Abstract
This book could not be more timely. The recent economic crisis has brought renewed attention to the disparity between the rich and poor in the United States. While many people have been shocked by the economic crisis of recent times, activists like Baptist and Rehmann have been watching this crisis unfold and deepen since the 1970s. For those like them, and their allies in the poor people’s movement, there was no Wall Street boom of the 1980s or dot.com and real estate booms of the 1990s and 2000s; each of these booms for the rich merely meant an expansion of the ranks of the poor and a deepening crisis that Baptist and Rehmann consider to be “the defining issue of our times” (p. 1).
This book is a very important text for adult educators of all stripes, particularly those adult educators interested in social justice. The main goals and strengths of the text are to provide a theoretical framework to understand poverty and to chart a course for an educational project rooted in social movement building among the poor that can end poverty once and for all.
Baptist and Rehmann call their book a “hybrid text” because it combines an extended interview with Willie Baptist on his life and work as an African American activist and leader in various organizations and campaigns of the poor people’s movement with various theoretical approaches. These approaches are used to place Baptist’s life and activist experience in sociopolitical economic context. Specifically, the interview with Baptist is chronologically divided into Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 of the text. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter, while the even number Chapters 2 to 10 take up theories of poverty; the root cause of poverty; a case study on the social movement to stop water privatization in Highland Park, Michigan; Gramsci’s theory of hegemony; and Ideology and antipoverty movements. The last chapter is a summary of the specific pedagogical work and approach used by Baptist, Rehmann, and Liz Theoharis in their home base of operations in the Poverty Initiative at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Through personal experience I can attest to the fact that the structure of the book lends itself very well for classroom use, and I can imagine it would be effective in nonformal study group sessions as well. The extended interview provides the reader with a personal narrative entry point for each of the theoretical chapters. Readers, however, will quickly realize that the interview chapters with Baptist are filled with sophisticated reflective analyzes of his personal and political experiences of sharecropping as a child in the South to the 1965 Watts Uprising and later poor people’s movement organizing and leadership. In short, the interview chapters provide a short, critical history of working-class African American life and politics of the last two-thirds of the 20th century. Since the book is only 177 pages of actual text, the theoretical chapters are short and, by necessity, succinct and unintimidating. Nevertheless, the chapters on Gramsci and Althusser (ideology) are some of the clearest and most straightforward introductions to their challenging theoretical work I have encountered. The chapter on the root causes of poverty also provides a much-needed analysis that takes seriously the tremendous impact of new technologies in fundamentally transforming the sociopolitical economic realities of the past four decades.
As is probably already obvious, I highly recommend this text for adult educators in formal and nonformal sectors. It is a very readable and important analysis of the political economic trajectory of how we have come to be a highly polarized society, while also offering pedagogical practices, lessons, and concepts for movement building to end poverty through the creation of a socially just society.
I will end my review with a summary of some of the text’s major themes. Today’s growing multiracial sector of poor and dispossessed people represent the trajectory of society as a whole; the poor are not an identity group but rather define “where our society is headed” (p. 5). Poor people are capable of building and leading a movement to end poverty. For this movement to be effective, there must be a welding of serious practical action and serious theoretical analysis into a praxis that goes beyond a “dumbed-down” popular education for the oppressed and the pragmatic poor people mobilizing of the Alinsky, and Cloward and Piven traditions. Central to this praxis must be the leadership development of people from the movement itself. A pedagogy of the poor is not just for poor people but for everyone interested in building a just society; it is a process of “teaching as we fight, learning as we lead, talking as we walk” (p. 164).