New Post-Katrina Poll: Ending Poverty Should Be Number One Priority
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 11/21/2005
Alleviating poverty in the country should be the country's number one priority according to a new multilingual national poll.Poverty emerged as a higher priority than fighting terrorism and establishing democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan for a majority of African Americans (58 percent), as well as pluralities of Hispanics (43 percent), Asian Americans (40 percent) and Non-Hispanic Whites (36 percent), according to poll results.
"I don't remember poverty ever finishing as the No. 1 priority on any kind of list," Sergio Bendixen told the Associated Press. His firm, Bendixen & Associates, conducted the poll for New California Media, a nationwide association of more than 700 ethnic media organizations. "The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the images of poverty have clearly made a large impact on many Americans," Bendixon told AP.
The NCM poll studies Katrina's impact on public opinion on four national issues: the eradication of poverty in the United States; race relations and discrimination; the environment and climate change; and the ability of government to deal with catastrophic events.
Poll results were released in Washington at a November 17 briefing co-sponsored by NCM, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF) and the Center for American Progress.
The issues addressed by the poll align well with LCCREF's objectives post-Katrina, Karen McGill Lawson, LCCREF's executive director said. "The tragedy of Katrina has provided us with an opportunity to re-examine policies that helped create the racial, ethnic and class inequities that we saw so graphically on our television screens. We have the chance to address these issues of poverty and racial isolation through the rebuilding process."
More than two-thirds of the respondents in each racial group believe that poverty is worse than they had "ever imagined."
"Americans seem genuinely to want something done about poverty in this nation. Dramatic images of tens of thousands of poor families ... may have had a major impact on the way many Americans look at poverty and what the nation should do about it," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and counselor to LCCREF. "It remains to be seen whether this view will be fleeting and episodic -- or whether it represents a real watershed of public opinion."
The consensus among the four major ethnic and racial groups polled was that the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast and the government's share of rebuilding efforts should be financed by "getting our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible." Clear majorities of African Americans (77 percent), Hispanics (69 percent), and Asian Americans (60 percent), as well as a plurality of Non-White Hispanics (46 percent), supported this strategy over "raising taxes" "cutting government funding for health and education programs," and "borrowing more money from foreign countries."
The poll, "Lessons of Katrina: America's Major Racial and Ethnic Groups Find Common Ground After the Storm" was conducted among 1035 individuals, who were interviewed in Spanish, English, Korean, Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
