Granted these figures are two years old and we've taken in a butt load of illegals since then but there are still vast amounts of poor white people.

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Despite routine portrayals of poor people as black and Latino, most poor people in America are actually white.

By: Rachel D. Godsil
Posted: Dec. 2 2013 12:30 AM

Fact: Most poor people in the United States are white.

According to Census figures in 2013, 18.9 million whites are poor. That’s 8 million more poor white people than poor black people, and more than 5 million more than those who identify as Latino. A majority of those benefiting from programs like food stamps and Medicaid are white, too.

But somehow our picture of poverty is different, and the media tends to tell us a different story. A recent New York Times story, “Cut in Food Stamps Forces Hard Choices on Poor,” included only pictures of African Americans and Latinos from the Bronx, N.Y., and a number of Southern states. In October, the Times published another story about the impact of states’ rejection of the Medicaid expansion that’s part of the Affordable Care Act.

The images accompanying that story were also all of black or Latino families. Was that because only blacks and Latinos receive Medicaid? No.

So, why didn’t the Times include a picture like this one?

They’re all white, they’re organizing to raise poverty wages in Wisconsin and they’re all in need of Medicaid.

The Times and others like them are likely responding to the reality that blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor—27 percent of African Americans and 25 percent of Latinos are poor, compared to just 9 percent of whites—and are disproportionately harmed by cuts to food stamps or limits to Medicaid.

And I agree with the authors of these reports that we ought to be troubled by disproportionate harm to groups we know have been discriminated against. Yet, inadvertently, the traditional media’s one-sided image of poverty has contributed to the misconception that most poor people are black and that most black people are poor—although more than 70 percent are not.

I’m white and now living a middle-class life, and I’m pretty sure my picture doesn’t come to mind when newspapers write about the “urban poor” on government assistance or benefiting from affirmative action.

But when I was a kid in the 1980s, I fit into all three of those categories. I lived in Milwaukee—not a wealthy suburb—so I was urban and, at times, poor. For years, I had medical care thanks to Title 19, a government program for low-income families. I have vivid and unpleasant memories of drinking powdered milk (if you’ve never tasted it, just think watery chalk). We rented out a room in our home to help pay the rent. We hitchhiked when our really old and unheated VW Bug wasn’t working. And when I was in middle school, my mother worked as a sheet-metal worker, thanks to an affirmative action program to get more women into the industry. I don’t know much about her actual job, just that she wore overalls and seemed to cut her fingers a lot.

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PS My mom picked cotton in the south and she is French. We grew up 9 people in a two bedroom house. Our dining room was a bedroom, too.