Thursday, January 19, 2012

Food Stamps and Invisible Americans

For South Carolinian Howard Furch the food stamp issue that Newt Gingrich raised during the last Republican primary debate is more about whether or not a candidate for president can empathize with unemployed and underemployed poor Americans struggling to put food on their table and feed their children. Furch asked, how can a candidate who can run up a $500,000 Tiffany bill and another one who can make a bet for $10,000 “relate to us?” His question reminded me of a book project that I'm working on that looks at Martin Luther King, Junior [MLK] through the lens of food. In his 1968 speech, “Remaining Awake Through A great Revolution,” King reflected on a recent trip he took to Marks, Mississippi, which at the time had the unflattering reputation as the poorest county in the United States. MLK recalled speaking with unemployed parents that had no kind of income, welfare, or food stamps. “I said how do you live? And they said well we go around—go around to the neighborhood and asked them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries; when the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits that’s about it.” In the northern ghettos of 1968 Newark, New Jersey and Harlem in New York City, MLK also found parents struggling to put food on the table and feed their children. King described these food deserts in the rural South and urban north “as kind of domestic colon[ies]” where the people remained invisible because the economic divide in United States limited contact between them and the more affluent Americans who worked, worshiped, and relaxed and in vastly different spaces. As King put it “our expressways carry us away from the ghetto, [and] we don't see the poor." I argue that in historic prospective Gingrich's current stump speech on food stamps and the president is more about class than race considering that the majority of citizens who have received food stamps have been white and poor. More on this topic tomorrow; in the meantime, enjoy the links below.