Obama's America: Black children were almost four times as likely as white children to be living in poverty in 2013, a new report has found, the latest evidence that the economic recovery is leaving behind some of the United States’ most vulnerable citizens

The poverty rate has remained stable for black children, while it fell for Hispanic, white and Asian children, a sign of just how pervasive and stubborn poverty has been for African-Americans, according to the report. About 38.3% of black children lived in poverty in 2013, nearly four times the rate for white children, at 10.7%. About 30.4% of Hispanic children and 10.1% of Asian children live in poverty. For the first time since the federal government started collecting the data, the number of black children in poverty appears to have overtaken the number of poor white children, even though white children far outnumber black children in the American population, the report said. About 4.2 million black children were living in poverty in 2013, compared with 4.1 million white children, though researchers said the difference was not statistically significant. In actual numbers, there were still more Hispanic children in poverty, 5.4 million, than any other group, researchers said, a ranking the group has held since at least 2008. The Hispanic population is larger and younger than any other racial or ethnic group, and the child poverty rate is relatively high. Researchers did not investigate the reasons black children were lagging. One possible driver was the unemployment rate, which has been consistently higher for African-Americans than for most other racial and ethnic groups, and which took longer to fall after the recession, Eileen Patten, a research analyst who tracks social trends at the Pew Research Center, said.