In discussing white people who define their politics as fiscally conservative but socially liberal, McGhee notes that all poverty in the US could be eliminated by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts. Resistance to this expenditure is due in part to media’s representation of poverty as a Black issue, which distances the white collective from a problem they perceive as belonging to the Other. White people’s social liberalism thus more often manifests in “helping” a culture that is seen as deficient.
