Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

by Sarah Smarsh

In the United States, the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry in that it’s not necessarily about who or what you are—your skin color, the gender you’re attracted to, having a womb. Rather, it’s about what your actions have failed to accomplish—financial success within capitalism—and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy. Poor whiteness is a peculiar offense in that society imbues whiteness with power—not just by making it the racial norm next to which the rest are “others” but by using it as shorthand for economic stability. So while white people of all classes hate or fear people of color for their otherness, better-off whites hate poor whites because they are physically the same—a homeless white person uncomfortably close to a look in the mirror. A higher percentage of people of color are poor. Meanwhile, population numbers being what they are, in the United States there are more white people in poverty than any other group. These two facts exist simultaneously and are not in competition, but the way our country talks about class and race would have you believe that only one of them can be true.