CHAPTER 2

The Whiteness of Poverty Studies

Derogatory, racialized representations of those experiencing impoverishment permeate U.S. popular culture, research findings, and policy debates. These representations are powerful drivers of ongoing public resentment, disgust, and even hatred toward those constructed as poor. While President Biden caught himself and followed up with an accounting of difference among those who experience impoverishment, this (mis)statement reflects widely held presumptions in popular culture about whiteness and success in the United States. Research on public assistance further demonstrates that white people are reluctant to support welfare funding, despite majority usage of benefits by white people, because they imagine those constructed as racial others as primary recipients—people they understand as undeserving or threatening. These quotes are the tip of the proverbial iceberg of the ways in which toxic ideas about “poor people” and “poverty” circulate in popular culture and broadly held social imaginaries in North America. We argue that liberal, social-science poverty studies reproduce hegemonic white-supremacist arguments about inequality and injustice, and as such, this form of poverty knowledge and practice must be disorganized and abolished.

Liberal poverty studies refers to ontological, material, and governance projects that rely on the construction of a poverty object: constructed variously as a measure, a social category, and/or a state of being (Dean 1991). This poverty object is rendered abundantly in the “poverty industry,” which includes academic and policy work on poverty in the United States (and other North Atlantic states), a flourishing of expertise and activism addressing constructions of global poverty, as well as popular culture and political discourse (Roy et al. 2016). In the United States, the problem of poverty is “solved” through incorporation into racial-capitalist economies for subjects who conform to universalized norms of Eurocentric whiteness, individual responsibility, and meritorious behavior (Schram 2000; Gustafson 2011). These logics of incorporation are rationalized through discourses of individual freedom, meritocracy, and choice, and people experiencing impoverishment are represented as in need of reform, threatening, and/or criminal and therefore utterly removable (O’Connor 2001; Hancock 2004). In this move to either reform or exclude racialized and dispossessed people, the question of poverty is rendered technical and apolitical through ontological moves that categorize people in terms of degrees of self-improvement, property ownership, personal responsibility, morality, and comportment (Gustafson 2011; Bhandar 2018). Poverty then, as a concept, trope, and social category, judges, demeans, and does violence to persons framed as “less than” by adversely incorporating them into racial capitalism. In these ways, poverty studies validates the imaginary of a liberal state and society made up of rational subjects with “free choice” to participate and succeed.

In the United States, this poverty object has historically been a condition of possibility for the construction of a universal whitened liberal subject. Within Western democracies this subject is argued to hold equal rights for participation in public and political life (Elwood, Lawson, and Sheppard et al. 2017; Rancière 2004; Balibar 1991; Read 2007). However, this idealized citizen is universalized through norms of whiteness and middle classness that construct an imaginary of equal opportunity when in actuality white power is constructed on a logic of racialized difference and devaluation that is essential to the operation of racial capitalism (Goldstein 2012; Million, personal communication, 2018). In this way, poverty studies reinscribes the paradox of liberal governance (here traced through U.S. welfare state practices), resting on the claim of a “universal subject” who upholds the seeming morality of (exclusionary) property and citizenship rights while simultaneously U.S. racial capitalism rests on loss, disposability, and the differentiation of human value, rooted in claims of white superiority. Racial capitalism rests on the expropriation of labor, land, and resources, but equally fundamentally capitalism requires social separateness—the delegitimation and deactivation of collective relations between people and lands/places—in order to make dispossession, exploitation, and premature death justifiable (Gilmore 2002; Reddy 2011). As Melamed (2015, 77) argues, “Most obviously, [capitalism] does this by displacing the uneven life chances that are inescapably part of capitalist social relations onto fictions of differing human capacities, historically race.” Settler colonialism relies on a violent redefinition of land as property, as a commodity that can be individually held/titled and separated from Indigenous communities (Goldstein 2017; Coulthard 2014). The U.S. settler-colonial project denationalizes tribes and minoritizes Indigenous people within the liberal settler nation-state, breaking relations of collectivity and relationality with the more-than-human world. As such, settler-colonial relations produce loss of sovereignty and lands, continually reproducing inequality and social devaluation by deploying individualizing ideologies of propertied personhood as a basis for liberal (differential) inclusion and exclusion.

Central to our argument here, U.S. liberal poverty knowledge contributes to the sustenance of white supremacy through twinned emphases on seeming inadequacies and needs for reform of racialized persons. This ontological move to categorize those experiencing impoverishment as “the problem,” and hence socially devalued, reinscribes a white-supremacist racial hierarchy that posits the “inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-white people, an ideology that was used to justify the crimes against indigenous people and Africans that created the nation” (Jensen 2005, 3–4). In framing the supposed solution to poverty as aspiring to become idealized, whitened, middle-class citizen-subjects, poverty knowledge perpetuates white supremacy in the United States. Centering this poverty concept is an ontological-political move that justifies white supremacy by obscuring the operations of racial capitalism—rooted in the historical and ongoing dispossessions of stolen lands and stolen labor that are foundational causes of racialized differentiation and impoverishment. We argue that the “whiteness of poverty studies” encompasses both foundational ontological-political moves in liberal poverty theory and epistemological moves that continue to center and reproduce them in poverty knowledge making. We argue that the whiteness of poverty studies is produced and sustained in interconnected registers of theory and practice and, in so doing, upholds white supremacy.

