Jerry Large / Times staff columnist
It's time to put a face on poverty — without color

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For most of my life, the poverty rate in the United States has been going down, but in the past few years it has nudged up. Some of that has to do with immigration or general economic funk, but part of it may be less commitment to aggressively addressing poverty.

We aren't feeling much kinship with poor people, probably because the face we put on poverty helps determine whether and how we want to help people affected by it. A lot of people don't see faces like theirs.

There are 36 million poor people in the United States, and the largest group of them, nearly 16 million people, are non-Hispanic whites. It's a good bet though, that when most people think of poverty, the faces they imagine are of darker shades.

Indians, Hispanics and black people do have more than their share of poverty. The poverty rate for black people is 24.4 percent, for Hispanics, 22.5 and for Native Americans, 23.2. Poverty rates for Cambodian, Vietnamese and Hmong Americans tend to be as high or higher than for black Americans. The white poverty rate is lower (8.2 percent), but because this country is about 70 percent non-Hispanic white and about 81 percent white if Hispanics are included, there are far more white poor people than any other kind.

(Japanese, East Indian and Filipino Americans have the lowest poverty rates among all groups of Americans, but there aren't so many of them.)

Maybe you are thinking race shouldn't make a difference. Well, it shouldn't, but it does.

I came across a policy brief from the Joint Center for Poverty Research, a collaboration between Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Using survey data and voting results, the study found that "support for welfare spending increases in step with the percentage of local welfare recipients belonging to one's own racial group."

There is a direct link between race and support for programs that address poverty.

"An additional African-American welfare recipient in an individual's census tract reduces support for welfare by non-African-American respondents, while having little effect on African-American respondents."
 
That is, the more people of a different race you see benefiting from welfare, the less likely you are to support it. Welfare is just one issue, of course. Yet feelings about it are an indicator of how people view helping the poor. This time of the year, we see lots of attention paid to poverty. And many of the people whose stories will be told will be from minority groups disproportionately affected by poverty.

It's done with good intentions, but that picture of poverty is a distortion. Media stories about poverty were mostly about white people until the '70s, when news organizations, in the wake of the '60s social turmoil, began to pay more attention to people who were not white and to highlight the greater impact poverty has on communities of color.

Again, that attention comes from good intentions, but it carries some bad side effects. Having the majority of the population turn away doesn't help poor people of any color. Even poor people themselves judge one another, but whether they are rural or urban, white or black, poor people have a lot in common, particularly root causes of their poverty.

Poor education, the absence of well-paying jobs or work of any kind plague people in isolated rural and city communities. The poverty rate in city centers is about 17.5 percent. In the suburbs it is 9.1 percent. Outside metropolitan areas in small towns and rural areas, the poverty rate last year was 14.2 percent.

Last year, according to the Census Bureau, 12.5 percent of Americans were poor.

Forty-five million Americans lack health coverage.

We need to see ourselves in the faces of poor people and make their poverty our issue. Empty stomachs and stolen dreams don't have a color.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com. His column runs Thursdays and Sundays and is found at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.