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Many Americans wrongly associate poverty primarily with Black and Hispanic communities. Explore how this misconception influences public opinion, politics, and anti-poverty policy.
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More Whites Live in Poverty than Either Blacks or Hispanics - Correcting the Perception of Poverty
Jul 22, 2026
From observing people and politicians over the years—I can find no data on this—I have the impression that liberals as well as conservatives think that the typical person living in poverty is Black or Hispanic. The image most Whites have of people of color is someone who is poor—except for celebrities—with little education; they are not aware of many people of color who are middle class. On the other hand, they are not aware of many Whites who are poor and so they think their number is low.
Why is the perception of poverty important? The perception of who is poor has significant impact on the support for government programs that aid the poor. Given the extent of racism in this country, whether subtle or violent, (see my post, “Whether the Issue is Gun Violence or Inequality, It Always Comes Back to Race/Racism”), it’s not surprising that support for anti-poverty programs is non-existent among MAGA Republicans and for that matter has always been weak among Republicans; 45% of Republicans would even cut food stamp support. Their attitude is "it's your fault;" so government has no responsibility to help. They feel the causes of poverty are personal: bad life choices, drugs, lack of work ethic, and the breakdown of families—all negative perceptions of Black culture.
Liberals of course support such programs as an expression of economic justice, of fighting the systemic causes of poverty—discrimination, an unfair economic system, and the lack of educational opportunities. Although often one feels support is given somewhat begrudgingly; there is a little bit of racism in most of us.
But this perception of poverty is in fact fundamentally wrong. While Blacks and Hispanics do have much higher poverty rates, there were more White people living in poverty (19.6 million) in 2014 than either Blacks (10.2 million) or Hispanics (13.4 million). Even when combined, Blacks and Hispanics, according to Census data from 2024, accounted for just 52% of people living in poverty. Minorities have also historically accounted for no more of the welfare caseload than White families.
Why does this misperception of poverty persist? The main cause is the biases and perceptions we are raised with. But there is also much fault with the media. When it presents images of poverty, they are almost always that of Blacks or Hispanics. The images from the depression—think of the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange—showing white Americans living in poverty, have very few equivalents in contemporary media.
Both government and the media must address this misconception. Especially in this polarized age, having an understanding of the oneness of all people is very important.
But it is also important that poor White Americans become more vocal in arguing for government support in bettering their lives and the futures of their children. There is no shame in being poor; it is not, as Republicans often say, "your fault." Asking for support is not asking for charity. Whether you are White or a person of color, most people are poor because of the circumstances of their birth and the resulting milieu the grew up in; getting beyond that barrier is very challenging regardless of race.
But this will be difficult. Although poor Whites benefit from anti-poverty programs, poor Whites seem to have the same perception as most that anti-poverty programs are geared to help people of color because that is how Democrats usually phrase their support; Democrats rarely speak about poor Whites—a big mistake. And this fits in with their racial biases; they do not want to think of themselves as comparable to Blacks. This is in part a result of history: in the antebellum South, planters feared the combined strength of poor Whites and slaves and so they used racism and force to keep poor Whites and poor Blacks separated.
Helping all poor people should be the goal of existing anti-poverty organizations; they should advocate for both people of color and Whites, which would only make their case more compelling. But when I googled to find organizations advocating for poor Whites, I found none.
This is what is fueling part of the Trump base. Poor Whites and poor people of color have been separated by the forces of racism—not just their own but of society's. Poor Whites are supporting Trump because no one else listens to them and no one else says he advocates for them. Even though he really doesn’t.
Poverty should never be seen as primarily a Black issue because it is not in fact. If we seek to end the grip of poverty on people and enable them to lift themselves up, programs and their marketing must be designed with Hispanics and Whites in mind as well. This is not a hand-out. This is about government fulfilling its responsibility under the Declaration of Independence to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans. It is supporting all Americans—including the poor, regardless of color—in the pursuit of their dreams.
The poverty of Whites must be brought visibly and audibly into the public consciousness in a positive way so as to increase public support for programs to fight poverty. If poor Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics aligned themselves in this common cause, they would present a very potent political force.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
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The All-America City of San Antonio Collaborates to Address Teen Pregnancy and Other Issues
Jul 22, 2026
San Antonio, TX, has been working to reduce teen pregnancy for over two decades, making considerable progress through collaborations among the city, county, nonprofit organizations, and the University of Texas. A nine-time All-America City, one of San Antonio’s key community collaborations, SA 2020, harnessed civic muscle to create and achieve dozens of measurable goals, including a significant reduction in teen pregnancy.