We illustrate this argument in two ways. In the second section we show how the ontologies of liberal poverty knowledge inflect poverty policies in the contemporary United States and reinscribe white supremacy by securing political and cultural systems that support material advantages of whiteness and class privilege. In the third section we trace how the whiteness of liberal poverty studies is secured through epistemological relations of poverty knowledge making that remain tethered to the racial limits of liberal poverty knowledge. Critiquing our long-term relational poverty research agenda, we show how our theoretical-political project of shifting poverty analysis toward relational thinking remained tethered to white liberal poverty ontologies and modes of incorporation because we failed to apprehend the racial limits to the concept of poverty. Our theoretical origins in Marxist feminist structural relationality did not go far enough, failing to center racialization as a (violent) ontological foundation of settler-colonial personhood in the United States. We show how our epistemological reflexes—conditioned by the enduring white supremacy of U.S. academia, our own structural privilege, and our efforts to reform the poverty concept—ensured that we continued to not recognize (or be challenged for) the ways in which our work reproduced the whiteness of poverty studies.

Finally, the fourth section outlines an urgent politics of building knowledge otherwise to challenge disciplining and white-supremacist frames. We argue for accountable relationality as a sustained practice of critique that apprehends the whiteness of theorizing and abolishes the poverty concept to instead center racial capitalism as a violent foundation of material-social inequalities. In so doing, accountable relationality interrupts the everyday workings of structural/institutional racism in academia that perpetuates enactments of white supremacy. Dismantling the whiteness of poverty studies requires theorizing and interrogating our own participation in modes of thought that make and remake the ontological objects and ways of knowing that sustain white supremacy in the academy and society writ large. We humbly offer this essay as an example of our own ongoing work, even as we are also aware that we make clueless oversights and ask wrongheaded questions. Sustained critique of our own knowledge project is one way of being in accountable relation with colleagues who have prompted us repeatedly to recognize the limits of the poverty concepts and to theorize the ways in which the whiteness of poverty studies upholds racial capitalism and white supremacy. Yet this approach is fraught with wicked tensions. Critical analysis of our own limits and learning is a crucial part of dismantling the whiteness of poverty studies, yet inevitably runs the risk of seeming to celebrate our growth. However, interrogating our journey allows us to trace the possibilities of unlearning poverty in accountable relation. Most fundamentally, our chapter argues that disrupting our investments in white supremacy starts by understanding that our apparatuses for knowing inequality and social justice are actually drivers of racial capitalism.

White Supremacy Advanced through Liberal Poverty Studies

The whiteness of liberal, social-scientific poverty studies stems from what this knowledge project both avows and simultaneously disavows. Liberal poverty knowledge diagnoses poverty as failure to self-actualize, failure to achieve the propertied personhood of the idealized citizen-subject (Bhandar 2018; Roy 2017). The remedy avowed by this diagnosis is reform and differential incorporation of those named as poor. This partial incorporation and management of impoverished subjects is central to the stability of the U.S. ideological project of liberalism built on meritocracy, individualism, property ownership, and white supremacy. White supremacy refers to a system of taken-for-granted, unremarked, and hegemonic societal domination through claims of the normative superiority of whiteness that produces material benefits for white people in sites such as the law, property ownership, political power, claims for rights, and more (Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1995). Within this system, white-supremacist norms, values, and beliefs are framed as if universal but are actually enjoined to white people in particular times and places (Jensen 2016; Gillborn 2005; Bonds and Inwood 2016). Our usage of “white supremacy” departs from the contemporary harnessing of the term to white-nationalist violence manifest in mass shootings and explicit visibility of white-nationalist racism in U.S. popular culture (see Gilroy 1993 on the vital importance of this distinction). “Supremacy” is significant because it directs attention to the sustained historical project of racial capitalism that, in the U.S. context, accrues value to whiteness.

We argue that liberal poverty theory, and the interventions it authorizes, perpetuates whiteness to resolve the inherent tension between the liberal claim of universal rights to property as the basis of social life and the imperatives of racial capitalism in the United States. In making this argument, we do not center whiteness as identity, nor do we see whiteness as an ahistorical, stable ontological object. Rather, U.S. white supremacy is a historically specific resolution of the paradox of liberal governance. Namely, that liberal governance rests on the claim of “universal propertied personhood,” while simultaneously U.S. racial capitalism rests on loss, disposability, and the differentiation of human value. We argue here that liberal poverty studies solidifies projects of differential social valuation and contributes to the stabilization of a racial caste system of social control in the United States, produced, historically and today, through the distinct but intertwined projects of racial capitalism and settler colonialism (Cacho 2012; Byrd et al. 2018; Simpson 2017; Coulthard 2014; Gilmore 2002; Alexander 2010).

