WASHINGTON -- Gene Alday, a Republican member of the Mississippi state legislature, apologized last week for telling a reporter that all the African-Americans in his hometown of Walls, Mississippi, are unemployed and on food stamps. 

"I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks,'" Alday said to a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper, earlier this month. "They don't work."

Nationally, most of the people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are white. According to 2013 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, 40.2 percent of SNAP recipients are white, 25.7 percent are black, 10.3 percent are Hispanic, 2.1 percent are Asian and 1.2 percent are Native American.