THE OTHER
AMERICANS
more than a quarter of its population. These are areas “where significant development investment
simply did not occur,” Morrill
writes. “Race matters.”
Karl Stauber, president and CEO
of the Danville Regional Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit,
and a former undersecretary for
research, education and economics
with the USDA, explained the dynamic. “The two challenges I have
to the ‘just move’ argument are
that the people most likely to move
are the people that are the most
skilled,” he said. “So then we’re
back to the rural ghetto.
“We spent a lot of the 1960s
to the 1980s trying to overcome
the concentration of poverty in
places like Appalachia, the Delta,”
Stauber added. “If we had been
a little more sophisticated, we
would have included Indian reservations, we would have included
the colonias, which were already
existing along the U.S.-Mexico
border. We would have produced
a more nuanced picture.
“What we know will happen,
because it’s already happening,
is that people that are the most
skilled and the people who are often the best educated are the folks
that are most likely to move and
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
successfully relocate. And then
we end up with this poverty concentration, and we go back to the
‘Two Americas’ problem.”
A measure of this sort of economic divide can be found in any
number of statistics. Mississippi,
for example, now ranks first in children born underweight; it is among
the five states spending the least
amount of money per pupil; it ranks
first for obesity, second for diabetes, and has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. In infant
mortality—often correlated with
the worst sorts of endemic poverty—Mississippi ranks second, just
behind the nation’s capital.
The infant mortality rate for
blacks in Mississippi, roughly
14 deaths per 1,000 live births,
is more than double the rate for
whites, more than double the national average, and considerably
higher than the rates in Botswana
and Sri Lanka.
Cuts in government benefits
after the wholesale reformation of
the welfare system in 1996 have
been blamed for a worsening in
many of these metrics, although
small social service agencies, like
the Cary Christian Center 13 miles
south of Anguilla, have made inroads in turning them around. The
Center’s prenatal program, funded
through donations, involves intensive outreach and home visits by