On another board I’m trying to debunk the myth that welfare is just subsidies for African-Americans. I’m fairly certain most welfare recipients are white and always have been, but I can’t seem to find those stats on Wikipedia or by googling.
Not sure if this will help. The author cites his sources but the sources are rather dated (1994) and not easily verifiable. But this is a start at least.
Here’s a really old (1993) census brief (in PDF) on the statistical breakdown of mothers who receive AFDC payments. AFDC is no more, of course, and the replacement program is run on a state level, but I’ll see if I can find recent data for TANF.
That’s a little misleading though, isn’t it? I would think you would need to consider the numbers as a percentage of the population that they represent too.
Depends what question you are trying to answer.
If it is a question of what percentage of all welfare recipients are of a given race then that holds fine.
It the question is which race has a greater percentage of its population receiving welfare then you need to compare the above percentages to a census to get an answer.
People who think that all or most TANF recipients are black probably live in a larger, more urban area. If you go down to Social Services in a medium-sized city, you might get that impression because I suspect that poor people in general have been driven to the cities as rural land is bought up, gentrified and “developed”.
Since, sadly, black folks represent a disproportionate segment of those in poverty, you will see more of them in offices in the city.
However, there are also large stretches of land where hardly anyone is black, and all the people in those Social Services offices are white.
I think people often don’t really think their opinions through – or never had enough information to properly form an opinion in the first place. Good luck fighting ignorance!
Assuming those 1994 numbers to be correct (and we shouldn’t, because that date pre-dates the comprehensive Clinton/Gingrich “workfare” reforms) then we can see two things:
Because there are more whites than blacks in this country, those numbers show it’s obvious that as a raw number, more whites receive AFDC than blacks do.
Because there are more whites than blacks in this country, those numbers show a greater percentage of blacks receive AFDC than whites do.
We can assume those numbers to be correct for 1994.
But are there any numbers more recent?
This is a particular interest of mine, and I looked really hard, but I had no real luck.
According to this study most of the leading indicators for families in poverty have remained pretty consistent by racial breakdown between 2002 and 2006.
But this very hard to read study suggests to me that the percentage of BOTH white and black TANF recipients has declined, while the percentage of hispanics has increased.
I completely admit I could be reading the numbers wrong, but to me it looks like a highernumber of white families receive TANF but a higher percentage of black families do.
I think one of the reasons why it’s difficult to find good data on TANF is that individual states determine eligibility. Each state collects different information from recipients and I doubt race/ethnicity would be collected. Therefore most state-level data that details something like race/ethnicity would need to be self-reported such as the case with the Census link that **Captain Amazing ** provided as well as NSAF and CPS data used in the links from kunilou.
I always find discussions of “welfare” to be difficult because there is no one thing called “welfare”, and people’s definitions can vary quite a bit. Are you limiting “welfare” to AFDC/TANF? Or are you going to include Medicaid, SSI, Medicare, need-based college aid, etc? Some people lump plain old Social Security into “welfare”. You might be in for a long afternoon.
Remember too these studies don’t mention how much time the individuals spend on welfare. Six weeks, six months, and six years are very different.
If three members of one group stay on welfare for two months, and one member of another group is on welfare for ten years, it is not fair to say that three times as many of the first are on welfare as the second.
I work with our county Social Services. The statistics are so screwed and skewered as to be totally meaningless.
When analyzing stats people are usually wrong because they compare apples and oranges.
Sure there would be more white people on welfare than blacks, why? Because there are SO many more white people.
Here is an example I did for research for college.
I found in civil service jobs whites are hired more. But this is not quite correct.
Blacks form 11% of the nation’s population.
So I went to each county where blacks made up 11% or more. I found out in those counties blacks in civil service jobs were up around 58% of the hires.
Now this says where black people are available they are hired in civil service far more in proportion to their population.
But now people will say, “but that’s the same thing because there are no whites to apply.” So what I did was dug up stats indicating hiring profiles. In otherwords in white areas there were simply no black people to apply. But in black areas I found enough white people did apply to render the statistic still meaningful. There always was at least 11% of the applications who self-identified as white. In white areas there was often NO black people at all to apply.
Admittedly there are still some flaws, but I didn’t have access to all the data I needed.
Anyway the point is, in areas where black people are 11% of the population they still are grossly over-represented in civil service type jobs. This shows there is a skewing in the hiring process of blacks. Now I didn’t check other minorities, so I will qualify myself by saying it might NOT just be blacks, it could be all minorities that are being overhired by government.
But if you look at raw numbers you see whites overwhelm blacks simply because there are so many more of them. In places like Vermont, Wyoming, and other western states where the blacks form small numbers the white population adds up quick to overwhelm the stats when you look as a whole