August 9, 2017

Tracie McMillan wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times last month about how poverty in America is often thought of in racial terms. She felt odd applying for SNAP, or food stamp, benefits, she said, as a white woman – even though the largest racial group receiving SNAP benefits is whites. A good part of the blame for the misperceptions about poverty and race, she suggests, belongs to the media. McMillan cites a study that found that Black people were the subject of 53 percent of stories about poverty in the three newsweeklies between 1950 and 1992, even though blacks constituted just 29 percent of the nation’s poor.

There are many problems with this inaccurate racialization of poverty. It can be stigmatizing to Blacks, who are more successful economically than media accounts of poverty suggest. And it can discourage whites, Asians, and Latinos from seeking the help they need because of a perception that benefits are “not for them.” (McMillan was once one of these people: a poor white woman who worked, who thought that, despite her low income, she was not the sort of person who should apply for food stamps.)

Recognizing that poverty is universal and prevalent in all groups could have two important effects:

• It could encourage more poor people who need benefits to apply for them, and
• It could create common ground around poverty programs by recognizing how necessary they are for people of all backgrounds

Here at NYC Opportunity, we usually report poverty within race/ethnicity – what percentage of whites in the City are poor, what percentage of Hispanics are poor, and so on. For purposes of comparison to the McMillan op-ed, we flipped it and looked at the race/ethnicity of New Yorkers who are living in poverty. The numbers confirm for the City what McMillan observed nationwide – that a significant percentage of the City’s poor people are white (also: fewer than one-quarter are Black).

Ethnicity by Poverty Status 2015