I Know About the Negroes and the Poor

There is sign which hangs behind the bar in quite a few neighborhood taverns in Milwaukee. It says, “It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.” Now you would not think this simple axiom would have to be spelled out for the leading intellectuals of our time, not even those who write for the New Yorker. Two notable articles published in that magazine—“Letter from a Region of my Mind” by James Baldwin and “Our Invisible Poor” by Dwight Macdonald —undertake to engage our emotions on the side of the underdog. Certainly, both Negroes and poor people can use our sympathetic understanding, and we can be grateful for what Baldwin and Macdonald have done to arouse it. But what cries out for our understanding is precisely the opposite of what Baldwin and Macdonald call our attention to. Both insist that we must give something to the poor and to the colored people. They even say that what we must give is justice. Equality must be recognized, says Baldwin: the poor must be subsidized, says Macdonald.

Not so, I submit. And, further, I submit that most poor people in America today are poor because they want to be. They make themselves the way they are by being lazy, uneducated, sick, undependable. They are all handicapped in the sense that they cannot or will not compete in the not very competitive society of modern America.

RD

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Robert J. Dwyer

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There is sign which hangs behind the bar in quite a few neighborhood taverns in Milwaukee. It says, “It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.” Now you would not think this simple axiom would have to be spelled out for the leading intellectuals of our time, not even those who write for the New Yorker. Two notable articles published in that magazine—“Letter from a Region of my Mind” by James Baldwin and “Our Invisible Poor” by Dwight Macdonald —undertake to engage our emotions on the side of the underdog. Certainly, both Negroes and poor people can use our sympathetic understanding, and we can be grateful for what Baldwin and Macdonald have done to arouse it. But what cries out for our understanding is precisely the opposite of what Baldwin and Macdonald call our attention to. Both insist that we must give something to the poor and to the colored people. They even say that what we must give is justice. Equality must be recognized, says Baldwin: the poor must be subsidized, says Macdonald.

Not so, I submit. And, further, I submit that most poor people in America today are poor because they want to be. They make themselves the way they are by being lazy, uneducated, sick, undependable. They are all handicapped in the sense that they cannot or will not compete in the not very competitive society of modern America.