Bruce Detwiler
12 September 2005
In 1964, after his sophomore year at Yale, Bruce Detwiler went to live with a black family in Holmes County, Mississippi—one of the poorest counties in the country where the median family income was $400 a year and just about everyone was a subsistence farmer. Detwiler had decided to spend his summers as a civil rights worker.
It was a choice his family found confusing and difficult ("My mother said, ‘Why you?’"), but one that profoundly changed him and the direction of his life. The first place he landed was an all-black town called Old Pilgrims Rest, a town so small it didn’t even have a store. The church was the center of the community’s life.
"Before I went to Mississippi I thought I was going to be a businessman," said Detwiler. Instead, he became a professor of political science. But first, he spent a year in Africa, in the Zambian bush, teaching at a school established for refugees from white supremacist countries.
"Theoretically, yes, it is possible to end poverty, but it would take at least two things. One is moral imagination. Right after college I spent a year in Africa and I concluded that the biggest moral failing of Americans and Europeans is a lack of moral imagination. Americans and Europeans in some sense know the incredible deprivation of people in the developing world, but they lack the imagination to understand in human terms what that means. They lack the imagination to understand how little it would take from them to change things… Not thinking these things through has moral consequences. One is a less ethical person if one doesn’t think about what it means to spend $30,000 on a wrist watch in a world where people don’t have basic necessities. If you spent the year I spent in Africa or the three summers as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, no, you couldn’t buy that wrist watch."
"The second thing is that to a large extent, people are poor because of a structure they can’t do anything about. West African cotton farmers are poor as a result of subsidies provided to American and European farmers who dump cotton on the world market at far lower prices than it costs to produce it. Women around the world are much poorer than they need to be because of social and legal structures that prevent them from having jobs and owning property. Oxfam, more than any organization I know of, is trying to respond to the structures that are preventing people from moving out of poverty."
"In Holmes County, when people got the right to vote, it’s amazing what a difference that made. Very slowly, but very perceptibly, a black political infrastructure began to emerge. The level of civic and political awareness began to explode in those communities. Holmes County was the first county to send a black representative to the state legislature since Reconstruction."
