The structural Racialization of food
By Jimi T Hardee with Rachel Major and Ari Ochoa
Quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. AZQuotes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a way of putting us in touch with some of the more glaring inadequacies and lack of resilience of our infrastructure in the United States. While many are struggling with a lack of affordable healthcare and sick time benefits, we have also begun to see the rise of another compounding health crisis that affects our most vulnerable citizens. Around 60% of school-aged children in the United States rely on the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to provide affordable meals. With the widespread closure of US schools since March, countless American families have found themselves without a way to feed their children.
Though 3rd party organizations that have stepped in to fill this gap, the whole situation smacks of a hard truth: if school-aged children don’t have enough food, their families don’t either. The question remains: how can so many citizens of the most wealthy and powerful nation in the world be so affected by food insecurity? To answer this question we have to examine who specifically is being affected, and as with our other recent blogs and newsletters, communities of color are disproportionately carrying this burden.
Golden State Warrior point guard Steph Curry addresses food insecurity in Oakland, CA. Twitter
Black households in America face hunger at roughly twice the rate of white households, and Latinx children require emergency food assistance at nearly three times the rate of their white counterparts. On the surface, the major driving factors of food insecurity for POC in America are things like poverty, proximity (food deserts), and even over-policing. To understand the underlying causes of the food gap between white Americans and POC, though, we first need to understand that these problems do not exist independently of each other. Poverty creates communities without proximity to healthy foods, poverty creates high rates of malnutrition and health issues, poverty creates higher crime rates which lead to over-policing and higher incarceration rates. Moreover, each of these outcomes themselves create more poverty and more food insecurity, and, without outside systems that help to break out, the cycle continues. This is a concept called “structural racialization” where racially divisive outcomes are created in society with or without racist intent, and it is the most important thing to understand when we talk about the food gap.
As we have discussed in earlier pieces, the poverty rate for Black and Latinx Americans is roughly twice that of their white counterparts. In terms of food this puts many households in a position of having to choose between purchasing healthier, more expensive food in lower quantities, or purchasing less healthy, more inexpensive food in higher quantities. To compound on this, impoverished communities have a tendency to become “food deserts” or areas where fresh and healthy foods are generally unavailable. According to a UC Berkeley report: “More than 23.5 million Americans, including 6.5 million children live in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods that are more than one mile from the supermarket.” Considering the widespread lack of public transit in these impoverished communities where residents are far less likely to own automobiles, being a mile away from the supermarket can severely limit the accessibility of healthy foods. What’s left is fast food companies who have historically used predatory tactics targeted towards Black and Latinx communities, particularly children.
Photo from Black Lives Matter protest of police brutality. ABC News.
Furthermore, both over-policing and mass-incarceration are also much more prominent in low-income areas, and both have a hand in creating more poverty and more food insecurity. The obvious monetary impact of mass incarceration on a family is pretty easy to understand: if a person who was working finds themselves in prison, suddenly that family’s income is drastically reduced, creating poverty. Over-policing and cash bail policies create countless instances where people find themselves in jail awaiting trial, unable to pay their bail. These individuals have not been convicted of any crime but often must spend weeks or months in jail before a verdict is rendered. Many lose their jobs because of this and even those who don’t are likely to lose a significant amount of income if they are hourly workers. All these lost wages lead to higher levels of poverty and thus, to food insecurity. Even those who complete their prison sentence and parole may find themselves unable to find work or to enroll in programs like SNAP, thus, once again, creating more poverty and more food insecurity.
There are countless more examples of how POC are affected by food insecurity but the goal here is not to explain that there is a food security gap in America, because honestly most of us already know that there is. In this last entry of our series on racial inequity in the US, our hope is to express how structural racialization creates a positive feedback loop that feeds on infrastructural failures like food deserts. A student who arrives at school with an empty stomach is not likely to perform as well as a peer who ate a balanced breakfast, through no fault of their own, they are starting at a disadvantage. Grades suffer and so educational opportunity suffers and so earning potential suffers and so on; when these children grow up, poverty begets more poverty, food insecurity begets more food insecurity, inequity of opportunity begets more inequity of opportunity.
Twitter response to the question: “what radicalized you?”
In America we have a tendency to blame people for their own problems and sometimes this can be a good thing. We like to pride ourselves on taking responsibility for our own success or failure. This becomes harmful though when we look at a multi-faceted problem like the food gap and blame the victims of poverty. The truth is that factors are often far beyond an individual’s control and there are few systems that work to break the cycle; in fact many systems we’ve discussed here arguably feed this cycle. In our recent newsletters we’ve discussed money, water, and food - essential necessities to live - that are often insidiously denied to our communities of color under the guise that they didn’t work hard enough or have enough grit. Instead we should ask: are they starting at a disadvantage because we are unable to help them or because we are often unwilling even to acknowledge that a gap exists, let alone why? To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, if we really want people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” perhaps we should first provide them with boots.