Differential social valuation operates through modes of government that establish which subjects have the right to claim rights, full personhood, and political voice/power. Impoverishment arises from racial-capitalist social relations that must differentiate owners from workers and, simultaneously, workers from indigents. Historical and ongoing dispossessions transform impoverished, racialized persons into a binary of wage laborer or indigent, while poverty governance frames moral social life through personal responsibility to provide for a patriarchal family (Dean 1991). This historical binary of wage laborer/indigent manifests today in framings of deserving/undeserving, law abiding/criminal, legal/illegal, decent/disgusting, each of which assigns social value through a distinction between subjects who are in a position to have made the “free choice” to sell their labor and those who are not, or cannot be, in waged work. The idea of poverty rests on assumptions that social value (full personhood) is conferred by being a wage worker and/or recognition by the state as a property owner with rights to hold or profit from property (Roy 2017). Precisely because of the liberal ideology that all people hold “free choice” to be a wage worker or to own property, chronically unemployed or vulnerably employed persons, who are disproportionately poor people of color, are unable to establish the root causes of their impoverishment in racial discrimination (Cacho 2012; Jensen 2016). That is, within U.S. liberal conceptions of impoverishment, modes of propertied personhood that have been historically limited to white people are framed as universal. Social value came to be defined in white middle-class terms that construct racialized, impoverished persons as “the problem” in need of reform, while simultaneously defining legitimate personhood through their very exclusion.

The whiteness of contemporary U.S. poverty studies rests on its commitment to these conceptions of propertied personhood and racialized social value that ensure that whiteness confers material advantages and is protected as a form of property. That is, whiteness is not an ontology but the effect of repeatedly enacted commitments to the ideological and institutional forms that enable racialized devaluation and dispossession. The benefits of whiteness are secured through the mundane workings of institutions and through normative tenets of liberal poverty studies (competitive individualism, meritocracy, fairness, “equal” opportunity, and so on) that protect whiteness and white people, while simultaneously seeming to appear detached from processes of racialized dispossession. Countless U.S. policies and institutional practices operate social safety net programs; the law / criminal justice, housing, taxation, banking, and employment systems operate in ways that protect white people (and further deny and remove material benefits from people of color). The material advantages of whiteness accrue through the impoverishment of BIPOC people: Black unemployment is twice the rate for white people (Wilson 2019); Black people in the United States have a poverty rate 15 percentage points higher than the rate for white people, and for Native Americans this rate is 16.5 percentage points higher (Hymowitz 2019); the wage gap between white and Black people has grown significantly since 2000 (Gould 2019), and rates of Black homeownership have dropped dramatically since 2001 (Goodman, McCargo, and Zhu 2018). These racialized experiences of life in the United States result from structures, processes, and institutions organized around a “possessive logic” of whiteness that reproduces white domination, entitlement, ownership, and control (Moreton-Robinson 2015; Alcoff 1998; Sleeter 1996; Jensen 2016).

Liberal poverty studies and policies/programs rest on racialized dispossession, and this violent ontology of racialized social value judges and demeans racialized dispossessed persons who are constructed as “poor and deficient.” This in turn sustains the liberal poverty discourse of “fairness” and “deservingness,” measured by the successes of white society. There are innumerable examples of racialized social devaluation within poverty policy and poverty theory. For instance, reforms to the social safety net over the past four decades have focused on reducing access to assistance rather than addressing the root causes of the need for assistance. Reducing access for those in need requires justification, typically delivered through racist and gendered judgments about who is impoverished and why. One striking example of social devaluation lives in toxic renditions of the “welfare queen” trope that dominated public debates around the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) and constructed welfare recipients as Black, morally bankrupt, disgusting women (Schram 2000). The persistence of this trope is rooted in discourses about Black women developed during slavery and still pervasive within the U.S. white-supremacist racial hierarchy. Hancock (2004, 26) argues that the “stereotype of Black women as bad mothers dates to slavery, when the terms ‘Jezebel’ and ‘Mammy’ represented oversexed and asexual women respectively . . . who shared in common neglect of their own children, in favor of having sex (the ‘Jezebel’) or tending the master’s children (the ‘Mammy’).” Constructing Black women in need of social assistance as “welfare queens” continues this theme of “bad parenting” and delegitimizes them as interlocutors with rights and voice. As Sparks (2003, 172) argues, “Welfare recipients who opposed any part of the reforms . . . were portrayed as troublemakers, not as citizens who might have important insights into public policy.” This toxic rhetoric ensured that women of color receiving welfare could not be respected interlocutors in the debate because they had been judged against white, middle-class norms and found deficient (see also Schram 2000).

