The International Liberation Reference Person for People Raised Poor
Hi. I’m Gwen Brown, the International Liberation Reference Person for People Raised Poor. So that’s for most of the world’s people, unfortunately.
If we’re ever going to have the kind of world we want—if we’re going to save our species, and the other species on the planet—we have to get really smart about raised-poor people.
Two of the things we have to wrap our minds around are that poverty is completely unnecessary and that we can do something about it.
We also need to completely understand that poverty, and the struggles that go along with it, are not a personal failure. They result from policies, social and economic policies, that have been paid for with the labor of workers. Owners have paid workers as little as they could possibly get away with and taken most of the wealth the workers have created not only to live extravagantly but to put in place policies that promote continued and increasing income inequality. We need to communicate to raised-poor people, over and over and over again, “You did not do this to yourself.” The self-blame is huge and just plays and plays and plays.1
And remember that raised-poor people will bring incredible strengths to your RC Community, and your Community to them, so get them involved and figure out how to support them.
For help with this, and to help you, and others, move through your own class distresses, look at our new Raised-Poor Draft Policy Statement. I spent twenty years not being able to write it, and finally, thanks to the discharge process, I was able to. Once I got it written, many raised-poor leaders made contributions. We think it is a good policy for us raised-poor people, as well as for people from all class backgrounds. It’s on the RC website.2 You can use it in your classes and even in your work outside of RC. Besides providing an overall class analysis, it lists the class-based distress recordings we raised-poor people need you non-raised-poor people to work on, as well as what we need to work on. We hope that you will help us stand up to the feelings that we can’t move through alone—most of all, our humiliation, and all that keeps us from being the great leaders we were born to be. Thank you.
Wilmington, Delaware, USA
1 "Plays" as in how a recording plays
2 www.rc.org