Yes, that’s right. I said genocide.
Because it is. Poverty is not an accident, poverty is not inevitable. The conditions of poverty are the result of manufactured scarcity by Western powers. Poverty is designed to shackle fear to the working class. Everyone is afraid of dying poor. Everyone. And with good reason!! Poverty and all its associated deaths (malnutrition, unclean water, homelessness, etc.)— they’re such a painful ways to decay into death. I always say poverty snatched the teeth from my mouth. It’s nice being on TikTok and having everyone compliment my smile, and it makes me ashamed of the truth. I don’t have dental care and my molars are rotting inside my skull.
I tried to write this essay with kinder, coded language and I could not bring myself to publish it. I was filled with disgust reading my work back to me, reading how much I softened my tongue out of respect for the empire. What respect does the empire have for me? This place wants me to die. It’s not even as if our rulers are apathetic to our suffering— they actively need us to suffer in order to continue their lives. I am absolutely scared to say this out loud and on record. I am afraid to say everything I have to say about that in writing. And so what? What is that fear worth? I’m already scared of this world every day. Every fucking day I wake up and taste the dread of living like this, watching us all decay. My teeth rot on the inside of my mouth; my lungs rot with the smog of LA; our oceans rot with plastic; our soil rots in plastic bags at Home Depot because they quite literally sell the earth back to us. Everything is rotting and I am scared all the time. Might as well call a spade a spade.
By the time this essay is penned and read, I want to plant a seed of dissent in you. Just one seed of doubt. We, especially those of us in the United States, have a habit of thinking that everything will be okay. That our governments, even if they are negligent at times, loves us and will figure all these problems out.
An essay formerly entitled, “The state does not love you and it never will.”
Last time we met to learn and unlearn, we discussed poverty metrics as the West imagines them.
I told you we would return to this map. The “unlucky” 1.6 billion, as called by The Economist with data from 2015. This data visualization allows us to see concentrations of Multidimensional Poverty, which we discussed in the first episode of the series. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is a human analytics measurement designed to understand how many people are living with depravities, or chronic and systemic lack.
I want us to note really specific word choice here: unlucky. What an interesting word to use. What’s the definition?
Unlucky: subjected to or marked by misfortune1.
This map shades in nations having notable or extreme concentrations of multidimensional poverty with different hues of peach, red, and brown. Areas highlighted with 60-80% of a population in multidimensional poverty are concentrated on the continent of Africa, with Afghanistan as the one exception. This includes my home country, Sierra Leone. We can see secondary concentrations of multidimensional poverty in South Asia, with countries like Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Yemen and Cambodia and then additionally in the islands of the Pacific and South America or Latino countries. What makes these countries in particular have such bad… luck?
Enter: The Wealth Curse
Also known as the “Poverty Paradox,” this framework ideates some sort of… confounding, supernatural reason that countries with huge concentrations in natural resources end up poor2. Curse and unlucky have similar roles in coloring the subjects of their respective clauses— both denote some sort of sad, unknowable, unchanging luck of the draw. Or, if there are fingers pointed, it’s always at corrupt African politicians and never the Western powers bankrolling them to betray their people.
Learning about the Wealth Curse in graduate school (which my plucky white peers debated as a real and verifiable fact of life) was the reason I started to have a glass of wine handy during class3. This is why I can only take poverty “research” so seriously. What is there to research? We know what happened. We grasp at straws to explain economic “successes” and “failures” of nation states without breathing the word colonization. With the mental gymnastics one must perform to excuse the genocides of colonization and slavery hidden away in the “third world,” you would think we in the Western world would be better at critical thought.
There is no curse. There is nothing to scratch our heads about. These countries are poor because they suffered (and continue to suffer) astonishing crimes against humanity by white, genocidal landowners. They are subject to rulership from those firmly under the thumb of the empire, and when leadership rises up to incite revolution, those leaders are brutally and publicly executed. The reason white folks are landowners in the first place is because they pillaged, killed, and raped en masse for it, with no consequence given or exacted on the world’s stage. The reason they continue to own lands they do not live on is because they war, enslave, pillage, rape and kill masses that have already suffered the apocalypse of transatlantic and continental slavery. Discussing the ongoing brutalities of colonization as if it was some unfortunate twist of luck is absurd. The fate of the world was spun off axis when white powers rose to domination.
Emphasis on Ongoing
Resource extraction out of the continent of Africa far outweighs any “aid” put in.
“It’s super sweet of you to come with your colored paper in exchange for our gold and diamonds.” — Marcelle Bart-Williams, Sierra Leonean writer and filmmaker. <3
I cannot recommend the TedTalk linked above enough. Marcelle is a fellow Sierra Leonean stating the obvious: that the world needs Africa, not the other way around. The image of Africa disseminated to the world has poverty as its natural, even God-given state; every brush stroke of that narrative is intentional and calculated. When we think of poverty as something that just happens,— or worse, the fault of “irresponsible” reproduction habits— it fills the general masses with a contempt that allows the Western world to do anything. They enslave children for cobalt and cocoa production. African descendants across the world still pay for the sins of colonization. Even down to poverty makeups in the United States, the people primarily suffering under poverty are Black, Indigenous, other economically marginalized groups of color (especially Latiné populations), and disabled people. These are all people chronically subject to killing by the state (by way of either intentional lack of access or straight up killing them in broad daylight via police, land snatching, or through medical apartheid).