These forms of racialized social devaluation are produced and sustained by social-scientific poverty studies research. Researchers reinforce the rationales for punitive and restrictive welfare policies, rarely challenging their theoretical foundation: that the idealized liberal citizen-subject rests on the normalization of whitened, middle-class, propertied personhood. A classic example is the Chicago School, which located impoverishment in (deficient, immoral, racialized) bodies and behaviors, a theoretical assertion of the supposedly lesser social value of racialized persons that misapprehends residential segregation and forced mobilities as “natural succession” rather than as modes of racialized (dis)possessions (Park and Burgess 1925; for a critique, see Baldwin and Crane 2020). Daniel Moynihan, a sociologist by training, commissioned the groundbreaking report titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” while assistant secretary of labor. This report was pivotal in shaping poverty policy while framing “the problem of poverty” as destructive “ghetto” culture and family “dysfunction” rather than structural oppressions (Moynihan 1965). Subsequent social-scientific poverty work perpetuates related theoretical claims, such as connecting impoverishment, racialization, and criminality (Wilson 1987; Murray 1985) or evaluating the effectiveness of “deconcentration of poverty” and “social mix” programs (Cisneros and Engdahl 2009; Levy, McDade, and Bertumen 2011). These studies represent a vast body of work that reinscribes the unremarked individualized, white, middle-class, propertied subject as the norm. Liberal poverty theory has long understood impoverished, racialized people as flawed and in need of reform while obscuring the basis of “poverty” itself in racialized understandings of who has rights to hold property.

These theorizations directly animate U.S. poverty policy. For instance, the passage of PRWORA further solidified the white-supremacist racial hierarchy through dramatic restrictions on social assistance and requirements that poor parents work outside the home, while doubling down on the narrative that impoverished persons are racialized, oversexed, and criminal. Pittman (2015) analyzes how access to social assistance is framed around white middle-class nuclear family norms of parenting that, in turn, devalue Black family life. These policies ignore the mass incarceration of African American men (who are made to be absent parents), the disproportionate removal of Black children by the child welfare system, and the deep poverty experienced by African American families. This social milieu leads many Black grandmothers to assume primary parental roles for their grandchildren, even as they remain unrecognized as legitimate beneficiaries of social assistance. Cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, child care subsidies, and housing vouchers all exclude grandmothers from benefits that recognize their parental roles. This is justified on the basis of white, middle-class, nuclear family norms that intensify racialized intergenerational poverty for Black families while simultaneously framing these families as deficient and irresponsible. Liberal poverty knowledge constructs racialized persons as deficient for not conforming, while the social, political, and economic context makes this impossible. Then, having constructed their lesser social value on white, middle-class criteria, liberal actors and policies punish racialized persons for not meeting these norms. The ongoing making of this kind of poverty knowledge and policy is a direct outcome of the social devaluation of racialized persons (Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015).

These forms of social devaluation reproduce and justify a racial caste system in the United States (Cacho 2012; Alexander 2010). This racial caste system secures white power through such institutions as the criminal justice, social safety net, banking/finance, and education systems, which exclude racialized persons from voting rights and access to work, food, housing assistance property, education, and career opportunities. Alexander (2010) shows how the criminal justice system reproduces racial discrimination through racial profiling, disproportionate police violence, extreme sentencing laws, and the exclusionary treatment of persons with criminal and felony convictions. One in three African Americans born today will be incarcerated during their lives (Wilson 2019), and incarceration stretches well beyond literal imprisonment, including systems of surveillance, control, and marginalization through parole, future ineligibility for social safety net benefits, and social stigma. Liberal poverty discourse and practice reproduces this racial caste system by regulating and criminalizing the sexual, family, working, and civic lives of people experiencing impoverishment. For instance, the 1996 passage of PRWORA explicitly created a racial undercaste to appeal to white swing voters. In the midst of a punitive war on drugs targeting communities of color, the new law instituted a lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare cash assistance, food stamps, and public housing “for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense, including simple possession of marijuana” (Alexander 2010, 57). The very possibility of these ongoing intimate connections between criminal justice systems and liberal poverty policies arises from discursive equivalences between poverty and criminality. Gustafson (2011) elaborates on the ongoing complementary operations of the welfare and criminal justice systems. Liberal poverty policy criminalizes people in need of social assistance through programs such as Operation Talon, which requires welfare recipients’ personal data to be released to law enforcement upon request. Welfare offices are sites for law enforcement sting operations targeting persons with outstanding warrants, and biometric data are shared between welfare and criminal justice systems.¹ In all these ways the welfare system, supposedly created to support people in need, has become an extension of the criminal justice system, and poverty policy continues to punish people of color (Gustafson 2011; Eubanks 2018).

