FLINT, MI. — During Sunday evening’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) insisted that white people do not know what it’s like to be poor, even if they are living below the federal poverty line, as almost 400,000 white Alabamians currently are.
“When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor,” the self proclaimed democratic socialist said in front of the audience in Flint, Michigan, to applause.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty threshold for a family with two adults and one child was $19,055 in 2014, the most recent year for which there is data. This is the official measurement of poverty used by the Federal Government, and the measure used for most poverty-based data presented on State Health Facts.
Below is the percentage of whites, blacks and hispanics in Alabama who currently live in poverty, according to federal poverty data collected by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Had Sanders said that African-Americans experience poverty at a higher percentage, that would have been accurate. However, the total number of white Alabamians living in poverty actually exceeds the total number of blacks.
According to federal statistics, there are 394,400 white people that live in poverty in Alabama.
Many liberal pundits and activists have applauded Sanders’ comments during the debate, saying he was addressing “white privilege,” a frequent rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or get dragged out of a car,” Sanders said of white Americans. “I believe as a nation in the year 2016, we must be firm in making it clear. We will end institutional racism and reform a broken criminal justice system.”
Sanders is locked in a tough primary with frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who dominated Super Tuesday in the South, where blacks make up a large portion of the Democratic Electorate.
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