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President Donald Trump and the Republicans are playing Russian roulette with the world’s food. Food pantries across the United States are emptying as Trump and Republicans in Congress use SNAP benefits as a bargaining chip to end the government shutdown they created.
As hunger emergency deepens – Trump administration promises to send half of the usual allowance while Trump himself insists on not sending anything— I have seen Black people on social media are urging each other to sit it out. Not to do interviews. Not to let the media run away from black mothers who are hungry to put a familiar face on the crisis that can then be ignored.
Because we already know how this story ends: The country watches Black suffer and shrugs. Black pain is not enough to shake the conscience of the nation.
Remember the “prosperity queen?”
Take the trope of the prosperity queen for example.
First Ronald Reagan popular the term “welfare queen” during his 1976 presidential campaign. He claimed there was a black woman from Chicago, Linda Taylor, who was gaming the system, driving around in a Cadillac while cashing government checks she didn’t deserve.
Reagan presented this story as fact to convince voters of the wastefulness of welfare programs, but it was a lie. There was a real woman named Linda Taylor who had committed welfare fraud. But she was white (at least according to the 1930 census), and was a prolific cheater who was even arrested for kidnapping.
Reagan stuck Taylor, named “prosperity queen” in 1974 by Chicago Tribuneto argue that welfare recipients were unwashed frauds. He repeated Taylor’s story over and over during speech after speech, claiming that he was collecting $150,000 a year through welfare fraud. The actual total was about $40,000 for many years, according to reports in the Washington Monthly.
Reagan’s lie was convenient. It cast a woman of ambiguous racial background into a symbol of Black degeneration: a lazy swindler who lives off the largesse of hard-working taxpayers.
Sure, there were white people who received public assistance. even Reagan could recognize that. But they were down on their luck – victims of circumstance who just needed a temporary hand. It wasn’t likethe blacks.’
Once in office, Reagan used his racist lie to justify cutting welfare spending. This, when combined with aggressive expansion of the former President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs and the increasing economic precariousness of the black working class; As manufacturing jobs disappeared, he established a political order under Reagan that effectively criminalized poverty itself.
And of course, rising crime—followed by mass incarceration due to mandatory minimums and increased homelessness—was seen as further evidence that poverty was a uniquely black moral failure. “We gave them boots and they can’t even stand up.”
Blacks had been cast as a permanent underclass.
Cruelty is the point
Almost 50 years later, we still live in the house that Reagan built— in a policy that treats poverty as a moral failure and encourages whites to blame blacks for it.
This is the real legacy of the “welfare queen” myth: It taught white voters to see social programs as something that blacks take advantage of and whites pay for. (The irony is that the real welfare queens aren’t black mothers. They’re rich white men who don’t pay taxes.)
Trump and his cronies are likely riding on the strength of this myth as he siphons off SNAP benefits.
About 41.7 million Americans rely on SNAP benefits, according to government data. That’s about 12 percent of the population. SNAP is literally the difference between food and not for some families — about 39 percent of SNAP recipients are children 17 and under.
And to make it even harder, almost Three-quarters of SNAP recipients live at or below the poverty line. In the US, this means that earn less than $32,150 for a family of four.
These numbers are not abstract. They represent people who may face starvation because of Trump’s political stunt. But does this concern the president? No. As a journalist Adam Server pointed out astutely at Atlantic back in Trump’s first term, toughness is the order.
Trump doesn’t care about the poor, black or white. And the weaponized myth of the welfare queen ensures that white America will see its own hunger and blame blacks for it. Or maybe they’ll blame it on brown people or trans people. a banner on the USDA website blames the shutdown on Democrats for prioritizing health care on “illegal aliens” and “genital mutilation procedures.”
I bet most Americans still picture a black mother when they think of welfare. It is so ingrained in the national consciousness that Fake videos of black women complaining about AI about their EBT cards have recently gone viral. This is the power of the Reagan myth: It rewired the public imagination so that poverty appears black, even when, in raw numbers, more SNAP recipients are white from any other race. Right above one-third of SNAP recipients are white; a quarter are black.
But that’s another lie we tell ourselves, isn’t it — that “most people on SNAP are white.” It is true, but it erases the fact that as a percentage of our population, blacks rely on food aid more than whites.
There is no shame in that. We don’t need white liberals trying to defend the honor of the black community by pointing out that many poor whites need help feeding their families too. We can admit facts.
The empathy gap
But we must also admit that it is not the whole story. Systemic racism and inequality is a large part of the reason that a quarter of all SNAP recipients are black. That’s a conversation this country never seems ready to have. Yet this is why the response to the white struggle is so different: unexamined prejudices and a refusal to have difficult conversations.
The response to the opioid crisis, compared to the response to the crack epidemic in the 1980s, is a stark example.
The opioid crisis of the past decade has been framed as a tragedy caused by the Sacklers—the family behind Purdue Pharma that sold opioids as non-addictive painkillers when they weren’t—and from doctors who irresponsibly pushed painkillers on sick patients, turning people in pain into unwitting victims.
THE crack epidemicon the other hand, it was framed as a self-inflicted “Black-on-Black” crime and became a justification for locking up an entire generation of Black people. The media was saturated with news about “super predators” and “crack babies”.
This is the empathy gap at work. In this country, there is a kind of invisible algorithm that determines what pain counts as human and worthy of sympathy.
But this time is different.
The Trump administration has shown little interest in allowing SNAP benefits for anyone. He doesn’t seem to care about poor white people as much as he does about poor black people.
However, it seems that when white people get mad, shit really changes. Just look how people he stood up indignantly to ABC and Disney for suspension Jimmy Kimmel Live! The backlash forced Disney to reinstate the late-night comedian within a week.
So if that’s what it takes to get America to care about hungry kids, then fine. Let white families be the face of this hunger crisis. Maybe when millions see the starving white kids on their phones, they’ll realize that hunger is a policy choice, not an inevitability.
Or maybe not. Maybe the myth of the welfare queen will last. Maybe this country will continue to blame poverty on black people. Maybe we’ve run out of empathy. After all, this country watched a class of white kids get slaughtered at Sandy Hook—and then watched hundreds more die in the decade after that— and still did nothing.
Perhaps the only honest thing left to do is to stop waiting for a moral awakening from a nation run on cruelty and tell the truth about who we are. And the truth is this: We are a cruel and stubborn nation. As a black woman, it’s hard for me not to understand exactly what this is: more fuel for the prison pipeline.
Trump is creating a hunger crisis because if there’s one thing that will drive otherwise law-abiding people to crime, it’s watching their children starve. So that’s the playbook. Starving people, taking away their health care, and then imprisoning them for doing what they have to do to survive.
It is a familiar book – the same one that has always been used to control and degrade us – to blame us for poverty as a moral failing rather than a policy choice designed by racist politicians. And then criminalize it.
But maybe this time when white America is in the cages next to us, they’ll finally understand what we’ve been shouting all this time.
