Report: Child Poverty Rate Holds Steady for Blacks, Down for Everyone Else

By Kenrya Rankin Jul 15, 2015

According to the Pew Research Center’s new analysis of Census data, America’s poverty rate for Asian, Latino and white children* has dropped since 2010. But when it comes to black children, it hasn’t budged.

In 2013, 14.7 million children lived in households with an annual income below the poverty line, which was $23,624 in that year. That’s 20 percent of all children, which is down from 2010’s rate of 22 percent.

That decline came with a drop in the poverty rate for Asian, Hispanic and white children, but it held steady at 38 percent for black children. That made them nearly four times as likely to be living below the poverty line than their white and Asian counterparts. In real numbers, a very young Latino population means that there are more Hispanic children (5.4 million) in poverty than any other group, at a rate of 30 percent.

*Post has been updated to reflect the fact that data is for Asian, black, Latino and white American children rather than all American children.