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Abstract
Recovering critical voices from the black radical tradition, this essay highlights the links between poverty, racism, capitalism, and imperialism in contemporary U.S. politics. I analyze the 2012 election cycle and Obama's policies and initiatives on poverty during his first term and ask what we can expect in the future. Noting that insights from the black radical tradition are rarely discussed in national discourse, the poverty of American politics is revealed as an inability to hear this criticism, to see poverty in our midst, and to address the inevitable ills that are the result of capitalist economics and liberal democratic politics.
In spite of the fact that we have just elected our first black president for his second term in office, there is almost no national conversation about the likelihood that if you are a black American, you are statistically likely at some point in your life to live below or close to the poverty line. Indeed, links between poverty and race are astounding. Frederick Harris reports that "28 percent of African-Americans, and 37 percent of black children, are poor (compared with 10 percent of whites and 13 percent of white children); 13 percent of blacks are unemployed (compared with 7 percent of whites); more than 900,000 black men are in prison; 2 and blacks experienced a sharper drop in income since 2007 than any other racial group."3 A majority of black children currently live in low income families at risk of falling into poverty, and statistics show that black youth and their families are not experiencing recession, but rather a "silent depression."4
Silence reigns too on the fact that more than one in seven women live in poverty and over half of all poor children are in families headed by women.5 Statistics that measure changes since the Reagan years reveal the depressing reality of deepening inequality overall in the United States. Analyzing US Census reports, Andrew Hacker notices that since 1985, "the lower 60 percent of households have lost $4 trillion, most of which has ascended to the top 5 percent, including a growing tier now taking in $1 million or more each year.6
Poverty rates soar, inequality deepens, and Americans continue to disavow what is unfolding before our eyes: while increasing inequality...