Fifty
years after the war on poverty began, its anniversary is being observed
with academic conferences and ideological sparring — often focused,
explicitly or implicitly, on the “culture” of poor urban residents.
Almost forgotten is how many ways poverty plays out in America, and how
much long-term poverty is a rural problem.
Of the 353 most persistently poor counties in the United States — defined by Washington
as having had a poverty rate above 20 percent in each of the past three
decades — 85 percent are rural. They are clustered in distinct regions:
Indian reservations in the West; Hispanic communities in the Rio Grande
Valley of Texas; a band across the Deep South and along the Mississippi
Delta with a majority black population; and Appalachia, largely white,
which has supplied some of America’s iconic imagery of rural poverty
since the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans.
McDowell
County is in some ways a place truly left behind, from which the
educated few have fled, leaving almost no shreds of prosperity. But in a
nation with more than 46 million people living below the poverty line —
15 percent of the population — it is also a sobering reminder of how
much remains broken, in drearily familiar ways and utterly unexpected
ones, 50 years on.
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