White Privilege, White Poverty: Reckoning with Class and Race in America

This essay argues that a failure to think and talk critically and candidly about White privilege and White poverty is a key threat to the United States of America's precarious democracy. Whiteness frames one of America's most pressing collective challenges-the poor state of the nation's health, which lags behind other wealthy nations and is marred by deep and entrenched class- and race-based inequities. The broadscale remedies experts recommend demand what is in short supply: trust in evidence, experts, government, and one another. The authors' prescription is threefold, beginning with a call for intersectional health studies and reports that avoid one-dimensional misrepresentations of widespread health problems as simply Black or White problems. Second, there is the need for a "critical consciousness" about race and class. Lastly, the essay calls for widescale opportunities for Americans to engage in cross-racial and cross-class democratic conversations about their struggles and aspirations in search of common ground.