It's time to get down to the of the matter.
(race & poverty)
In 2021, 37.9 million Americans lived in poverty (11.6 percent). Over 18 million Americans lived in “deep poverty,” meaning they had a family income of below one-half of their poverty thresholds. But as usual, it gets much worse when you break the poverty numbers down by race. In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 19.5 percent of Black Americans were living at the poverty level, compared to 10 percent of White Americans.
On any given night in 2022, around 582,500 people experienced homelessness in America. As usual, there was an overrepresentation of Black Americans. Although Black Americans represented just 12 percent of the total U.S. population in 2022, they made up 37 percent of all people who experienced homelessness and 50 percent of people who experienced homelessness as members of families with children.
A report called Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States revealed that "more than TWO MILLION Americans live without running water and basic indoor plumbing, and many more without sanitation. On the Navajo Nation in the Southwest, families drive for hours to haul barrels of water to meet their basic needs. In the Central Valley of California, residents fill bottles at public taps, because their water at home is not safe to drink. In West Virginia, people drink from polluted streams. In Alabama, parents warn their children not to play outside because their yards are flooded with sewage. In Puerto Rico, wastewater regularly floods the streets of low-income neighborhoods. Families living in Texas border towns worry because there is no running water to fight fires.
Millions of the most vulnerable people in the country — low-income people in rural areas, people of color, tribal communities, immigrants — have fallen through the cracks. Their communities did not receive adequate water and wastewater infrastructure when the nation made historic investments in these systems in past decades. That initial lack of investment created a hidden water and sanitation crisis that continues to threaten the health and wellbeing of millions of people today.
Race is the variable most strongly associated with access to complete plumbing. Nationwide, 0.3 percent of White households lack complete plumbing, as compared to 0.5 percent of African American and Latinx households, and 5.8 percent of Native American households. That means that African American and Latinx households are nearly twice as likely to lack complete plumbing than White households, and Native American households are 19 times more likely." Read the full report here.