Let White People Be the Face of Trump’s Hunger Crisis—Opinion

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President Donald Trump and the GOP are playing Russian roulette with people’s food. Food pantries across the United States are emptying out as Trump and Republicans in Congress use SNAP benefits as a bargaining chip to end the government shutdown they created.

As the hunger emergency deepens—the Trump administration is promising to send half the usual aid while Trump himself insists on sending nothing—I’ve seen Black folks on social media urging each other to sit this one out. To not do interviews. To not let the media trot out starving Black mothers to put a familiar face on the crisis that can then be ignored.

Because we already know how that story ends: The country sees Black suffering and shrugs. Black pain isn’t enough to stir the nation’s conscience.

Remember the ‘welfare queen?’

Take the welfare queen trope, for example.

Ronald Reagan first popularized 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 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 she was a prolific scam artist who was even arrested for kidnapping.

Reagan latched on to Taylor, dubbed “welfare queen” in 1974 by the Chicago Tribune, to make the case that welfare recipients were profligate scammers. He repeated Taylor’s story again and again during speech after speech, claiming that she was collecting $150,000 a year through welfare scams. The true total was somewhere around $40,000 over multiple years, according to reporting in Washington Monthly.

Reagan’s lie was convenient. It cast a woman of ambiguous racial background into a symbol of Black degeneracy: an indolent cheat living off the largesse of hardworking taxpayers.

Sure, there were white people who received public assistance; even Reagan could acknowledge this. But they were just down on their luck—victims of circumstance who just needed a temporary hand. They weren’t like ‘the blacks.’

Once in office, Reagan used his racist lie to justify slashing welfare spending. This, when combined with aggressive expansion of former President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and the increasing economic precariousness of the Black working class as manufacturing jobs disappeared, cemented a political order under Reagan that virtually criminalized poverty itself.

And of course, rising crime—followed by mass incarceration due to mandatory minimums and increased homelessness—was held up as further proof that poverty was a uniquely Black moral failing. ‘We’ve given them bootstraps and they can’t even manage to pull themselves up.’

Black people had been dismissed as a permanent underclass.

The cruelty is the point

Nearly 50 years later, we’re still living in the house that Reagan built—in a politics that treats poverty as a moral failing and encourages white people to blame Black people for it.

That’s the real legacy of the “welfare queen” myth: It taught white voters to see social programs as something Black people exploit and white people 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 probably counting on the power of that myth as he squeezes SNAP benefits.

Some 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 eating and not for some families—about 39 percent of SNAP beneficiaries are kids 17 and younger.

And to make it even more difficult, nearly three-quarters of SNAP beneficiaries live at or below the poverty line. In the U.S., that means they make less than $32,150 for a family of four.

These numbers aren’t abstract. They represent people who may face hunger because of Trump’s political stunt. But does that concern the president? Nope. As journalist Adam Serwer astutely pointed out in the Atlantic back in Trump’s first term, the cruelty is the point.

Trump doesn’t care about poor people, Black or white. And the weaponized myth of the welfare queen all but ensures that white America will see their own hunger and still blame Black people for it. Or maybe they’ll pin responsibility on brown people or trans people; a banner emblazoned on the USDA website blames Democrats for the shutdown because they are prioritizing health care for “illegal aliens” and “genital mutilation procedures.”

I’ll bet most Americans still picture a Black mother when they think about welfare. It’s so engrained into the national consciousness that AI-generated fake videos of Black women complaining about their EBT cards have recently been going viral. That’s the power of Reagan’s myth: It rewired the public imagination so that poverty looks Black, even when, in raw numbers, more SNAP recipients are white than any other race. Just over one-third of SNAP beneficiaries are white; one-quarter are Black.

But that’s another lie we tell ourselves, isn’t it—that “most people on SNAP are white.” It’s true, but it elides the fact that as a percentage of our population, Black people rely on food assistance more than white people.

There’s no shame in that. We don’t need white liberals to try to defend the Black community’s honor by pointing out that a lot of poor white people need help feeding their families, too. We can admit facts.

The empathy gap

But we also have to admit that’s not the whole story. Systemic racism and inequality are a large part of the reason a quarter of all SNAP recipients are Black. That’s a conversation this country never seems prepared to have. Yet it’s the reason why the response to white struggle is so different: unexamined biases and the refusal to have difficult conversations.

The opioid crisis response, when compared to response to the crack epidemic in the 1980s, is a stark example.

The opioid crisis of the past decade was framed as a tragedy caused by the Sacklers—the family behind Purdue Pharma who marketed opioids as non-addictive painkillers even though they weren’t—and by doctors who irresponsibly pushed painkillers on ailing patients, turning people in pain into unwitting victims.

The crack epidemic, on the other hand, was framed as 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 “superpredators” and “crack babies.”

That’s the empathy gap at work. In this country, there’s a sort of invisible algorithm that determines whose pain counts as human and deserving of sympathy.

But this time feels different.

The Trump administration has shown little interest in permitting SNAP benefits for anyone. He doesn’t seem to care about poor white people any more than he cares about poor Black people.

Still, it seems like when white people get mad, shit actually changes. Just look at how people rose up in outrage at ABC and Disney for suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! The backlash forced Disney to reinstate the late-night comedian within a week.

So if that’s what it takes to make America care about starving kids, then fine. Let white families be the face of this hunger crisis. Maybe when millions see 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 hold. Maybe this country will continue to blame poverty on Black people. Maybe we’ve run out of empathy. After all, this country watched a classroom of white children get slaughtered in Sandy Hook—and then watched hundreds more die in the decade after that—and still did nothing.

Maybe the only honest thing left to do is to stop waiting for a moral awakening from a nation that runs on cruelty, and to tell the truth about who we are. And the truth is this: We are a cruel and carceral nation. As a Black woman, it’s hard not for me to clock exactly what this is: more fuel for the prison pipeline.

Trump is engineering a hunger crisis because if there’s one thing that will drive otherwise law-abiding people to criminality, it’s watching their kids starve. So that’s the playbook. Starve people, take away their health care, and then jail them when they do what they have to do to survive.

It’s a familiar playbook—the same one that’s always been used to control and degrade us—to blame us for poverty as a moral failing rather than a policy choice engineered by racist politicians. And then to criminalize it.

But maybe this time when white America finds itself in the cages right alongside us, it’ll finally understand what we have been hollering about this whole time.

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