Here’s some math on U.S. poverty.

• from Census.gov: estimated U.S. population on July 1, 2019: 328,240,000
  • “Black or African American alone, percent”: 13.4% (this works out to 43,984,000, rounding all numbers to the nearest 1,000)
  • “White alone, percent”: 76.3% (this works out to 250,447,000)
• from Urban Institute: U.S. poverty rate in 2021, all races: 13.7% (44,969,000)
  • Black poverty rate: 18.1% (7,961,000)
  • White poverty rate: 9.6% (24,043,000)

A few points/opinions, which I hope will not be too controversial.

• A long history of legal and institutional racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact, a moral outrage, and needs to be corrected, particularly in housing and education.
• A greater fraction of the black population is poor compared to the white population.
• There are more poor white people than poor black people in the country.
• You have to be careful comparing averages between groups of very different sizes.
• From a moral perspective, if you want to help the most people, you would not only help black people. You would try to help people who need help in both groups, while trying to even out the disparities.
• From a political perspective, an incessant focus on race, and rhetoric equating race and poverty, is going to turn off a lot of poor white voters. This ends up electing politicians who are not going to help poor people of either race.
• There are other races, there are many mixes of races, and there are many confusing census questions about whether people consider themselves hispanic instead of or in addition to the other races. I am not a professional demographer, and do not know the absolute best way to handle these issues.