Facebook Publication Date: 4/5/2021 6:04

Lace on Race sez:

It is an unmitigated good that the Biden Administration is seeming to understand what previous Administrations, including previous Democratic Administrations, failed to either understand, acknowledge, or act upon: that the current food security programs in the United States have been woefully inadequate.

Since the Clinton administration, with its large-scale rollback of both Cash Aid and food benefits, which disproportionately affected black and brown populations, the combination of the physical scarcity of enough *and* the psychological toll that it takes has made for both humiliation and real time consequences.

1 and 4 American children have food insecurity, and demonizing parents for that systemic problem happy, both fashionable an expedient.

This new expansion is a big deal. Externalizing the problem to systemic and institutional forces, as well as an admission that the Thrifty Budget set by the budget is laughable on its face, goes a long way towards humanizing the most marginalized people.

In this article you will see talk of humiliation and what small interventions can do.

The scope of the program is expensive at first glance; about 9 billion dollars in what is essentially a pilot program.

But that only tells part of the story.

The food stamp program is essentially a retail program; that is to say the government is paying retail not wholesale prices, and the beneficiaries are as much food sellers and distributors as much as they are for the end users of the program.

People are always surprised to find out that the food stamp program is not an HHSA program but a Department of Agriculture program, and in that sense provides incalculable subsidies for the agricultural sector, which puts Republicans in a conundrum.

It’s a conundrum that they answer inadequately and inelegantly.

Their talk of balking at expanded food programs because it, in the words of a spokesperson at the American Enterprise Institute says that it will undermine initiative and marriage, leave them to intentionally punish those at the bottom two quartiles of the American income distribution.

What has changed to make it more politically palatable to extend what can only be called compassion for those sporting shopping trips an exercise in anxiety?

This is where race comes in.

Since 2008, since that major recession, demographics in food insecurity began to change.

More lower middle-class and working-class people, most particularly white lower middle-class and working-class people reported food insecurity for the first time and the lines at food banks and Family Resource Centers became, on the aggregate, paler and paler.

Just like the change in attitudes towards addiction, when the face of food poverty becomes whiter, compassion becomes easier, and solutions are arrived at quicker and with less pushback.

The Biden Administration seems to be aware of this; seems to be aware that the faces of poverty, or, more accurately, that the *acknowledged* faces of poverty have changed makes it easier for programs to be pushed forward that will indeed help brown and black populations, which essentially means that policy change that benefits all turns on white supremacy.

Even though it’s in the background, and will not be easily or overtly acknowledged, the fact that there is now a national consensus that white families need and deserve help without stigma is what is driving policies. The covid-19 crisis is also a factor; and also an acknowledgement that the current Dynamic in job creation has created an entire class of gig workers, significantly White, that makes for insecurities and volatility in a population that was used to security and regularity.

Put another way, white people, even as they struggle, are seen to have the right to basic survival, even as they’re brown and black counterparts have never been.

As well, externalizing the problem, which is a correct approach in my view, lessens the demonization and the stigma and the character assassination of those who need food assistance.

The programs are currently temporary but there are moves to have them be made public.

It is unfortunate that it is taken white people and their struggle to allow for national consensus about the struggles of all people.

And hopefully in this time of the virus, and afterward when things return to some semblance of normalcy, the old tropes and push back the food security for all will have quieted.

But it may not.

It was indeed a democratic Administration that codified this demonization 25 years ago.

My hope Is that *this* Democratic Administration well reverse the heinous and punishing and punitive an adversarial policies of the past.

Read, reflect, comment.

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