibrancy of specific communities.” In Milwaukee, Wisconsin the McGee family lives in a predominantly Black community and tries to combat racialized poverty. In the family, Geneva McGee pushes for better health care in her community. Micheal McGee Sr. created direct action initiatives. They established a BPP chapter that organized meal programs and administered medication throughout the community. While these initiatives are helpful for communities facing racialized poverty dramatic and substantive change is only possible if the systems that enforce racialized poverty are disrupted.