Twinned projects of social devaluation and racialized social control are at work not just in liberal poverty policies and governance but also in persistent reinscriptions of white supremacy in institutions of research and education. Poverty knowledge is forged in what Ybarra (2019) terms “historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs),” at research conferences that require knowledge to be performed through Western/colonial norms to be recognized as legitimate (Hunt 2013; Rodriguez 2017), and by academic societies that do not recognize or intervene in racist structures of exclusion (Moser, Hendricks, and Vives 2017). In all these sites of knowledge making, white supremacy is reproduced through projects of differential incorporation of racialized persons (Peake and Kobayashi 2002; Pulido 2002; Baldwin and Crane 2020). For instance, Arday (2018) traces experiences of anti-Blackness within the academy, showing how normative whiteness is perpetuated in curricula, reading lists, hiring and promotion decisions, and microaggressions that devalue his presence as a Black man and subject him to frequent violence. Patton and Jordan (2017) and Gusa (2010) demonstrate ways in which scholars of color are delegitimized and silenced by the white-supremacist logics, norms, and practices of universities, recognized only if they conform to white institutional norms and rules.

These institutional conditions ensure that liberal poverty knowledge is made and enacted in brutally white spaces created by systemic racialized removals. In universities and research centers, academics, policy makers, and program administrators are inscribed in—and often personally advantaged by—systems that routinely devalue the voices and experiences of racialized, impoverished people. The whiteness of poverty studies and policies is continuously (re)produced not just by theoretical concepts but also by their enactment in laws, policies, and actions that demean, disadvantage, and dispossess racialized persons. There is an intimate relationship between the making of poverty knowledge in racialized institutions and racialized dispossession resulting from the knowledge they disseminate.

The Whiteness of Theorizing: Reproducing Possessive Investments in Whiteness

We set out the whiteness of theory—the concepts that obscure the origins of “poverty” in racialized dispossession and propertied personhood, and the ways these are enacted through laws, policies, and institutional workings that reproduce white supremacy. As Rinaldo Walcott (2016) notes, “Questions coming from Whiteness carry with them the intimate seeds of the brutalities of their very asking. . . . There is a long history of whiteness framing questions . . . in ways that seek to replicate the brutalities of White imposition.” Here, we turn to the whiteness of theorizing. That is, whiteness is always also epistemological—a way of knowing embedded in relations that are calibrated for white supremacy. Walcott points to relations of white imposition and violence enacted through knowledge-making practices as mundane as posing clueless questions. We take up this thread, arguing that the whiteness of liberal poverty studies is secured through epistemological relations in everyday knowledge making that allow the racial limits of liberal poverty studies to remain unseen and unchallenged (by some). We trace these operations of whiteness through our own theorizing, drawing examples from the conceptual evolution and transformation of our relational poverty research. We tell this story to demonstrate our own efforts to move toward more accountable relations of knowledge making. We revisit our research questions and analyses that allowed status quo white supremacy at the heart of liberal poverty theory to remain untroubled. We argue that this is not only a problem of theory (though it certainly is that as well) but a consequence of the relentless workings of whiteness in the making of poverty knowledge. This analysis does not resituate us as “good white people” (Griffin 1998; Applebaum 2010) nor suggest that the racial limits of poverty thought can be addressed through individual white self-criticality. Rather, by exposing how the whiteness of theorizing allows the racial toxicity of the poverty concept to remain unchallenged, we show that dismantling the whiteness of poverty studies requires reorienting not only our theoretical claims but also the epistemological relations of our theorizing.

Feminist and antiracist scholars argue that systemic and structural positions within white supremacy not only enable material advantage, possession, and taking but produce whiteness as a “site of opacity” (Yancy 2014). That is, conferred domination, self-segregation, and assumptions of superiority perpetually reenlist white-identified people in affirming white norms and practices, while also allowing them to refuse to recognize how these norms and practices perpetuate white supremacy (Mills 2007; Sullivan and Tuana 2007; Gusa 2010; DiAngelo 2011; Teel 2014; Yancy 2014). Variably named as white cluelessness (Teel 2014), white racial ignorance (Mills 2007), white fragility (DiAngelo 2011), or epistemological ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana 2007), this work focuses on whiteness as an epistemological orientation that is continuously made and remade through persistent refusal to recognize white supremacy and myriad forms of racialized exclusion. That is, white epistemological ignorance generates everyday practices of denying racial oppression and recentering white power. Other scholars connect these epistemological reflexes directly to propertied personhood, noting how “white logics of possession” include routine habits of thought in which white-identified people engage everything as ours/theirs to consume, with little to no awareness of having done so (Lipsitz 1995; Bonds 2019). We use these propositions to illuminate how U.S. poverty knowledge making functions as a racializing apparatus—continually reinforcing the whiteness of liberal poverty studies, even in research that adopts a critical orientation to it. Through analysis of our own relational poverty research agenda, we trace the whiteness of our theorizing—epistemological reflexes that continuously overlook the foundation of the poverty concept in white supremacy and racialized dispossession. These reflexes are maintained through white institutional dominance, and for white-identified scholars aiming to critique poverty studies, this continual reinscription of epistemological ignorance poses a persistent tension: whiteness is simultaneously a focus of critical inquiry and the obstacle to that criticality.

