Being poor as a kid doesn’t always mean a hellish life. A lot of character is to be had when family stands by you, and encourages deep-seated values of love and compassion. I grew up poor, but it never felt like it. I always had a sense of fun and happiness as a kid and teenager – just never occurred to me that I might have been “underprivileged.” Oh yeah, I knew there were kids who lived in big fancy houses, and seemed to always have the latest and greatest. It just didn’t occur to me though that they were any “better off” than me, although I suspect these people “thought” they were better off.
The fact is, most kids in my community were considered “poor” by societal definitions of success. For some time, I have been thinking about the poor in my community, and how things have turned out for some as they grew older. Some of the poor are now rich. And I imagine some of the rich are now poor.
The most intriguing aspect of being a poor white in Georgia though is the collective feeling of superiority among this group. I wondered where on earth it came from so I did the only thing I knew to do: research. I found in Georgia’s history that very few Georgians were plantation owners with slaves – a very small percentage. That left a large population of poor whites who sharecropped and otherwise owed their livelihood to the product of slavery. However, this created a sort of tension between the haves and have-not’s so I believe it was in the best interest of the haves to manipulate the have-not’s so as to avoid an uprising by the poor class. Remember, back then there was no “middle class.”
This brought me to a conclusion that the poor whites were given a scapegoat that focused them away from the fact that there was a huge division between rich white and poor white, and that the few rich (minority) actually controlled everything. In its stark reality, if allowed to be shown, this would have been a very painful situation for the poor whites.
Oh – the scapegoat…black people. Poor whites were convinced by the upper crust that they were indeed superior to blacks, and this gave these folks their own “class” distinction. It remains to this day.
