THE OTHER
AMERICANS
than 40 years ago, for President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s formation of a
National Advisory Commission on
Rural Poverty and that body’s subsequent report, titled “The People
Left Behind.” In 1967, places like
this drew Robert F. Kennedy, then
a junior senator from New York, to
the Mississippi Delta, where he encountered, to his and subsequently
the country’s dismay, a harsh landscape of plank-wood outhouses,
dirt floors and affectless children
with bellies distended from hunger.
In the 1980s, Richard Woodbury,
writing for Time magazine, exposed
the struggle “to bring drinking water to thousands of impoverished
families” in ramshackle communities along the Mexican border. In
1990, reporters from the Associated
Press noted that the infant mortality rate in the Delta ranked below
that in some Third World nations.
Last October, ABC’s Diane Sawyer
described the “unthinkable conditions” on the Pine Ridge Indian
reservation of South Dakota.
In many of these places, basic
amenities like plumbing and electricity have improved standards of
living, even if jobs remain scarce
and dependence on government
assistance remains widespread. In
some outposts, however, house-
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
holds lacking even these most basic
of basics can still be found.
The Economic Research Service,
the data-gathering arm of USDA,
notes that while the gap in poverty
rates between the nation’s urban
areas and its rural outposts has
been shrinking over time, families
living away from the bustle of city
and suburban life have had a higher
rate of poverty every year since data
on the subject was first officially
recorded in the 1960s.
The ERS lists the current overall poverty rate in rural America
at 16.6 percent, the highest rate
since 1993. The poverty rate
among children in rural areas
is now roughly 27 percent—an
increase of 6 percentage points
over 2000—according to an
analysis prepared by the Southern Rural Development Center at
Mississippi State University.
These statistics often conjure
visions of Appalachia, and not
without reason. More than 90
counties in the Southern Highlands of the Virginias, eastern
Kentucky and parts of Missouri
and Oklahoma—all predominantly
white—are considered “high poverty,” according to federal data.
No matter where poverty is
measured, however—whether in
urban, suburban or rural areas—
minorities always fare worse. According to a 2011 analysis by the