As white-identified middle-class women, we are subjects and beneficiaries of propertied personhood and white supremacy, in the academy and in society at large. Our middle-classness rests on parents’ uneven but generally upward mobilities in the United States and the United Kingdom. They and we benefit from structures calibrated to ensure white supremacy—the GI Bill, mortgage lending, labor protections and benefits in white-dominated sectors of employment and education, and much more. Our trajectories as scholars are marked by access to elite schooling through “merit”-based subsidies whose markers of “merit” rested upon mechanisms of racialized differentiation and removal (for instance, scholarships based on standardized testing that advantages white students, disproportionate exclusion of students of color from financial aid for higher education). These same systems mark our careers as academics: rapid trajectories through graduate education into secure tenure-track positions, quick promotion to greater job security and higher pay, and consistent access to stable housing. We have learned, researched, and taught in white-dominated universities produced through removals of people of color via the school-to-prison pipeline, racial disproportionality in student debt, institutional racism in hiring, promotion, and tenure, the ill health consequences that accrue from everyday aggressions, and more (Smith 2009; Scott-Clayton and Li 2016; Lee and Hicken 2016; Arday 2018; Johnson 2018). We have experienced precarity and (micro)aggressions as women, and one of us as a lesbian, but at the intersection of middle-classness and whiteness, these experiences have been episodic and mitigated by powerful allies. In short, our lives and scholarly work are thoroughly inscribed in the very structures and institutions of liberalism that conceal white supremacy and racial dispossession behind false promises of equal access and individual merit, in liberal poverty studies and poverty policy. As we show below, our theorizing and its institutional contexts have reflected and sustained these dynamics: even as we critiqued liberal tenets of poverty governance, we failed to theorize the racial limits of “poverty” as a concept, even when directly asked to do so.

Much of our scholarship over the past decade has centered on articulating relational theorizations of impoverishment, framing a field of “geographical relational poverty studies,” and coalescing a community of critical scholars through the Relational Poverty Network. Our research has, for example, explored the poverty politics enacted by middle-class people, asking when, where, and why they apprehend structural processes of impoverishment and forge pro-poor politics, work toward inclusive social policy, and fight against poverty governance and the divisive narratives that legitimize it (Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015; Lawson and Elwood 2014). We proposed geographical relationality as an analytical framework for revealing the limits to liberal poverty studies, arguing that relational sociospatial ontologies, antiessentialist modes of explanation, and boundary-crossing dialogic processes as modes of thought and action offer a basis for repoliticizing poverty beyond these limits (Elwood, Lawson, and Sheppard 2017). Most recently, we have theorized relations between “thinkable” poverty politics of governance and differential incorporation and “unthinkable” poverty politics: restless, unruly tactics, meanings, and claims that refuse the terms of prevailing racial-capitalist social and economic orders (Lawson and Elwood 2018).

Throughout, our concept of relational poverty animated a limited form of relational analysis that emphasizes Marxian feminist structural analysis and simultaneously elides the centrality of racialization (Hickey 2009; Mosse 2010; O’Connor 2001; St. Clair and Lawson 2013). From this conceptual vantage point we focused on material exploitation to understand impoverishment, but without sufficient attention to the ways in which the human differentiations necessary to capitalism rely on racialization. Our analyses have been oriented around theoretical claims that perpetuated (or at best left unchallenged) the persistent whiteness of theory in poverty studies. At the broadest level, our relational poverty theorizing has been a knowledge project oriented toward “reforming” poverty studies through relational analysis—without recognizing, as we argued above, that the poverty concept originates in racial violence. We continued to center “poverty,” in effect leaving unquestioned the whiteness of liberal poverty studies. We theorized systems of racial differentiation and control as simply one of many intersecting processes producing impoverishment (along with class relations, gendering, and so on). Paradoxically, even as we critiqued poverty studies, we reproduced its liberal erasures, for instance in our analysis of middle-class poverty politics. This work began from the proposition that middle-class people’s attitudes and responses to impoverishment could be key sites for disrupting divisive cultural politics and forging cross-class coalitions fighting for inclusive social policy (Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015; Lawson et al. 2015). This assumption is replete with epistemological reflexes that persistently fail to see white supremacy at work in the U.S. liberal regime: theorizing liberal antipoverty policies as inclusive requires overlooking their systemic racial limits, such as the exclusion of (largely Black) agricultural and domestic workers from the 1935 Social Security Act and de facto state investments in securing material advantages of whiteness. Related to this, our hopeful orientation to cross-class alliance politics rests on epistemological ignorance of the racial limits of incorporation politics. Theorizing cross-class alliance as a site of transformative poverty politics is possible only by leaving untheorized the role of the liberal state in racial violence and the state’s continued role in facilitating middle-class people’s possessive investments in whiteness. Even as we sought to critique liberal poverty studies, our relational poverty theorizing continued to reinscribe whiteness, relying upon theoretical assumptions and omissions that ensure the reproduction of white supremacy, even as it is held out of view (for some).

