Why is poverty black and wealth white?

‘I’ve avoided the temptation to say that, in the United States, poverty is white.  It’s true, however, that there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks.  While a larger percentage of the African-American population lives in poverty, the sheer number of poor whites — 24.1 million — overwhelms the number of poor blacks — 12.1 million.  (Interestingly, there are also more poor Hispanics than there are poor blacks — 14.5 million.)

Nevertheless, Americans insist on associating poverty with blackness.  According to the influential study by Gilens that I mentioned above, the fact that blacks “dominate public images of poverty” is the result of “network TV news and weekly news magazines [that] portray the poor as substantially more black than is real the case.” This needs to change, and photography can play a role.’

Read the full article by John Edwin Mason here.