NC NAACP and UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity Respond to Governor Mitt Romney's Remarks

North Carolina NAACP and UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity Respond to Governor Mitt Romney's Remarks and Challenge Political Leaders to Follow the Truth and Hope Tour and See the Faces of the "Very Poor"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 2, 2012

For More Information:           Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137

Mrs. Amina J. Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700   

Governor Mitt Romney's Remarks Reveal the Continuing Attention Violence Committed Against the Poor

By, 

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II President, North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP  

Professor Gene Nichol, Director, UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity

There is a certain political and social brutality to the declaration by presidential candidate Governor Mitt Romney, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that he is "not concerned about the very poor." What we in the civil rights community know is that this sort of language reveals an attention-violence against the people who were already in crisis before the crisis became public in 2008.

We must remember that such political language, whether overt or subtle in nature, has always been used by politicians to divide the poor from the rest of society in the public arena.  We must closely examine language that race baits the poor, language that suggests the leader of our nation is a welfare president, that poor people are the real problem in America as opposed to the structures that create poverty. Language that would have us believe the poor, through welfare and safety net programs, are actually taking money from the wealthy.  Racialized language that suggests poor people should stop having babies while we say little about greedy corporations giving birth to the corruption, bankruptcy, and income disparities that caused the Great Recession in the first place.

How can any person, or persons, desiring to obtain the highest office in the land, or for that matter, the office of governor or legislator, not be concerned with the 40 plus percent of African-American, Latino, and Native American children in North Carolina living in stark poverty? Not concerned with the Eastern North Carolina communities we just visited where over 50% of Tar Heels live below the harsh federal poverty standard -- $22,000 a year for a family of four. Not concerned with one in five black North Carolinians presently unemployed. Not concerned with over a thousand homeless women and men in Elizabeth City trying to scramble for one of 26 beds available in area shelters; or the scores of parents waiting in line all night long, mid-winter, in Ahoskie, to secure scarce canned goods from the food bank. Not concerned about the millions and millions of Americans of all races and creeds who languish in the immoral clutches of structural poverty and long-term unemployment.

Not concerned with the families in Gates and Hertford counties living without toilets. Not concerned with a 70 year-old woman, in Winton, who drives a school bus twice a day so that she can care and provide medication for her stroke-disabled husband. Not concerned with the invisible poor who struggle, against great odds, for a measure of dignity and opportunity, but who don't register, don't appear, on Gov. Romney's list of real Americans. It is rare that an American politician is as candid as Gov. Romney in his declaration of who counts and who does not. It is flatly routine, however, for politicians of both parties to simply turn their gaze away from those locked at the bottom of American life.            

Individual charity alone will not address this problem.  The pain that has been perpetrated in the name of greed and racist public policy requires much more than this. They cannot keep conversations about income inequality in the "quiet rooms" as Gov. Romney suggested earlier this year. The moral requirements of our Constitution, the moral underpinnings of the Biblical truths require more than a call to private charity.  They require a call to structural change and systemic economic reorientation.

We invite Gov. Romney and any other candidates who aren't concerned about poor people to leave the banquet halls and staged campaign stops and join us on the Truth and Hope Tour where we are putting a face on poverty across North Carolina. We extend an open invitation for all candidates to follow our bus in March as we travel to Southeastern North Carolina on the real back roads and back streets of rural America. We believe if Gov. Romney and other candidates see the faces of poverty we saw in Northeastern North Carolina last month and the ones we will see in March, they will never again allow themselves to commit this attention-violence against the poor.

###

Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.