Talks & Entertainment

As a teenager, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II recalls seeing Black mothers interviewed on TV whenever there was a story on food stamps or unemployment. Poverty, then as now, was depicted as an essentially Black problem. In White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, Rev. Barber—a Protestant minister, social activist, professor, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, and a leading advocate for the rights of our nation’s poor—addresses white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that might just be the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans.

Together with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, the assistant director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, Rev. Barber contends that the millions of America’s lowest-income earners have much in common and provides one of the most sympathetic and visionary approaches to endemic poverty in decades. Rev. Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove will be in conversation with Symone Sanders Townsend, the co-host of MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” a seasoned Democratic strategist, and the author of No, You Shut Up: Speaking Truth to Power and Reclaiming America.

Book signing to follow.