These theoretical exclusions are reinforced in everyday encounters of poverty knowledge making (reviewer comments, presentation Q&As, invitations to collaborative projects) within institutions that have systematically removed people of color and persistently devalued them as less legitimate interlocutors in academic knowledge production (Arday 2018; Johnson 2018). Reviews of our National Science Foundation proposal that built the Relational Poverty Network critiqued the proposed network for having no sociologists represented when in fact sociologists of color from Argentina and South Africa were listed. They were not seen as adequately representing the discipline. Only when white sociologists from the United States were added to the proposal was this work funded. At the time, we read this critique as national chauvinism, but we now consider it also as an example of seeing people of color as invisible or illegitimate knowledge makers in the U.S. academy. Peer reviews of our theorization of relational poverty urged us to double down on the poverty concept rather than interrogating its normative liberal foundations in whiteness and class privilege (Elwood, Lawson, and Sheppard 2017). Specifically, one reviewer asked, “Is there something though about ‘poverty’ . . . that makes relationality more thinkable,” urging us to more boldly elaborate this linkage. This question reinforces the whiteness of poverty studies: it urged us to double down on centering “poverty” rather than asking us to (as colleague Dian Million later did) call out the racial violence of that very concept. In academic knowledge-making practices such as grant seeking and publishing, possessive investments in whiteness are reinscribed by prioritizing white scholars and reproducing the normative power of a liberal, whitened poverty concept.

The whiteness of academic knowledge production and white institutional dominance also leads to certain questions being left unasked or inadequately answered. For instance, we have rarely been asked questions that built a racialized critique of our relational poverty framing. When such questions were posed, not only did we not recognize what was being asked, we responded in ways that recentered the whiteness of poverty theory. For instance, when presenting our middle-class poverty politics work on racialized place making in a HOPE VI development, we were asked a question that invited us to recognize the foundational anti-Blackness on which socially engineered mixed-income neighborhood projects rest. We responded with a class analysis that did not recognize the always already racialized workings of class politics (Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015). In this moment, we failed to grasp the centrality of racialization to the conception of who is constructed as poor and excluded within that neighborhood. In another example of questions ignored, as we invited colleagues to join our book theorizing relational poverty politics, those who study radical politics of racialized dispossessed groups consistently told us that their work wasn’t about “poverty.” We reiterated our structural analyses of class and inequality and theorized their work as unthinkable poverty politics—essentially recentering a white liberal framing of poverty. Rereading these quotidian encounters illustrates some forms that white logics of possession take in everyday theorizing and how the whiteness of poverty studies is sustained. When colleagues of color directly refused the concept of poverty, our practical and intellectual response was to inscribe them into our whitened theorization of relationality, an epistemological reflex that stabilizes the whiteness of poverty studies.

We trace how the whiteness of our theorizing was expressed as a set of theoretical silences that critiqued, but nonetheless upheld, liberal poverty theory ultimately reinscribing white supremacy. Scholars like us are the legible and materially advantaged subjects of the racial ontologies of liberal personhood and the systems of governance, violence, and removal that uphold them. This institutionalization of white supremacy in the academy enables white epistemological ignorance that is reproduced and rewarded in the everyday relations of poverty theorizing. We expose how the whiteness of liberal poverty theory is ensured through epistemological regimes of poverty knowledge making, the inscription of scholars like us into them, and institutional conditions that allow the whiteness of theorizing to remain unchallenged (or refused and unrecognized). This apparatus makes and remakes the enduring whiteness of poverty studies. Our analysis underscores the urgency of not only reorienting our theoretical objects/claims but also fundamentally transforming the relations of knowledge making toward accountable relations that set the conditions of possibility for theorizing otherwise.

