We need to be careful when we are talking about a rate (a percentage) and when we are talking about an absolute number.
According to the National Census Bureau, in 2014, some 31 million white people in the US were below the poverty line. Some 11 million African Americans were below the poverty line. So, yes, in absolute terms, there were more white people in poverty. But...
According toe the same source, those 31 million white people were about 12% of the white population. The 11 million African Americans were 26% of the African American population.
So, the poverty *rate* is higher among African Americans - if you're African American, you're more than twice as likely to be in poverty than if you're white in the US.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2014/table3.pdf
The USDA finds that about 86% of American households were food secure at all times in 2014. "These households had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members."
That means 14% of housholds had some level of food insecurity - "At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. Food-insecure households include those with low food security and very low food security."
Rates of food insecurity were higher for some groups:
All households with children (19.2 percent),
Households with children under age 6 (19.9 percent),
Households with children headed by a single woman (35.3 percent),
Households with children headed by a single man (21.7 percent),
Black, non-Hispanic households (26.1 percent),
Hispanic households (22.4 percent)
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food...curity-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx
There are other social factors involved, that transcend race. Whatever the race, men are *far* more likely to be violent criminals than women. In essence, when you put a group under stress, it is the men who lean toward the high risk activities that may lead to violence. This likely has more to do with more broad gender roles than race.
By the US Census Bureau, voting rates for blacks were 2.1 percent higher than whites in the 2012 Presidential election. That was the first (and only) time that lack voting rates were higher than whites in the period of 1996-2012. The cite I found doesn't speak to years before that, but in 1996 blacks were voting at a rate of 7.7% lower than whites. The trend is such that I am not confident that they'd ever been at a higher rate before 2012.
https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-568.pdf
Yes. See the financial sector (filled with white people) as an example of both of these - you'd imagine a lot of folks should have gone up the river for fraud after our last financial crisis, but... no. Closed mouths and money do protect people, clearly.
Yay Stats from Umbran!
Last stat I had heard on NPR was that blacks account for about 75% of America's poor. Close enough to what Umbran said.
And sure, since more blacks are poor, I'm sure that means blacks in total pay less than whites in taxes. That's just math.
What gets racist is what we do with this information and how we express it.
I think blacks get arrested more because they are the largest portion of the poor people
I think cops, just by the crime rate and skin color distribution, see a lot more blacks they have to cuff than whites.
I think that colors how cops see blacks in a bad way (no pun intended).
Hopefully, these views don't make me a racist as I do not want to be a racist.
In my view, if we could raise everybody to be middle-class, we wouldn't have a crime problem* that is dominated by poor black people. Most crimes happen from poor people, and the most poor people are black. Flip the skin colors around and it would be white people in jail because they are poor and living desperate lifestyles.
*crime problem is relative, since the 1990's crime has dropped and is generally at all time lows.
I swear we've had this discussion in other threads, and I'm not sure how it involves the guys in Oregon, other than the difference in police response to their crime.