Dear Friend,
After centuries of the United States treating Black lives as dispensable (without admitting that Black labor was indispensable), large numbers of Americans are finally saying “enough.”
History has inflection points, and the beyond-brutal murder of George Floyd—captured on an excruciatingly long video for the entire world to see—combined with vast racial disparities in the COVID-19 death rates has brought the nation to one of those turning points.
Even many of those who previously chose to avert their eyes from the obvious cruelty and racism of our criminal justice system, the inhumanity of our inadequate health care system, and the economic inequality that has led to vast poverty and hunger here at home are now confronted with a reality they can no longer (easily) ignore.
The United States’ willingness to allow Black Americans to be tortured and murdered with impunity has always been inextricably tied to its willingness to deny them equal access to living-wage jobs, safe housing, sufficient health care, high-quality public schools, and yes, adequate food. When we say today that Black Lives Matter (and Hunger Free America does emphatically say that), we must include not just the right not to be killed or unfairly targeted by police, but also the right to obtain food, housing, and other lifesaving necessities.
Throughout our organization’s 37-year history (first as the New York City Coalition against Hunger, and now under the name Hunger Free America), we have made it clear that structural racism is one of the top causes of hunger in New York City and the United States.
It’s no coincidence that many of the workers now deemed “essential”—literally risking their lives for us—are still often paid less well and protected less well from disease because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity.
People of color are also now suffering the most from the recent spike in hunger, and such deprivation is further fueling our current civic unrest.
The nation’s history in this regard is beyond shameful.
People of color have always been paid less (or nothing at all) and charged more for basic items they need to survive.
For decades, it’s been a scourge of the nation that the (mostly Latinx) people who pick, process, prepare, and deliver our food—engaging in some of the most back-breaking, dangerous work in the country—are often paid so little that they suffer from hunger themselves.
When the modern federal nutrition safety net was created in the 1960s and 1970s, Southern segregationists, who still dominated key Congressional committees, gave control of key aspects of program administration to states, purposely enabling some states to make it more difficult for non-white people to get their fair share of food aid.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan repeatedly used race-baiting language to undermine safety net programs, railing against supposed “strapping young bucks” getting food stamps. Reagan’s slashing of the government safety net—combined with outsourcing middle-class, unionized American jobs—created the modern hunger and homelessness crisis, from which the U.S. has yet to recover. And of course, people of color suffered the most.
New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg insisted on criminalizing (and racializing) hunger by requiring all applicants for food stamps to be finger printed. Our organization led a decades-long, but ultimately successful, fight to end that outrageous practice in New York City.
We spoke out when leading conservatives, such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, implied that African Americans were uniquely dependent upon food stamps.
Yet our work—and that of so many other activists around the country—to combat racial injustice has never been nearly sufficient. We need to do more and do it better.
Even though the largest number of people in America who are poor, hungry, and reliant on government aid programs are now—and have always been—white, people of color still disproportionately face economic deprivation.
In bad times, such as recessions, people of color disproportionately lose the most jobs, have the steepest declines in income, and are most likely to lose their homes.
But even in good times when the overall economy is soaring, people of color achieve the fewest gains. In 2018, in supposed boom times, fully 37.2 million Americans—more than the combined populations of Ohio, Georgia, and the five states of New England—lived in households defined by the federal government as “food insecure,” or unable to always afford enough food. The vast majority of those were children, seniors, working people, veterans, and people with disabilities. Hunger Free America found that one in 11 employed U.S. adults were struggling against hunger, and that the working hunger epidemic was most pronounced in states with lower minimum wages.
Even though most impoverished Americans continued to be white, as always, non-white people get the short end of the stick. In 2018, real median incomes of non-Hispanic white households ($70,642) was 71 percent higher than that of Black households ($41,361), and 37 percent higher than that of Hispanic households ($51,450), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The poverty rate in 2018 was 8.1 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 10.1 percent for Asian Americans, 20.8 percent for Black Americans, and 17.6 percent for Hispanics. In other words, the Black and Hispanic poverty rates were double the white poverty rate.
The household food insecurity rate in 2018 was 8.1 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 21.2 percent for Blacks, and 16.2 percent for Hispanics, according to USDA. In other words, the Black food insecurity rate was about two and a half times the white rate and the Latinx food insecurity rate was double the white rate.
