Eradicate Poverty

ERADICATE POVERTY -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kuhl of New York). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watts) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. WATTS. Mr. Speaker, I simply want to thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus who are taking the time and consistently putting forward this message that poverty and race and the convergence of them in this country must be an issue that we deal with.

I found it extremely ironic as Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus that it has taken a disaster like Katrina to refocus attention on the issue of poverty in this country. In fact, it has been interesting to see how this has evolved, because the Congressional Black Caucus has been dealing with this issue of poverty and the disparity in economic means between African Americans and other Americans in this country this entire year.

We developed an agenda in January of this year which was printed, released, covered and written about in the press. Press people were calling me, saying you have positioned this in a different way than it has been positioned in the past. And then all of a sudden what I found was quietly into the night the discussion about poverty and the convergence of poverty and race and class went quietly into the background.

What has been interesting since Katrina occurred is that the same press people who wrote about our positioning of this issue have been on the phone to me, saying why have you all not been talking about this? Why have you not kept this issue of race and class and poverty in front of us? We should have been talking about this.

And I have to remind them that, yes, look, you wrote about this in January and February of this year, and you must have forgotten about it. We have not forgotten about it. We have been talking about it all year.

It did not take a hurricane to make us patently aware that poverty exists in this country. In fact, what I would submit to you is if the same kind of catastrophe occurred in any city in America and the same amount of advance notice was given to the people of that city, the people who would get out would be the high-income people. They would heed the notice. They would have the resources to move away from the disaster that is coming down the pike. And the people who would not be able to heed the notice and the entreaties to get out of harm's way would be poor people; and in every city in America, every place in America they would be disproportionately African American, Hispanic and other minorities.

That is not only true of a hurricane. When you are poor, you cannot get away from bad health conditions, because you cannot take the preventative steps that you need to take to get treatment. When you are poor, you do not have the option of sending your kids to private school to get them away from bad schools. You do not have the option of doing a lot of things that we take for granted in this country.

So maybe my staff member is right. We do not like to talk about that in this country. We do not like to talk about poverty in this country because we have this notion that we all are equal. We are not equal except in writing.

Under our Constitution, we are created equal. We are supposed to be given equal opportunity, but when somebody starts at the 70 yard line in a race of 100 yards and somebody else is starting at the zero yard line, making up that difference is an impossible task, and we have got to recommit ourselves to making up that difference. It cannot be done just by people running faster and harder and longer. We have got to commit ourselves as a Nation to fighting poverty and its convergence with race.

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