“You have to understand that you are not to blame”
Jean Swanson,
anti-poverty activist and author ofPoor-Bashing:
The Politics of Exclusion
In conversation with Joanna Fine
In Poor-Bashing: The
Politics of Exclusion, anti-poverty activist Jean
Swanson passionately exposes poor-bashing—a term that
has yet to gain widespread familiarity despite its use in
the anti-poverty movement since the early 1990s.
Swanson’s twenty-five years of experience as an
anti-poverty activist has provided her with the opportunity
to travel and talk with people across Canada. Poor-Bashing
is the culmination of those conversations and a call for
change.
Poor-Bashing takes a new and much-needed
approach to writings on poverty—Swanson is committed to
asking “why?” Why does poverty exist? Why do
corporations use poor-bashing? In addition, Swanson provides
a space for people to tell their own stories and, more
importantly, to share their analysis and thoughts on
poverty. As a result, Poor-Bashing challenges
the view that the poor are to blame. The book is both an
analysis of poor-bashing embedded in our language and
institutions as well as a tool for education and
empowerment. Candid sections including a guide to how you
can tell when the media poor-bash, resources for learning
about poverty and the economy, a glossary of poor-bashing
words and phrases, and ways to challenge poor-bashing within
and around us make Poor-Bashing an ideal
educational resource.
JF: How would you define poor-bashing for those who may
not be familiar with the term?
JS: Poor-bashing is when people who are poor are
stereotyped, ignored, blamed, patronized, pitied, falsely
accused of being drunk and having large families and not
looking for work. Other ways are institutional, for example,
low welfare rates is a type of poor-bashing. Having poverty
in a world where it is possible to eliminate it is a type of
poor-bashing.
JF: What do you say to people who argue that Canada is a
rich country and people who are poor choose to live that
way?
JS: There is a section in the book in which I ask that
question to a single mother that I interviewed. She said
“I didn’t choose to be on welfare. Harris made
choices that put me where I am.” The latest wealth
stats have just come out. They show the poorest half of
Canada’s population to have 6 per cent of the wealth,
and the richest half to have 94 per cent. There is a general
opinion that the way to get some of that 94 per cent is to
get an education and a job but it’s not because there
are laws that prevent people without money from getting into
that 94 per cent. There are laws that help the rich that
don’t help the poor. You have different choices
available to you if you are rich than if you are poor.
JF: Is poor-bashing new or has it changed with increasing
globalization?
JS: Poor-bashing has always existed—I trace it back
500 years in European society. With globalization,
corporations are wanting the cheapest labour. They
traditionally exploited women and people of colour (and
especially women of colour), now the drive for globalization
is very intense and they are wanting to expand the number of
people they can legitimately exploit. This is where
poor-bashing comes in—it is now applied to men and
women of European background. Poor-bashing is a way of
concealing who has the real power.
JF: Why hasn’t there been much progress made against
poverty?
JS: In the mid-1970s, corporations got together to push
their agenda of privatization, deregulation, free trade, and
cuts to social programs to increase profits. As this agenda
was implemented by the federal and provincial governments,
poverty increased. The corporations used their think tanks
(for example the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe) to push
poor-bashing which blamed the poor for the poverty that the
policies of the corporations and think tanks were creating.
This was pushed by the media and politicians and had a big
effect in increasing poor-bashing in the minds of people who
weren’t in power. Poor-bashing made the cuts to welfare
and unemployment insurance seem legitimate.
JF: In Poor-Bashing, you devote an entire chapter to the
language of poor-bashing. Why is language so important?
JS: Some words and phrases are inculcated in to our
consciousness and you can’t use them without
poor-bashing, without blaming the poor for poverty. For
example, the word incentive. Incentive is a big one. When
you talk about the incentive to work you stop talking about
poverty and start talking about cheap labour and people
don’t realize this because we have been programmed.
Another one is dependency, that people on employment
insurance or welfare are dependent on the system. Dependency
implies that people use welfare or unemployment insurance
because they are lazy or childlike or personally flawed in
some way. Why aren’t corporations considered dependent
on sweat shop labour?
JF: Who did you write Poor-Bashing for?
JS: For poor people who I hope will take the blame off
themselves for poverty. And also for working people. There
is such a great need for working people to unite with poor
people, not blame them. Poverty and poor-bashing undermine
the working conditions of working people. And also for
people with a social conscious who are often taken in by
language and the media—I hope it opens their eyes to
become allies of the poor. I tried to write the book in
plain language and I hope it will be a tool for people who
want to end poor-bashing and who want to live in a fair and
just society.
JF: What’s wrong with the media’s tendency to
focus on the personal stories of individuals who are
struggling with poverty—isn’t it a good thing to
tell these otherwise unknown stories?
JS: The media takes a lot of approaches to covering
stories on poverty. Lies. Double standards—for example,
playing up welfare fraud and playing down corporate fraud.
“Poornography”—portraying people who are poor
as sufferers—is part of the journalistic technique of
‘putting a face on the problem.’ The problem with
this is that is doesn’t politicize the problem, it
doesn’t point to the causes of poverty, and it
doesn’t point to a solution (often charity is offered
as the answer).
JF: How is your book different in its approach to
poverty?
JS: I have been involved with the anti-poverty movement
for 25 years. I was the president of the National
Anti-Poverty Organization for 2 years and I’ve worked
with End Legislated Poverty for 15 years. I’ve made a
lot of contacts in the anti-poverty movement. Travelling
with the NAPO board allowed me to meet people from across
Canada, from Newfoundland to Victoria. I interviewed 30 poor
people and anti-poverty activists and incorporated their
thinking about it and their analysis of it. This is new for
a book on poverty. Other books on poverty do not talk about
the why of it—why are people putting up with this?
JF: How does the book help people who are
poor-bashed?
JS: The first thing about challenging poor-bashing that
everyone I interviewed said is that you have to understand
that you are not to blame. You have to understand the
economic system causing poverty and how poverty is
legislated. You have to learn about how there is enough
wealth to end poverty and that people benefit from
poor-bashing and poverty. Poverty is government policy and
anybody that is bashed becomes cheaper in the labour market.
You have to challenge self-bashing, as a form of racism or
sexism (although different), and you have to challenge the
language/myths/media/politicians that do it.
JF: Are there coalitions to be built among anti-poverty
activists and other anti-oppression groups (racism, sexism,
classism)?
JS: Ultimately we need to unite campaigns about
poor-bashing with coalitions against racism. The most
important thing in uniting with other anti-oppression groups
is to say what’s on their mind and to learn about other
forms of oppression. We need a lot of listening but in the
end we need to build a coalition.
JF: How do we end poverty in Canada and the world?
JS: One necessary step is to end the kind of thinking
that puts people into groups like “the poor” or
“those on welfare” to justify treating them badly
and/or blame them for poverty. If we stop blaming poor or
other oppressed people for poverty, we can expose the
policies, laws, and economic system that force millions of
people to compete against each other, driving down wages and
creating more poverty.
JF: What do we have to do to put an end to
poor-bashing?
JS: We have to think about poverty in a different
paradigm—as something that is caused. Ending
poor-bashing isn’t just a matter of being nice. Ending
poor-bashing means asking questions about the unequal
distribution of wealth and income.
March 2001
Jean Swanson has worked as an anti-poverty activist
for twenty-five years. A former board member and president
of the National Anti-Poverty Organization, Swanson
co-chaired the B.C. Action Canada Network in its fight
against the free trade deals. For the past fifteen years she
has worked for the coalition End Legislated
Poverty.
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