The San Antonio Teen Pregnancy Collaborative (SATPPC) was formed in 2010 in response to news that Bexar County had one of the highest rates of teen births in the United States. The SATPPC brought together an impressive list of cross-sector organizations, including public entities, community-based organizations, and faith-based and secular institutions. The group’s overall goal was to reduce the Bexar County teen birth rate among females ages 15 to 19 by 15% by 2020, and it exceeded this goal even before that date.
At about the same time, in 2010, former Mayor Julian Castro launched SA2020, a community-wide visioning process. Through a series of public meetings, online chat sessions, and surveys, San Antonians shaped a shared vision for their community by the year 2020. Nearly 6,000 residents, representing a diverse cross-section of San Antonio, were tasked with developing a framework, defining community results, and identifying measures of success. The first SA2020 report, released in 2011, identified eleven community results tracked by 59 indicators, including the goal of reducing teen pregnancy.
In tackling the teen pregnancy goal, the SATPPC pulled together an impressive list of cross-sector organizations, including public entities, community-based organizations, and faith-based institutions.
Prior to the community goal of reducing teen pregnancy, Bexar County Birth Rates for teens aged 15-19 had remained stagnant. Following the SA 2020 goal, the county reached the 2020 target of reducing the teen birth rate by 15% in 2012. Afterward, SATPPC set a bolder 2020 goal—a 25% reduction—and achieved it by 2014.
More specifically, because of the targeted approach of holding each program and organization responsible for its own outcomes, birth rate by race illustrates progress. Between 2010 and 2015, the teen birth rate for Latino teens, aged 15-19, went from 65.4 per 1,000 to 39.0, and the teen birth rate for African American teens, aged 15-19, also nearly cut in half from 45.6 per 1,000 in 2010 to 25.3 in 2015.
One of the stronger partners in this work was UT Teen Health, based at the University of Texas-San Antonio, which partners with community youth-serving organizations to implement adolescent wellness and healthy relationship programs in South Texas. Partners in this initiative implement programs in middle schools, high schools, after-school programs, faith-based organizations, and in community settings with especially vulnerable youth, including expectant and parenting teens.
UT Teen Health provides capacity-building assistance to organizations that implement programs for youth on a variety of topics, including training on the effects of adverse childhood experiences, trauma-informed practices, and its community resilience initiative.
The city’s SA2020 community-wide visioning process also included other goals related to health and fitness, with an overall vision as follows:
“In 2020, San Antonio residents are among the healthiest in the country. San Antonio promotes well-being by providing healthy and affordable food choices, convenient access to green spaces and recreational facilities, and a robust network of physical and mental healthcare designed to eliminate existing health disparities in the community.”
To guide its strategies toward implementation, SA2020 became an independent, non-profit organization in 2012 and was a major feature of the city’s All-America City application. As of 2016, SA2020 was a collaboration of the city, 133 non-profits, 7 major corporations, the San Antonio Area Foundation, and the United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County, SA2020. 10 years after the project’s indicators were set, 70% of the goals were trending positively.
While the nonprofit organization tracking the SA2020 goals has since ceased operation, the City of San Antonio continues to set and track measurable goals through its quarterly San Antonio 24/7 Performance Report and continues to collaborate with nonprofit groups and the whole community in achieving these goals.
As for teen pregnancy, Bexar County continues to track goals and outcomes, showing in its latest report that as of 2022, teen pregnancy was only one-third of its level in 2007. Thanks to the continued collaboration of UT Teen Health and its nonprofit partners, progress continues to be made.
The National Civic League (NCL) is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing inclusive civic engagement and strengthening democracy by helping communities build more equitable, participatory, and effective local governance.
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Anti-gerrymandering sign
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Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting for Politicians or Their Consultants to Fix Gerrymandering
Jul 22, 2026
2018, a nonprofit worker in Michigan named Katie Fahey posted a message online asking if anyone else was tired of politicians drawing their own districts. She had no campaign experience and no political base.
Within two years, the ballot initiative she built, called Voters Not Politicians, had written an independent redistricting commission into the Michigan constitution. Hollywood eventually made a documentary about it, Slay the Dragon, which is a fairly accurate description of what she had actually done.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
California voters had already done something similar a decade earlier. The Independent Voter Project supported both Proposition 11 in 2008 and Proposition 20 in 2010, handing the state's congressional map to an independent citizens commission instead of the legislature.