People of color are far more likely to live in food deserts, in which healthier foods are not readily available. Because healthier food is more expensive, harder to find, and more time-consuming to prepare, hunger and obesity are flip-sides of the same malnutrition coin, and people of color have higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, one of the key reasons they are more likely to die from COVID-19 and other diseases.
While the racial income, poverty, and hunger gaps are is vast, the gaps in assets—what people own—are far vaster. According to the Board of Governors Federal Research System, in 2016 white families had the highest level of median family wealth, $171,000. Black families’ median net worth was less than 15 percent that of white families, at $17,600. Hispanic families’ median net worth was just $20,700.
The mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement made poverty alleviation and economic justice cornerstones of their work. The famous 1963 March on Washington was formally called the March for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month before he was assassinated, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
Rev. King made the hunger issue a central component of his Poor People’s Campaign. After his assassination, the movement, ably led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, camped out on the Washington Mall to dramatize the issue and call for the expansion and creation of federal nutrition assistance programs. These efforts generated widespread media attention and forced the President and Congress to act.
In the years following the encampment on the Mall, the president and Congress jointly expanded the Food Stamp Program and federal summer meals programs for children from relatively small pilot projects into large-scale programs and created the National School Breakfast Program and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program, which provides nutrition supplements to low-income pregnant women and their small children. These expansions succeeded strikingly in achieving their main goal: ending starvation conditions in America.
As this grassroots movement receded in the subsequent decades, our public policies retreated, and hunger, poverty, and inequality once again soared.
So today, we say “enough.”
But what does that really mean? How do we transform our outrage into actual improvements in the living conditions of people of color and people in poverty? What do we really need to do in concrete terms?
For starters, let’s actually listen—fully listen—to Black Americans and all people of color, as well as all people who have life experience with poverty and hunger to inform us what they believe needs to be done. To address economic opportunity, we need to build a new, broad-based, movement with low-income Americans leading the charge, pressing the government to enact serious, sustained, comprehensive, adequately-funded public policy improvements to enable Black Americans and all people of color who are now struggling to finally gain the access to food, health, and economic opportunity so many other Americans enjoy.
To obtain just a small down-payment on what needs to be done, we need to pressure the U.S. Senate Republicans to pass, and President Donald Trump to sign into law, the increases in SNAP and other food aid programs in the Heroes Act, which has already been passed by U.S. House Democrats. We also need to pass the HOPE Act to make it easier for low-income Americans to access a wide variety of benefits—stigma-free—by using modern technologies, and to empower low-income families to better work with government and charities to achieve long-term economic self-sufficiency. We urge everyone reading this to contact your two U.S. Senators and one U.S. Representative today to ask them to fast-track these vital measures.
More broadly, we need to push policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels to enact an “Aspiration Empowerment Agenda” which would give all people—and especially people of color—the opportunity to advance their dreams through learning, earning, and saving their way out of poverty through living-wage jobs, world-class public education, and a modernized, adequate safety net. True economic security for all Americans means empowering people to develop assets to enable them to move from owing to owning.
We also need to vote. Every single of one us who is eligible to do so must register and cast a ballot—in every election. We need to educate ourselves on the policies and the candidates, rejecting the demonstrably false cop-out that “all politicians are the same” or “nothing I do matters.” Electing better leaders—and then holding them accountable—is hardly the only answer, but it’s the most important one.
As we collectively say “Enough!” and that Black Lives Matter, the million-dollar question is whether this new movement: a) is merely a flash in the pan that vanishes when the TV cameras go away; b) gets hijacked by fringe elements (many of whom have little or no true interest in racial equality), selling the long-discredited fairy tale that we can achieve serious social progress through violence or indiscriminate destruction; or c) builds the long-lasting, multi-racial, peaceful, outcomes-focused movement capable of transforming every aspect of American society for the better.
I hope we choose the latter, and Hunger Free America will do everything in our power to help. We can do no less to honor the memory of George Floyd and the countless other Black Americans who have been senselessly murdered and brutalized throughout our country’s history. You cannot separate economic justice and food justice from racial justice and we must ensure our leaders remember this truth, as well.
But this is really up to all of you—up to all of us— to build an America of true opportunity and equality.
Merely saying “Enough” isn’t enough. Together, let’s do the hard work to make progress real.
Sincerely,
Joel Berg
CEO, Hunger Free America
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