THE WAR ON THE POOR: REBRANDED
1. Colonialism’s Blueprint: Control Land, Control People
In colonial America, land seizure was the first step in control. Native communities were forcibly removed, their societies fractured, and their self-determination denied. This template remains intact in today’s housing crisis.
Investors, backed by government subsidies and zoning loopholes, are buying up properties in historically poor Black and Brown neighborhoods, many of them the same areas redlined in the 20th century. As rent soars and ownership slips out of reach, generational stability erodes. Modern gentrification is a sanitized term for the same settler logic: displace the vulnerable, extract value, and consolidate power.
2. Imperialism and the Machinery of Mass Incarceration
Like foreign imperialism justified by “civilizing missions,” today’s prison-industrial complex is disguised as public safety. The U.S. imprisons more people than any country on earth… disproportionately Black, Brown, poor, and mentally ill. This is not by accident.
After slavery was abolished, Black Codes and vagrancy laws criminalized poverty and labor autonomy. Later, the War on Drugs became a war on communities of color. Today, broken windows policing, cash bail, and underfunded public defense maintain an imperialist logic: criminalize what you do not want to understand, then incarcerate to silence.
3. Mental Health as a Battlefield: From Asylums to Abandonment
In the mid-20th century, asylums were shuttered under the guise of deinstitutionalization. Yet community-based mental health systems were never fully funded. This vacuum left millions untreated, especially the poor, who now find themselves cycling between homelessness, emergency rooms, and jail cells.
Mental illness is not criminal. But our infrastructure treats it as such. The abolitionist lens reminds us that systems designed to punish rather than heal must be dismantled — not reformed — because they were never meant to serve equitably in the first place.
4. The Ballot Box: Democracy Denied, Again
Reconstruction once promised a multiracial democracy, and Black communities organized to claim it. Then came Jim Crow. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and violence systematically stripped away the right to vote.
Today’s voter ID laws, polling place closures, and gerrymandering echo that suppression. New laws in dozens of states disproportionately target low-income and minority voters, creating modern barriers to electoral participation just as intentional as the ones that came before.
5. The Myth of the American Dream: Decline by Design
The GI Bill didn’t apply equally to Black veterans. Suburbanization excluded communities of color. Industrial jobs left inner cities without transition plans for the working class. Reaganomics gutted the social safety net. The 2008 housing crash targeted communities already denied access.
All of these were milestones — not accidents — in the slow and calculated erosion of the American Dream for the poor. A dream not deferred but denied by design.
6. The Call to Abolish — Not Just Reform
The abolitionists of the 1800s did not ask for kinder slavery. They demanded an end. Likewise, today’s struggles require a new abolitionist vision — abolishing poverty, racist systems, carceral logics, and economic disenfranchisement.
It means building housing as a human right. Universal health care. Restorative justice instead of cages. Unfettered voting rights. Reparations — not just recognition.
WE ARE IN A GLOBAL SHIFT TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN
From colonialism to capitalism, from plantations to prisons, the systems may look different, but the impact on the poor remains brutally consistent. What we face now is not just a social crisis but a moral reckoning.
We are in a global shift. One that must be rooted in protecting our children, rebuilding community infrastructure, and redesigning access — together. The war on the poor is real, but so is our power to end it.
