THE OTHER
AMERICANS
National Poverty Center, a nonpartisan research center at the
University of Michigan, roughly
26 million of the nation’s poor are
racial or ethnic minorities.
Put another way: Of the 46 million U.S. residents who now live below the poverty line, nearly 60 percent are minorities. This is despite
the fact that all racial and ethnic
minorities combined comprise just
37 percent of the U.S. population.
In rural areas, the disparities are
particularly pronounced. Of the
more than 400 rural counties with
poverty rates exceeding 20 percent, which are considered “high
poverty” counties, roughly threefourths were “linked directly to the
economic circumstances of racial
and ethnic minorities,” according
to the NPC report.
About 47 percent of those counties are largely African-American;
17 percent are mostly Hispanic; and
about 9 percent are Native American. These include places like predominantly black Isaquenna County in Mississippi’s Delta region,
where 60 percent of children were
living in poverty in 2010, or Todd
County, S.D., with its large Native
American population, where the
child-poverty figure is 59 percent.
“Despite advances made through
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
the civil rights movement, labor
struggles and increased self-determination, the experiences and
conditions of rural minorities are
often overlooked given their relatively small populations,” noted
the Housing Assistance Council, a
Washington-based nonprofit that
tracks rural poverty issues, in a
recent report. “Moreover, it is
often assumed that the conditions
that led to these upheavals have
been addressed.”
These numbers suggest, of
course, that they have not.
Disparities in standards of living, wherever they occur, are often
dismissed as the result of poor personal choices or cultural decay. A
2012 survey commissioned by the
Salvation Army, for example, suggested that 27 percent of Americans
believe people are poor because
they are lazy. Nearly 30 percent of
respondents said poor people have
lower moral values, while 43 percent believed poor people could
find a job if they really wanted one.
Fully half of those surveyed said a
good work ethic was all that was
needed to escape poverty.
Epidemics of drug and alcohol
abuse, low educational attainment,
teen pregnancies and long-term,
multigenerational dependence on
government subsidies in these
rural outposts, as in areas of urban
decay, can lend a superficial legiti-