Short Essays "The Rich and the Rest of Us"

After viewing the Bill Oriley film that featured the heated debate between Tavis Smiley, Cornell West and Bill Oriley I came to several different conclusions due to the controversial issues being addressed in the discussion.  As the book “The Rich and the Rest of Us” written by Cornell West and Tavis Smiley points out the steadily increasing percentage of poverty in the United States, and how poverty sees no color. This debate refreshes the commonly dismissed hidden fact of prejudice assumptions in relation to poor people in the United States. When ethnicity is associated with poverty lines this creates a systematic preconceived notion towards a societies perspective on a group of individuals as a whole based on their race.

Poverty is an unfortunate factor of American society, and economics. Though economic hardship has familiarly struck the stability of the American economic system.  People have still been able to overlook the seriousness of America’s economic crisis, and focus on the ethnicity of the individuals who are in poverty and illuminate the minorities who have been poverty stricken. When in all actuallity poverty is a primary example of the flawed American economic system that has no color lines, everyone is effected by the misfortanes of poverty. Cornell West states,  “The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.”  The discussion surrounded around the controversial topic concerning cast system in the United States is being questioned. How is “middle class” defined being that the current poverty stricken households were once considered the middle class in American Society.