Toward Accountable Relationality and Building Knowledge Otherwise

Liberal poverty studies sustain white supremacy in the U.S. academy and society. This leads us to two claims. First, the liberal poverty concept must be abolished, as we have argued throughout this chapter. Second, knowledge must instead be made through practices of accountable relationality. This concept arises from Black queer ethics—an ontological-political project of forging subjects and relations outside of white-supremacist and heteropatriarchal structures of life and personhood (Young 2016). Accountable relationality involves sustained critique of one’s own “theoretical and personal connections” to these violent structures/relations, as a basis for being and knowing otherwise (Young and Miller 2015, 292). For white scholars and liberal poverty studies, the ontological-political work of accountable relationality means naming and challenging white-supremacist, settler-colonial, racial-capitalist, and heteropatriarchal formations that produce social injustice and impoverishment and interrogating how these formations shape our own theoretical and structural embeddedness in these very systems. In this essay, a critical examination of our relational poverty work has revealed how we refused to recognize the racial limits to our white Marxian and feminist analyses and the ways that our possessive investments in whiteness secured our positions in white-supremacist institutions and knowledge production. Accountable relational theorizing insists on the centrality of racialized difference to histories and presents of capitalist and settler-colonial oppressions.

Accountable relationality is also an epistemological orientation to building knowledge otherwise that entails scholars becoming agents of change and engaging in forms of immanent critique that undo white privilege. Creating transformative educational spaces begins from posing, hearing, and responding to critical questions about our relations to white supremacy, racial capitalism, and propertied personhood. But it goes far beyond: transforming academic spaces through accountable relationality is an ethics, a politics, and an ongoing practice of analyzing embodied present histories of racialized social life and building knowledge with scholars of color and racialized, dispossessed communities (Byrd et al. 2018). For scholars like us, accountable relationality means learning how to think and act in sustained critical tension with white supremacy because this establishes conditions for reflexive, critical, care-full questioning that builds “the intimacies of being and being-together from which new worlds arise” (McTighe 2018).

These intimacies of being together have involved critical, generous, and sustained engagements from antiracist thinkers that have pushed us to transform our theoretical-political trajectory. Black-, Latinx-, and Indigenous-identified colleagues have insistently posed questions from outside the liberal limits of poverty studies, with a commitment to both rupture the whiteness of our theory and challenge us to recognize our own possessive investments in it. Students in our graduate seminars have noted the racial limits to our theoretical affinities, identifying our enthusiasm for “alliance politics” as calibrated to liberal, thinkable structures of inclusion that rest upon racial unthinkability. They have called out our political optimism as rooted in liberal presumptions of incorporation into norms of morality, middle classness, and individual responsibility that ultimately uphold white supremacy. One discussant of Relational Poverty Politics pointed out that our theorization of “unthinkable poverty politics” ignored long histories of Black radical thought and social movements (Miller 2018). Another colleague noted that by centering “poverty,” even critically, we foreclose theorizations of inequality arising from Indigenous ontologies and do violence to community and life-land interconnections that are fundamental to living well (Million, personal communication, 2018). We learn the theoretical and political limits of our prior conceptualizations of relationality through these repeated care-full critiques by colleagues who challenge us to disrupt our white frames of knowing.

Accountable relationality is the generative space where engaged critique and epistemological humility come together. The critique of our omission of Black radicalism is also an invitation to apprehend the possessive whiteness of our theoretical claims about relational poverty politics. By seeming to “discover” what was there all along, as a basis for claiming our own theoretical innovations, we were sustaining white supremacy in the academy. Our colleagues’ supportive rebukes and pointed invitations to other theoretical-political trajectories emerge from conversations sustained over many years. Relations of care, trust, humility, and interconnectedness are conditions of possibility for posing questions across racialized difference and for giving voice to, and taking responsibility for, our complicity with the violences of white supremacy. For us as white feminist thinkers with considerable investment in “reforming” liberal poverty studies through relational poverty theory, being accountable to these relations has meant arguing for abolishing “poverty” as a concept; for learning from relational politics at the intersections of Black, feminist, Latinx, and Indigenous thought-life-action; and for remaking concepts and institutions against white supremacy through new forms of engagement, new forms of action, and new knowledges.

Disrupting, disorganizing liberal poverty studies is one example of the transformations of the academy and its practices of knowledge production that deconstructs white-supremacist modes of knowing. Collaborators in this volume argue that the work going forward is for scholars to be agents of change who fight for relationality as a project of generative disruption, not inclusion. The role of this chapter in that larger work has been to critique poverty studies and the academic spaces/research that sustain them, to ensure that this immanent critique can happen and is heard. We argue for transformations of academic space and practice that are led by diverse scholars, epistemologies, and analyses and that reduce the barriers that separate disciplines in ways that disconnect studies of identity from those focused on materiality. Indeed, our central argument in this essay rests on this insight: that by separating identity from capitalist oppression, it becomes possible to legitimate white supremacy and racialized dispossession through construction of poor, racialized subjects. Ultimately, this chapter argues that disorganizing liberal poverty studies creates space for the urgent work subsequent chapters in this volume do: building diverse analyses of impoverishment, rooted in multivalent ways of knowing and pluriverse politics.

NOTE

1. These systems of racial control operate through data and capture whose antecedents stretch to back to slavery and beyond (Benjamin 2019; Browne 2015).

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