US Representative Barbara Lee speaks to DNC Poverty Council founder Susie Shannon. (Photo by John Griswold)
The second meeting of the Poverty Council at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, titled “The Fierce Urgency of Now: How Democrats Can Win the Fight Against Poverty,” revealed another tension within the DNC.
Susie Shannon, a California Health Commissioner and founder of the DNC Poverty Council opened the meeting with a personal story about childhood poverty and food security, to explain her activist interest. She said she had met other elected officials with similar experiences, but these stories needed to be shared more often.
“A lot of people self-censor poverty,” she said. “Self-censorship has really hurt people.” Policymakers need that information, she said, but that in any case, the Republican party did little to help. She said she told others, “People who live in poverty typically don’t have a union. They have the Democratic party.” The speakers that followed provided some information to the room about their own particular experiences.
The first was Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women and vice-chair of the Poverty Council. Nunes said there needed to be an “honest conversation” about poverty, especially with women and children. She brought up the astonishingly good results of the Child Tax Credit (CTC). The CTC was enacted in 1997 but was expanded in President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and it effectively cut child poverty in half in the US. Nunes reminded the room that MAGA Republicans had fought to end the program.
Nunes said the wage gap between the “White man’s dollar” and women and people of color also damaged economic security and pointed to racism and misogyny as causes of poverty.
The second speaker, Shannon Bennet, is executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), “one of the oldest grassroots, Black membership-based community organizations left in the City of Chicago.” KOCO develops Black leadership and works in “areas of affordable housing, equitable education, youth investment, and senior rights.”
He described Bronzeville, or the “Black Belt,” on the south side, where his organization works, as a once-thriving Black community similar to Harlem. Famous figures such as Bessie Coleman, Ida B. Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and Louis Armstrong had ties to it. Much as in The Ville, a similar Black community in St. Louis, White violence at the start of the 20th century, and later housing and economic predation and discrimination, destroyed its integrity. He explained newer problems there, including school privatization and the after-effects of public housing, and called for national rent control as one measure to fight poverty.
The third speaker was Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, which organizes “service workers, employers, and consumers to advance local, state, and federal policy requiring…a full, fair minimum wage with tips on top for all workers,” and director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley. She called the National Restaurant Association “the other NRA,” and gave a brief history of tipping in the industry, centered on its start with Black labor for the Pullman company in Chicago. She said her writing and activism on the subject had resulted in death threats, doxing of her children, and other violence, “because they [the National Restaurant Association] do not want to pay more than $2.13 an hour anywhere in the country.” During the pandemic, she said, “12,000 restaurant workers were murdered” by being required to go back before it was safe to do so. COVID, along with wages so low workers did not qualify for unemployment, and rampant sexual harassment, led to 1.2 million restaurant workers leaving the industry.
“It created a moment of worker power the likes of which we have not seen since emancipation,” Jayaraman said. “And we started winning.”
The fourth speaker was US Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA-12), who started the Out of Poverty Caucus, which “will develop legislation and gather support keeping the following principles in mind: Provide affordable healthcare, provide affordable housing, reduce unemployment and reduce hunger….”
Lee spoke on the need not only to grow the middle class—one of Harris’ platforms—“but we also have to use the ‘P’ word,” Lee said.
Lee hinted at how the Democratic party could do better at using the word “poverty” and addressing elements of it, such as affordable housing. “There is a racial equity issue and a racial justice issue in our overall housing policies,” she said. “It’s a moral failure. It’s a moral disgrace.” She added that Republican plans for “Project 2025” would deepen poverty in the country, which she has known, in her roles on the House Budget and Appropriations Committees, for years.
“Elections have consequences,” she said.
Chair Susie Shannon called Barbara Lee her “hero” in her introduction. Shannon said the Poverty Council was never embraced by the DNC, perhaps because it would bring attention to a problem that has always been intractable, no matter which party has been in power, and that Lee was responsible for the Council being able to meet at all and do its work. (An earlier history of the Council’s struggle can be read here at The Nation.)
The final panel speaker was Jitu Brown, who once served as board president for KOCO and is the national director for the Journey for Justice Alliance, “an alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in over 30 cities across the country demanding community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public schools systems.” Brown asked the people in the room to raise their hands if they had never experienced certain markers of poverty, such as living in a slum, having the liquor store be your grocery store, or if “as a child you were never roughed up by the police.”
He spoke about a web of policies and defunding that forced neighborhoods deeper into poverty. “If we don’t run it, it’s not for us,” he said. “We exist in a state of colonialism.”
An awkward delay ensued after Brown was done, as Shannon stalled for the arrival of two speakers who would prove to be no-shows. In the gap, an older, sinewy White woman in the audience asked loudly to be allowed to speak. No audience members in the meetings I attended had been invited to speak, but Shannon allowed it.
The woman identified herself as Appalachian. She spoke angrily for several minutes about historical labor struggles in her region. She said their hard-won gains had helped the national labor movement by often-bloody actions, and that that struggle was a very different one from any described by the meeting’s speakers. The problem with the DNC, she said, was that everything said about poverty was racialized, and she felt her people were not represented. The now-small audience muttered, and Shannon listened politely then called the meeting to a close.
Despite political rhetoric slung to get elected, no party can take care of all people and all problems at once, and resources and time are limited. This was tacitly acknowledged by the DNC when they tried to quash the Council. How a Harris administration will settle into issues of poverty remains to be seen.