Neither reform came from Congress, a caucus, a task force, a political consultant, or a framework; both came from voters who grew tired of waiting and took matters into their own hands.
This brings us to the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus, which unveiled a Gerrymandering Reform Framework on July 1 calling for national standards and an end to mid-decade map redraws. (The particulars are covered by Independent Voter News here.)
Their big plan landed a few months before a midterm election in which independent and No Party Preference voters have grown loud about their disgust with gerrymandering. That disdain is not exactly irrational, especially since 94% of House seats are considered safe for one party or the other, according to the Cook Political Report.
One of the framework's earliest fans is a California political consultant who reposted the caucus's press release, calling it important and necessary and adding that the country needed to enter 2031 with real, standardized reform.
He did not mention, in that post, that he has spent years drawing California's congressional districts for Democrats, or that he is paid each time those districts get redrawn. It is possible to cheer for the end of a war you are paid to help wage, though it is not obvious why anyone should mistake the cheering for sincerity.
The caucus's own math is not encouraging at all. Every single one of these representatives knows full well that nothing becomes law without a majority. No majority is attainable in the current House unless Republican Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries agree on something—an event with no recent precedent.
The immediate mess we find ourselves did not start with Congress either. President Donald Trump pushed Texas to redraw its map outside the normal 10-year cycle, and Texas obliged him.
Governor Gavin Newsom then asked California voters for permission to respond, temporarily setting aside the state's own independent commission to draw a map of the legislature's choosing.
Voters agreed, wiping California's gold standard of independent redistricting off the books.
As of May 2026, 10 states—Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah—had new congressional maps. Before 2025, according to Ballotpedia, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970.
So here is one truth about partisan gerrymandering: the people in Congress or the political consultants currently getting any credit for wanting to fix it are not the people with the power to do so, and the people who do have that power were never in Washington to begin with.
Katie Fahey did not need Congress, and neither did the voters of California, thanks to the power of direct democracy.
Congress can keep issuing frameworks for as long as it likes; a framework requires no votes and changes nothing. A ballot initiative requires signatures, patience, and nobody's permission, not in Sacramento and not in Washington, which is presumably why it remains the only version of reform that has ever actually worked.
Cara Brown McCormick is the principal at Smart Campaigns and advises on strategy and research.
Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting for Politicians or Their Consultants to Fix Gerrymandering is republished as part of The Fulcrum’s partnership with IVN and the Latino News Network to expand voter‑first journalism and strengthen public‑centered coverage of democracy.
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Red rock formations in the "Valley of the Gods" on April 22, 2026 in Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. Bears Ears has been a controversial Monument since it's creation in December of 2016.
George Frey / Getty Images
When Public Lands Become Real Estate
Jul 21, 2026
Last week, in his latest attempted liquidation of our shared heritage, President Trump signed two executive orders eviscerating protections for close to three million acres of our national monuments: Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. From the Oval Office, a president who has never even seen these sacred sites reduced them by roughly 90%, dwarfing his 2017 attempt at a similar land grab by about a million acres, leaving only 300,000 acres of protected land. These cuts will directly threaten critical wildlife habitats, put nearly 100,000 irreplaceable archaeological sites at risk of destruction, and fracture an interconnected indigenous homeland that has been stewarded by Native tribes since time immemorial. To Trump, it’s just another real estate deal.
The Trump regime has tried to portray this set-up to sell off as an effort to restore public access. During the Oval Office photo op where the president signed the proclamations, he said of the monuments: “You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.” That is, to put it mildly, a malicious lie. All your favorite forms of outdoor recreation—from hiking and camping to fishing and hunting—are allowed there, which Trump might know if he had ever visited the land he decided is not worth preserving. In fact, the Antiquities Act doesn’t limit ordinary public use but rather the extent to which an area can be subject to mining and drilling. So much for the land of the free. Trump wants to make it a whole lot easier for extractive industries and private development interests to privatize and pillage these sacred lands for financial gain. Home of the brave? Not an ounce of courage to refuse the fuel lobby when it comes to our public lands. At least the law is on our side. As the President of the National Parks Conservation Association put it, this is both “a betrayal to the American people and illegal.”
The Antiquities Act delegates to the president the power to create national monuments, but the power to diminish them belongs strictly to Congress. Trump’s attempt to slash these boundaries is an unlawful usurpation of legislative power that defies more than a century of legal precedent. But then, what else is new? Still, while Roosevelt explored the wild west and was inspired to designate lands worth protecting, Trump is stripping those protections, sight unseen, to harvest parts to sell to the highest bidder. He has already eliminated over 16 times more land than Teddy protected. It may be predictable, but it is despicable.
