At Confluence’s 2nd Annual Advisor’s Forum, Reverend Dr. Barber II detailed his organization, The Poor People’s Campaign, and their work with the current state of the political system, and more.
Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and national co-chair of the 2018 Poor People’s Campaign. He leads an alliance of more than 200 progressive organizations best known as “Moral Monday.” This coalition has led justice work in North Carolina for a decade and inspired organizing across the nation. The Washington Post called Barber’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention “the most engaging” of many strong ones. Dr. Barber was recognized as one of the International Black Achievers by the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool England and his portrait now hangs on the Black Achievers Wall in the Legacy gallery.
The Background
In searching for the “light with which to replace the darkness,” Barber took a three-month sabbatical. During this time, he met with a variety of spiritual leaders from various religious backgrounds and analyzed thousands of passages from religious texts to understand how to treat inequality. He also consulted a Nobel Prize–winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, to better understand the cost of inequality and what was holding the country hostage. "Who is NOT involved in this democracy? What's holding it back?" the Reverend asked rhetorically. "I wanted to answer that. Not just emotionally, I wanted to answer it empirically, so my emotions were driven by my thinking."
After three months of discussion and research, Barber had the framework for his latest book “On Moral Monday”. In the book, Barber identified 14 steps for organizing moral movements, including moral analysis, moral articulation, and moral action. “There’s not one progressive thing we believe in (i.e. women’s rights, social security, etc.) that, at some point, didn’t have a moral movement underneath it,” Barber observed.
Following the release of the book, Barber went on a 26-day tour to communities across the country to organize and teach the principles of moral movements. As part of his efforts, he helped found “MPOLIS,” Moral Political Organizing Leadership Institute and Summit, “designed to put religious leaders, impacted people, and advocates all in the same room and train them in three parts—moral analysis, moral articulation, moral activism.” He was actively working to build a movement from the bottom-up.
Barber recalled how he believed that a moral movement was necessary regardless of who won the 2016 presidential election. “This country needed a movement and there were some issues we needed to address. One person [candidate] might exacerbate the problem, but the problem was not just rooted in one person,” Barber said.
The Moral Audit
“I’m so sick of folk commemorating Dr. King,” Barber admitted, adding that the best way to honor martyrs and ‘people of the past who broke through’ is by continuing the work they began. “You go wherever they failed and reach down in the blood and pick up the baton and carry it another mile.” He said Dr. King’s moral movement was assassinated as soon as Kennedy and Dr. King were shot, but now the community needs to organize to finish what Dr. King started.
Barber knew that he had to find quantitative data if he was going to grow the cause, so he began to coordinate a state-by-state ‘moral audit’ of the U.S. “America understands auditing, so we got permission to audit,” Barber said. He assembled a team of experts and organizations to help with the process, including the Urban Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies, and other experts in economics.
The moral audit identified five interlocking injustices: systemic racism, systemic poverty, environmental devastation, the war economy, and the false narrative of religious nationalism.
Barber excluded cultural racism from the discussion. He explained that cultural racism historically has followed systemic racism and that the systemic issues needed to be dealt with to make an impact. The audit committee was able to develop a list of five penetration points to address systemic racism: voter suppression, mistreatment of immigrants, resegregation in high-poverty schools, mass incarceration, and continued oppression of native indigenous people on reservations. He also shared that he wanted to examine the racism of undermining allies.
The audit committee also wanted to address systemic poverty. “What is the real poverty and low-wealth reality in this country? Not what is the poverty level based on who is above the government's poverty line,” Barber explained, “if you are one hundred dollars above the poverty line, you are still poor and low wealth.”
Barber also briefly explained the history behind the fifth interlocking injustice–the false narrative of religious nationalism. Today’s right-wing religious nationalism can be traced back to the 1930s, when large corporations recruited evangelicals to promote a religious message that would protect capitalism and undermine societal support for FDR’s new deal. These corporations purchased the American pulpit to manipulate the general public by distorting the moral narrative, and Barber believes that this narrative continues to be the under-girders for most of the injustices today.
The Data
Revealing some shocking statistics about the state of impoverished demographics in this country, Barber shared, “For the last 50 years, we basically stopped talking about poverty in the public sphere.” Over 140 million people are living in poverty, over 43.5% of the population, including 66 million Caucasians and 26 million African Americans. Despite these startling figures, not one of the 26 presidential debates in 2016 touched on poverty. Essentially, 43% of the country did not even get a mention.
Barber called out the government on military spending. “We have a military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, [we’re spending] $700 billion a year. The average combat soldier makes $35,000 a year, the average CEO of a defense contracting company makes $19 million plus,” Barber stressed. “People are making a killing off of killing.” For every discretionary dollar that the government spends, 53 cents goes to the military and less than 15 cents on every dollar is going to infrastructure, health care, and public education. Again, none of the 2016 presidential debates touched on this topic.
Barber also discussed the federal minimum wage. “Sixty-two million people are working every day for less than a living wage and they are being subsidized by the government. These are people working everyday living in their cars, the majority of which are white people.” Barber explained that no one working for the federal minimum wage can even afford a basic two-bedroom apartment; most people would have to work 81 to 85 hours a week to afford that.
Barber believes interlocking injustices must be challenged by an intersectional response made up of all people of every race, gender, sexual orientation, and creed. He purported that progressives tend to get stuck in silos and that while silos are important, it is also important that they work toward the whole.
Making the argument that voter suppression policy is a precursor to social injustice and systemic racism, Barber showed a map of every state that had engaged in voter suppression or gerrymandering since 2010, 26 states in all. He explained that the states with racialized voter suppression policies are the same states with the highest poverty, and these states tend to elect the candidates that are antithetical towards fixing the issue. “People use race to get elected, but then, once they get elected, they hurt mostly poor white people,” Barber said. “That's the ugly irony, and that is the conversation we need to be having on the ground level." He added that progressive businesses should pull out of states that participate in voter suppression because those policies will inevitably lead to some form of social injustice.
Barber stressed the importance of engaging the impoverished and establishing a moral movement that changes the narrative in order to change the system. “The 140 million poor and low-wealth people hold the key to the transformation of this country,” he said. The last election was so close, he explained, that everyone who is concerned about the state of the system should really care about the people that are not participating in the political process, including those whose votes had been suppressed.
The Progress
In conclusion, Barber detailed the progress of the Moral Monday movement and the Poor People’s Moral Action Congress. Since its launch last year, over 5,000 people committed acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in 26 state capitals, including DC. The movement began with a bus tour, embedded with educational media, that makes 93 stops across 30 states. Over 30,000 people showed up for the campaign launch on June 30th of last year to commit themselves to the cause.
The group was even invited to speak to the House Budget Committee on Capitol Hill and spoke with several key politicians who promised to make poverty a debated issue in the 2020 election. The group’s work has culminated in the development of a ‘moral budget’ for the country, demonstrating how much the country could be improved with changes in spending.
“A democracy cannot survive when 140 million people, 43% of your population is living in poverty and low wealth,” Barber warned, adding that the opponents to progress “want to disable democracy, not destroy it.” However, the movement can prevail by taking the moral high ground and appealing to common values. America cannot survive if we do not address these five interlocking injustices. “It’s not the waking, it’s the rising. If you woke and are still in bed that is not enough.”
