Poverty in Oklahoma
Poverty: the state of being extremely poor.
16.1% of people in the state of Oklahoma had incomes below the poverty line in 2015.
We are 38th when it comes to poverty in the U.S.
Throughout our nation, poverty is a thing we as Americans are battling constantly. Every street corner we turn, we see different forms of poverty, especially in Oklahoma.
The thought of poverty itself tends to cause people to laugh or think “Oh that doesn’t exist in Oklahoma, poverty is low in Oklahoma.” While in some areas it is low, it is not the lowest state in the United States.
Throughout the conversation of poverty, we will have to look at how different things affect poverty, like looking at the demographics, looking at the psychographics, looking at specifically age, gender, race, ethnicity, and many other things that will be brought up at a later time.
When looking at poverty in Oklahoma, people tend to think of people just sitting on the side of the road, homeless, with nothing left in their life. When we look at the reality of poverty, it means different things to different people. The sad reality of poverty is that people can meet the level of poverty but still be living in some sort of house hold.
Some do have a form of a home, whether it is theirs or it is a homeless shelter.
Many of these families have kids and pets who they also have to take care of, besides themselves. Some people of poverty have to take care of their parents because of an illness or because of a disability.
The sad reality is that parents will try to get jobs but no one will hire them, or if they get hired, they get fired immediately because of a “situation” that is out of the employers control.
Poverty cannot even be characterized as only caused by having a job or having a car or not having the same privileges that most people tend to have. There are many factors that build up to how poverty is decided, especially when looking at the numbers that is given to us, it takes a lot of factors to determine what is the poverty level.
When looking at poverty, people tend to make assumptions/build stereotypes about these people who meet the level of income when it comes to poverty. People tend to assume that most people of poverty is of Hispanic heritage or African American heritage. They usually assume that these people are ghetto or a danger to society, when is reality, people of poverty are just trying to make it like everyone else.
Poverty, being a constant challenge, have many supportive people and organizations who want to end poverty or end hunger. These organizations are raising money or even more, raising awareness of what the problem is and what we as Americans, or more specifically Oklahomans, can do to help fix this problem in the future.
Poverty in general is a problem here in Oklahoma and how we can fix it is not solely in the hands of the people who are in poverty, it is up to us to fix this problem, or at least how we can try to help fix it and better our community as a whole.
