95% of welfare recipients in American are families headed by a single mother.
About 27% of welfare recipients are African American.
But in surveys, Americans estimate blacks to make up 60-70% of welfare recipients.
When journalists were surveyed, their estimates were similar.
Why would people think that? The percentage of black people shown in pictures/videos about poverty stories in major news magazines and TV are about 60% -exactly what Americans estimate. What a coincidence.
It's the same pattern in school texts. In school texts most of the white people that appear as faces of poverty are in the photos from the Great depression.
Pictures of Native Americans also appear frequently in school texts as faces of poverty, although they constitute much less than 1% of the nation's poor.
The odds of finding the picture of a white, middle-aged male in a text book chapter or news article about poverty is very small. But black males are very much overrepresented in pictures of poverty. This is particularly odd given that blacks are normally very much underrepresented in newspaper pictures and TV news.
The truth is, white children and white single-mothers are the real face of poverty in the US.
And another truth is that in an experiment more people signed up to volunteer when they were led to believe that the poor people in question were white. The saddest thing was that even African Americans volunteered more for white people.
Surveys show that people who believe African Americans are lazy are less supportive of welfare.
Add all these up:
Racism is the biggest impediment in the fight against poverty in the US. And it is mostly invisible. Most racists don't prepare signs with racist imagery, or make jokes about monkeys. Most of them are not even aware that they are racists.
They just oppose "big government".