For most of my life, I got called “poor white trash” and was treated in a manner consistent with how that slur sounds. This fact drives the essay that I just published through Public Source, while also making clear that despite my challenges I didn’t have to deal with the immense costs of racism that my poor Black peers do.

I was mostly treated this way by middle-to upper-income people of various political persuasions and backgrounds. To them, I was lazy, stupid, ignorant and parasitic. These are actual words I heard again and again about me and others from my same background.

I don’t talk about it in the essay (because it didn’t quite fit), but one upper class person I met through college even told me, “we shouldn’t feed the animals because they get lazy and dependent,” when reacting to me saying my family relied on government assistance. This was by no means the first or last time I was told things like this.

And so, I’ve been thinking about writing this essay for the past few years, just a little while after I wasn’t low-income anymore. Writing about the experience of coming from poverty to now being a researcher who focuses on addressing issues stemming from racism and classism.

I’m about to be 35 (so have been doing a lot of reflecting on how I got here), and it’s also maybe the most pivotal election year of the modern era (with democracy itself on the ballot), so now felt like the right time for this essay. Because building coalitions has never been more important.

The essay is about my life long experiences with poverty as someone who is also white (with a focus on my high school to college years), the need for intersectionality in understanding, addressing and talking about poverty, and, ultimately, it’s implicitly and explicitly about how we can more effectively build coalitions across race and class to eradicate poverty.

I’d argue this extends to other social and economic issues too, regarding how we can and should come together to solve them.

This also is an essay about “ands”, not “ors.”

In this spirit, it’s an essay where I do my best to navigate the fact that white poverty doesn’t tend to come with the additional, deep racism-based challenges that often come with Black or Indigenous poverty, especially, or poverty for other people of color. At the same time, I also explore the challenges of growing up poor as someone who is also white, though it tends to play out differently.

This is one I’d encourage folks to read all the way through.

Persistent poverty is the result of structural barriers, and tends to affect different groups in different ways because of the additional reality of structural discrimination. No one should ever be to blame for their poverty and no one should have to live in poverty.