Perhaps Trump just has terrible taste when it comes to what is worth preserving for antiquity. His proclamations modifying the monuments, which condescendingly explain why 90% of the monuments were just not monument-worthy enough, are illuminating. He writes that the original designations as national monuments were “premised on the purported need to protect items that are not historic landmarks…or objects of historic or scientific interest.” He then mocks a list of what he calls “generic topographic and geologic features.” Of Grand Staircase-Escalante, they include: “‘vast and austere landscape[s],’ ‘sedimentary rock layers,’ and ‘bold plateaus and multihued cliffs.’” Of Bears Ears: “‘deep sandstone canyons, broad desert mesas, towering monoliths, forested mountaintops dotted with lush meadows’ and ‘low bluffs and high mesas.’” Trump concludes: “These generic features…do not become “landmarks,” “structures,” or “objects of historic or scientific interest” worthy of protection under the Antiquities Act simply because they are scenic.” It is the point of view one imagines ChatGPT, with its zero senses, might have.
To suggest that sedimentary rock layers are not objects of scientific interest is the mark of someone who has never cared for science. In reality, to quote the proclamation that Trump is reversing, the sedimentary rock layers are “unobscured by vegetation, offering a clear view to understanding the Earth’s geological development…[making it] one of the world’s great paleontological laboratories.” And to state there are no objects of historic interest is deeply dismissive, offensive, and inaccurate. These lands include a rich human history that begins with ancient indigenous people (documented even in petroglyphs and pictograph panels–another feature of these monuments). To imply otherwise is an erasure.
On that note, Trump’s desire to privatize these lands is merely the latest chapter in a legacy of American colonialism. Historically, treaties between the U.S. and sovereign Indian nations were routinely coercive, misleading, and signed under duress, and in several landmark cases, the Supreme Court invented loopholes in property law to diminish Native American land claims. Now, Trump tries once more to illegally claim land that is not his, turning to a tired trope. To add insult to injury, Bears Ears happens to be the very first national monument established at the request of a historic coalition of Tribal Nations. If we are not going to actively return this land through the “Land Back” movement, the absolute minimum we can do is treasure it and ensure it remains for future generations. Trump’s actions are unforgivable.
Fortunately, guess who supports protection for public lands: the public. Polling shows that 91% of Western voters support existing monument designations. Three in four Americans actively oppose expanded drilling and mining on our public lands (it’s bipartisan!). The fact is, nobody wants this except the beneficiaries of deals like these, who apparently can look upon “forested mountaintops dotted with lush meadows” and not see past the dollar signs. One of my favorite things about public lands is the spirit of equality in a place where everyone is sleeping in a tent and the campsites are first-come, first-served. Perhaps it is that exact spirit—or the distinct lack of thread count—which generates such contempt for the land among oligarchs.
It turns out, Trump may have only ever visited three national parks or monuments: Everglades, Mount Rushmore, and Gettysburg. He’s a billionaire and the leader of the free world, but with all that money and power, he’s never seen the sun rise at the Grand Canyon or a night sky peppered with stars in Joshua Tree. If he only looked into the bold plateaus and multihued cliffs of our planet, perhaps he would no longer find them generic and rather see the value in protecting them. Or not. In the meantime, he felt compelled to plaster his face on this year’s park passes, in violation of a federal requirement that the pass bear the winning wildlife scene from a national parks photo contest.
Still, this ongoing effort to loot the American commons begs the question: has anyone at the White House ever had a meaningful experience in nature? Been mesmerized watching a condor soar above a canyon? Or simply curious about the natural world? Pity for those people notwithstanding, given the evidence that they consider breathtaking natural wonders generic, at what point do they sell off the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone for being mere scenery, too?
It should go without saying, but our grandest marvels are so much more than scenery. They are essential to our collective identity as a nation and to the health of our planet. They are also the backdrop for the history and culture of so many people in this country, from ancient tribes to college besties on a road trip. And they need our help. If we don’t want to see their destruction, we must sign petitions, support organizations like Veterans for Public Lands, and show up. It is exactly this kind of people-led advocacy that helped restore protections to these lands after 2017. We can do it again. We can also visit these vistas ourselves and share stories about the cactus wren and the Saguaro, or the wonder of watching a desert tortoise cross the road. We can spread the gospel: nature is worth protecting.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
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