Our insistence on equating "poor" with "black" has undermined the success of anti-poverty programs.
Our national conversations about poverty — so entangled with race in unspoken ways — have rendered the white poor invisible and the black poor pathological, and undermined our attempts to gain majority support for anti-poverty programs. Led to believe that the poor are “other people’s problems,” a significant portion of Americans have come to view social welfare programs designed to assist the poor as attempts at wealth redistribution — not just across class lines but across the unspoken, coded racial lines.
