The racist subtext to the SNAP discussion (that isn’t always subtext)
Clay Higgins, U.S. representative from the state of Louisiana, thinks it’s the poor’s own fault that they might go hungry if and when SNAP benefits aren’t distributed in November.
“Any American who has been receiving $4200 dollars per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked,” he wrote on social media, “should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack.”
Let’s set aside the ludicrousness of the idea that $11 a day in groceries is enough to feed a family in the U.S. (or even most adults). Let’s also set aside that those families should also have had the foresight to reserve a portion of that money in order to warehouse groceries in the event that there was for some reason interruption to the support (the reason at the moment being “politics”).
Let’s focus on Higgins’ addendum there: “stop smoking crack.” It’s not clear if he meant that literally, that recipients of SNAP (also often referred to as food stamps) are making bad decisions because they are on drugs. But given how energetically Higgins’s party has tried to tie the receipt of federal benefits to laziness, it’s probably not a mistake.
Of course, there’s also a racial subtext to that addendum. Discussion of government support has for decades carried a racist subtext, at least since Ronald Reagan dishonestly singled out a Black Chicago woman as the face of federal subsidies. Smoking crack has been similarly coded for a long time.
But we don’t need to raise an eyebrow and wonder whether the response to the SNAP shutdown is rooted in part in racism. We can simply quote Rob Schmitt, one of the interchangeable faces on one of the interchangeable right-wing video broadcasting sites.
“People are selling their benefits,” Schmitt claimed. “People are using them to get their nails done, to get their weaves and their hair. I mean, this is a really ugly program.”
Yeah, OK. That’s racist.
As it turns out, there are a lot more White households receiving SNAP benefits than Black (or Hispanic or Asian) households. Nationally, there are 1.8 White households getting SNAP benefits for every Black one.
In fact, more White households than Black households receive SNAP benefits in 44 states. In six states and D.C., more Black households receive the benefits, in large part because those places have larger Black populations.
It is true that a larger proportion of Black households than White households receive SNAP benefits. But, as I noted earlier this week, that’s in large part because SNAP benefits are (as you’d expect) closely correlated to household income and poverty levels. Since Black households tend to have lower incomes — itself a function of endemic and institutionalized racism! — those households are also more likely to receive SNAP benefits. Benefits, I’ll note, that are almost exclusively used for their intended purpose: food.
Why does Schmitt want to suggest that the aid is going to wasteful Black people? The same reason Higgins wants to suggest it’s going to drug addicts or (at the very least) people inept at taking care of themselves: because it makes it so that their heavily White audiences are inoculated against news reports describing SNAP recipients potentially going hungry.
This is the role such rhetoric has played since the Reagan era. But the people who will be negatively affected by SNAP cuts are a lot more likely to be White than Black.
Photo: Meat for sale in 1936. (National Archives)