There is no economic analysis without historical context.
The “poor” are the colonized peoples of the world and the resulting collateral damage; notice how they are concentrated in Black populations across the globe. We are kept in the demoralizing, unyielding conditions of poverty so that we cannot rise up and own what is ours. Even in the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, a disproportionate amount of the population are Black, Indigenous, or other people groups previously (or currently!) subject to killings by the state. It is not a coincidence that the current day poor are made up of those previously subjected to genocide by land theft or genocide by labor extortion. This system only works so long the downtrodden of the earth stay that way. The modern day poor are the people that white supremacist colonization and sanitation efforts did not successfully kill the first time around.
Are you certain that your politic of choice is to restrict the most vulnerable from full access to reproductive rights as a response to poverty that they did not create? This, as a sound politic of justice? Are you certain?
Remember: poverty metrics are entirely made up. They seek to tell a particular narrative. What qualifies as “poor” designed meant to make the Western world look unilaterally wealthy and saintly.
This is why poverty metrics and poverty research mean so little to me. You do not need the academy to tell you what economic hardship feels like. We know what it is to suffer! Do not let propaganda convince you that you deserve your suffering. Do not let them convince you it’s “not that bad since others have it worse.” Do not let these people they prey upon us let you think that your suffering is supernatural, inescapable, or inexplicable.
Where does poverty come from and who does poverty benefit?
Poverty is not created by poor people having children. Poverty is not even perpetuated by poor people having children. The fault of poverty, in both creation and maintenance, lies solely with the ruling class.
People enduring poverty, especially any kind of generational poverty, are continuing to survive. That’s it, that’s all. The worst we are doing is continuing our communities despite the fact that the state actively tries to kill us— and it is active! Poverty is a policy choice, not a moral failing. We are the survivors of or the collateral damage of white settler capitalism. We are living in the aftermath of the pillaged earth. Poverty is far from accidental and the choices we have as those enduring poverty (including the choice to procreate) are not simple choices; they are not individual choices; they are not choices that exist in a vacuum. Poverty is not an individual’s circumstance; it is an entire world-system created by the wealthy for two distinct purposes:
(1) to ensure the ruling class can experience extreme luxury and produce extreme waste without delay or consequence by having an endless workforce to exploit
(2) to further subjugate, punish or eradicate the people white supremacists tried to enslave or kill in the ongoing process of colonization.
In case those assertions are brand new, I would recommend reading Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. Please respond to this email or email me at ismatu.gwendolyn@gmail.com if you need help finding access to these texts.
Poverty is not an unfortunate happenstance of humanity. Poverty itself is most certainly not an accident; it is not inevitable; poverty is most especially not an unsolvable curse. We know how to solve poverty! Reparations to people groups on the receiving end of literal crimes against humanity, accompanied by the redistribution of resources globally and production of goods primarily benefitting the workers who run the world would do exactly that. Problem solved. So why don’t we?
The conditions of poverty actively shorten the lifespans of the world’s colonized and the rich benefit from that. That’s why. The conditions of poverty intentionally keep groups most likely to overthrow the wealthy so weak and so fractured that they are unable to defend themselves against pillaging (read: robbery at a systematic level of operation) and exploitation. That’s why. Poverty prevents the working class from ascending to wealth by keeping them floating above an inescapable chasm; it guarantees the ruling class subjects to lord over and to extract labor and capital from. That’s why! We know how to solve poverty! Governmental bodies, elected officials, and the ultra-wealthy don't move a muscle towards reparations and redistribution because they need poverty to keep their seats in the global oligarchy. They convince you that these people deserve it and that there’s nothing you can do anyways so that you turn a blind eye while they continue to exact state-sanctioned torture and murder in exchange for unspendable amounts of money. And the propaganda they use is so effective, they get us to blame ourselves.
The reason poverty is not solved is because the ruling class benefits greatly from impoverished people dying painful, drawn out, entirely preventable deaths. We die from stress, from malnourishment, from pollution, from injury, from lack of access to food, water, education, medical care. Entirely preventable death and suffering is promoted to make sure we are desperate enough for survival that we work without question. That we’re grateful for jobs that pay $100k when that’s still pennies to the empire. The children that the internet seems to care so deeply about are stunted, suffering, even dying in prepubescent bodies preventably and we wish to blame their parents. Can you imagine? That is squarely the fault of the rich and the ruling. Poverty is not a problem that would ever be solved by impoverished people having less children. Children are inevitable, poverty is not!!
