Cultural critics rarely talk about the poor. Most of us use words such as “underclass” or “economically disenfranchised” when we speak about being poor. Poverty has not become one of the new hot topics of radical discourse. When contemporary Left intellectuals talk about capitalism, few if any attempts are made to relate that discourse to the reality of being poor in America. In his col­lection of essays Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times, black philosopher Cor­nel West includes a piece entitled “The Black Underclass and Black Philosophers" wherein he suggests that black intellectuals within the “professional-managerial class in U.S. advanced capitalist society” must “engage
In a kind of critical self- inventory, a historical situating and
Positioning of ourselves as persons who reflect on the situation of those more disadvantaged than us even though we may have relatives and friends in the black underclass.” West does not speak of poverty or being poor in his essay. And I can remember once in conversation with him refer­ ring to my having come from a “poor” background; he corrected me and stated that my family was “working class.” I told him that technically we were working class, because my father worked as a janitor at the post office, however the fact that there were seven children in our family meant that we often faced economic hard­ ship in ways that made us children at least think of ourselves as poor. Indeed, in the segregated
World of our small Kentucky town, we were all raised to think in terms of the haves and the have-nots, rather than in terms of class. We acknowl­edged the existence of four groups: the poor, who were destitute; the working folks, who were poor because they made just enough to make ends meet; those who worked and had extra money; and the rich. Even though our family was among the working folks, the economic struggle to make ends meet for such a large fam­ily always gave us a sense that there was not enough money to take care of the basics. In our house, water was a luxury and using too much could be a cause for punishment. We never talked about being poor. As children we knew we were not supposed to see ourselves as poor but we felt poor.

I began to see myself as poor when I went away to college. I never had any money. When I told my parents that I had scholarships and loans to attend Stan­ford University, they wanted to know how I would pay for getting there, for buy­ing hooks, for emergencies. We were not poor, but there was no money for what was perceived to be an individualistic indulgent desire; there were cheaper colleges closer to family. When I went to college and could not afford to come home dur­ing breaks, I frequently spent my holidays with the black women who cleaned in the dormitories. Their world was my world. They, more than other folks at Stan- ford, knew where I was coming from. They supported and affirmed my efforts to be educated, to move past and beyond the world they lived in, the world I was com­ing from.