Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) stated that “I know about white poverty” and that “in African-American communities, you have people who are living in desperation, often being abused by white police officers” in response to a question on his comments that “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car” during a Democratic presidential town hall on the Fox News Channel on Monday.
Sanders said, “Look, there is no candidate in this race who has talked more about poverty than I have. And one of the things that’s disturbing, the media doesn’t often cover that, we have 47 million people in this country living in poverty. That is a higher rate than any other country in the industrialized world. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. I talk about poverty all of the time. What I meant by that is that in African-American communities, you have people who are living in desperation, often being abused by white police officers, that is a bad thing. And that has got to change. And that’s why I’m fighting to reform a broken criminal justice system. But I know about white poverty. It exists in my state. It exists all over this country. In the richest country in the history of the world, we have more income and wealth inequality than any other major country. We have too many people living in poverty. We have got to change our national priorities. We have got to deal with that issue.”
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