The world still runs on slavery. The only correct word for enslavement via poverty is genocide.
Lots of the pushback for my original TikTok came from people arguing I was misusing the terms “genocide” and “eugenics.” I want to take a look at the definitions for these words so we can see how accurately they fit the logical conclusions of “poor people shouldn’t have kids.”
Genocide is defined as the systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, political opinion, social status, or other particularity.
Eugenics is defined as the study or practice of attempting to improve the human gene pool by encouraging the reproduction of people considered to have desirable traits and discouraging or preventing the reproduction of people considered to have undesirable traits. 4
There are people that attempted to argue that poverty is not an inheritable trait. That is categorically not true. We live in racial capitalism, meaning that the basis for our economic system is race-based human labor. Still to this day, the most valuable forms of capital are land and human labor, both of which you have to steal to get at a profit margin that will make you rich. Capitalism works by taking “profit,” which is the difference between the wholesale cost of the good and the retail cost of the good, plus dividends. Profit occurs only when the laborers that produce the good are paid inadequately. In order for there to be profit leftover for the people on top, the people at the bottom must do without. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore (muva) defines racism beautiful with the following:
“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
Poverty in this world has been attached intrinsically and inextricably to African descendants and non-white countries that defy the Western state. There is a reason poverty hangs above Africa like a pregnant storm cloud; poverty is a sysmatic choice that was designed to be self-sustained and expansive. Children under systems where poverty is kept and maintained are designed to make you poorer. Poverty makes us resent our own children for the economic burden of parenthood, when parenting does not need to be an economic burden! Under capitalism, the function of children are to keep adults chained to working for fruits of the earth that were once freely given to us. Capitalism trains us to see children as a burdensome economic drain until they can grow up in to the next generation of exploitable labor. Depending on where those children are in the world, they don’t even wait until they reach adulthood to begin working them for slave wages.
The idea that poverty is randomly occurring is a hot lie. Poverty is absolutely an inheritable trait BY DESIGN. The whole reason that people on the internet are arguing that poor folks should stop reproducing is because their kids will be born into (read: inherit) the heinous conditions of poverty. The definitions of eugenics are met. And because it is specific, racialized groups affected under strain of economic oppression, because that oppression is absolutely intentional, the creation and maintenance of poverty is a genocide. Poverty is genocide.
Instead of realizing that we are being shackled to working ourselves to death, we as a public choose to think invidivual birth is the problem. We frame parents as irresponsible and thus responsible for their own subjugation. You are doing the work of the state for them, for free.
I use the words “eugenics” and “genocide” intentionally because they are the most accurate way to describe the actions and logical conclusions behind the statement “poor people shouldn’t have kids.” Restricting the choice of birth is a primary mode of genocide, and "the poor” is an underclass made up of specific ethnogroups for specific historical reasons. You have been got by propaganda.
Poverty is not a personal failing, poverty is an active and intentional policy choice on behalf of white supremacy. In saying poor people “should not” have children, you are arguing for the eradication of some of the most pulverized and most vulnerable people groups on the face of the earth— which won’t even address the causes of poverty in the first place.
Additionally, and because it bears repeating: at what age do you begin to deserve poverty? Why, in “kids don’t deserve poverty,” does that ever only apply to minors? Do adults deserve the conditions they were also born or forced into without choice? No one chooses poverty! No one deserves this.
Pushing the colonized to actively participate in their own genocide will never (ever) result in any kind of justice. What will?
A note on “idealism.”
There’s this comment that I get all the time: “two things can be true at once!” This is (supposed to be) the idea that it’s perfectly okay to think poor people shouldn’t have kids so long as it’s accompanied by some loosely defined will to end poverty. I reject this wholeheartedly. No, it’s is not “fine” to think poor people shouldn’t have kids. Restricting the reproductive access to the world’s most impoverished campaigns for genocide. I will absolutely not be doing that.
Instead, I will work to create a world where parents have safe conditions to steward their children well. I work to create a world where children are the most cherished members of society rather than among those most oppressed. I keep being told that I am “too idealistic.” Two things can be true? How do you negotiate with genocide? How long am I supposed to wait for your progress?
I for one, am impatient. I am hungry. Oppressed people will eat until we are full.
Sources for this episode (not hyper-linked):
BBC News. (2013, October 9). DR Congo: Cursed by its natural wealth. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24396390
CBS News. (2018, March 6). Children mining cobalt in Democratic Republic of Congo, CBS News investigation finds. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democratic-republic-congo-cbs-news-investigation/
The resource curse: why countries that have so much, often have so little. (n.d.). https://www.theneweconomy.com/energy/the-resource-curse-why-countries-that-have-so-much-often-have-so-little
Next episode: My politic is alive and she will kill me.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
Smith, Benjamin; Waldner, David (2021). Rethinking the Resource Curse. Cambridge University Press.
Allegedly.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
18| Poverty is an intentional genocide.