WASHINGTON -- Gene Alday, a Republican member of the Mississippi state legislature,
apologized last week for telling a reporter that all the African-Americans in his hometown of Walls, Mississippi, are unemployed and on food stamps.
"I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks,'" Alday said to a
reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper, earlier this month. "They don't work."
Nationally, most of the people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are white. According to 2013 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, 40.2 percent of SNAP recipients are white, 25.7 percent are black, 10.3 percent are Hispanic, 2.1 percent are Asian and 1.2 percent are Native American.
does race really matter when it comes to human beings living in poverty?
it seems to me it only matters if one wishes to push blame for societies ills off on a race other than ones own and in so doing, divorce ones self from the necessity of finding a solution.
honestly, i don't believe for one second that anyone wants to be enslaved to poverty, and that's pretty much where folks on food stamps are living. so regardless of race, the question needs to be how do we help people rise out of poverty.
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i'm a firm believer that education is the key to unlock that prison door, so how do we reach the innocent kids who through no fault of their own were born into poverty?
kids are born with an enormous capacity for learning and an aptitude that is very rarely exhausted, particularly when born into a toxic environment. so the question that must be answered is how can we reach these kids and help them to see and pursue achieving their vast potential in life as opposed to fallin prey to the perils of a toxic environment (i.e. poverty, drug addiction, gang banging, criminal behavior, etc).
we've got to find a way to reach these kids so that they don't get trapped.