Many people think that poor white people cannot be the benefactors of white privilege because they have worse lives than wealthy and powerful people of color like Barack Obama and Al Sharpton. These people go on to say that privilege is based on class rather than race. This statement is half right. Poorer white people are significantly less privileged than rich and famous people of any race. However, when compared to poor African Americans, poor white people seem to have significant advantages.
Past discriminatory housing policies and practices such as the National Housing Act and Redlining kept African Americans from moving into middle and upper-class neighborhoods and pushed them into the poor neighborhoods that they are still
concentrated in today. Since they live in more impoverished areas, poor and middle-class African Americans are more likely to live in areas with unhealthy environments and attend lower performing schools, than white people of similar economic statuses.
Researchers at the
University of Minnesota found that African Americans were more likely to live in areas with high levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant linked to heart attacks and asthma attacks, then poor white people. The prevalence of nitrogen dioxide in these communities is responsible for 7,000 deaths a year and is probably why African Americans are
more likely to die from asthma attacks and suffer from heart issues than of other races.
Along with suffering from health problems from environmental issues, poor people of color are also more likely to go to under performing schools than poor white people.
Since public schools receive funding from property taxes, schools in areas that have more expensive homes (i.e. wealthy areas) have more resources and are able to give the students who attend the schools a higher quality education, than schools in poorer areas with less expensive homes and less resources. Since middle class and poor minorities are more likely to live in poorer areas than poor white people, they are more likely to go to public schools that are
lower performing and overcrowded. Students that attend lower performing schools are less likely to get the necessary education to move up the social ladder, which is probably why the
Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan policy analysis group, found that 54% of African American children from low-income families stay poor, compared to 31% of white children.
Even though poor white people have less privilege than wealthy African Americans, they still have more opportunities than poor and middle-class sometimes African Americans and this should be remembered when discussing race and making housing policy.