ThinkProgress: Families of Color Likely to Remain in Poverty Even If They Work

According to ThinkProgress, families are color are likely to remain poor even if they work. Almost half of minority working families are poor or low-income. More than a third of African-American and Latino working families make less than $32,000 a year. In contrast, just 13 percent of white and Asian-American families find themselves in that same income bracket.

Some people argue that the poor are poor because they lack a work ethic. But hard work doesn’t mean American families can pay the bills. Nearly a third of the country’s 32.6 million working families, or 10.6 million, were low-income in 2013, or had incomes that fell below 200 percent of the poverty line, according to a new report from The Working Poor Families Project.

And race plays a huge role. Working families headed by people of color are twice as likely to wind up in poverty anyway as compared with white families. The report finds that nearly half, or 47 percent, of working families headed by racial or ethnic minorities are poor or low income, compared to just 23 percent of white families. Breaking it down further, 55 percent of working Latino and nearly half of African-American and Native American families who work are low income, but less than a quarter of white families are.