Yes, I've heard of Appalachia; they seem to regard poverty as a minority disease they caught, and are ashamed of it, it's not politicians that hide non minority poverty, but the people themselves. Right now, non minority poverty is worse than it's ever been at any time other than the great depression. Non minorities make camps in the middle of nowhere, and live in busses, cars, trucks, and home made shacks; these are people who would be employed working a decent job if they had found one, but now they quit looking so no longer even count as unemployed.
Been to Detroit lately? Have you ever heard of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement or the Trans Pacific Partnership? How about "Globalization"? All of those things stand for loss of jobs, and Mo money for the rich.
"The women are all married to Uncle Sam". This statement is lower than whale feces; it blames the victim for the crime.
"The Great Society" The political scam of the 20th century should go to conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960's were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers money. Nothing could be farther from the truth. (I'll discuss this at lenth if you like)
Detroit looked like the gleaming city of "Oz" in the 60's; remember "Motown". It looked that way because of all those assembly lines: Cadillac, Pontiac, Gray Hound Bus, and those are just the ones I remember; were paying top wages and going full blast. I saw more new cars on the streets of Detroit than I ever saw anywhere before or since. I also went to Mississippi, this was about the time "Ode To Billy Joe" came out. I thought I must have passed through some kind of time warp without knowing it; the service stations were even old fashioned, everything seemed to be from a different era.
I learned a lot about the people of Mississippi from reading "Eudora Welty" and Faulkner, the people got a kind of backwardness that's passed down from generation to generation; for example when things are going real bad, they say "It could be worse, you could have been born black".