Vigilante
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
Things I learned today: Middle class = White people.
Via Roll Call:
The Congressional Black Caucus is still getting up and running for the 114th Congress — it announced its staff Monday — but its new chairman sees an urgency for an organization that has long been known to represent the interests of minorities and the poor.
“We have a traditional role and that is to be the conscience of the Congress,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., told CQ Roll Call on Feb. 20. “We’ve been using ‘conscience of the Congress’ as our brand, if you will, since our founding. But we’ve got to do more than that because black America is in a state of emergency right now.”
Butterfield noted that 1 in 4 black families — and 1 in 3 black children — live in poverty, while the unemployment rate for African-Americans is roughly double that for whites.
“We cannot continue down this path,” the North Carolina Democrat said. “We have to be assertive. We have to be more aggressive.”
Asked about the Democratic Party’s new messaging focus on the middle class, Butterfield said that was a concern he had raised with Democratic leadership.
“We cannot forget that so many of our families are not middle class,” he said.
That new focus — obsession almost — on the middle class has many in the CBC concerned their constituencies may be left behind.
During the Democratic retreat in Philadelphia at the end of January, Butterfield’s predecessor at the CBC, Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, told CQ Roll Call she had some apprehension about the party’s new message.
“I’ve always said that, as a party, we don’t talk enough about the poor,” Fudge said. “I do believe we need to talk more about how we lift people out of poverty.”
Fudge added that, while the middle class is important, she wouldn’t call it the middle class. “You’re talking about working families. I don’t believe in classes,” she said. “But I certainly do believe that we need to spend some time and attention on getting people out of poverty.”