Once again, the Republican Party is showing that they
really don’t care about children. For all
their talk about family values — empty and
self-righteous talk at that — red states only
care about children as pawns in their cruel
expression of power.
Fifteen states, all led by Republican
governors, have rejected
federal money for a summer lunch program.
Congress approved a food assistance program
designed to assist low-income families during
the summers, with $120 for each child to
purchase food when school lunches are
unavailable. While 35 states, five territories
and tribal nations have opted into the
program, 15 states — Alabama, Alaska, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming — declined
the offer.
All of these states are GOP-controlled, which is not
accidental or by chance, a fact that we will
explore later. (To be fair, Louisiana, which
is currently Republican-led, opted out of the
funds when a Democrat was governor.) Roughly
half of these states are former confederate
states with large Black populations, a long
record of treating people poorly and a history
of not regarding Black people as human
beings.
This federal program provides $2.5 billion to around 21
million children who would receive free or
reduced-cost lunch in school. And yet, these
red states are knowingly and willfully
depriving the children of their states the
opportunity to keep their bellies full and
keep from starving in the summer months.
This stance on the part of Republican
governors is the ultimate in cruelty, a hatred
of government programs to help people and a
cold-hearted and cold-blooded demonization of
the poor. “COVID-19 is over and Nebraska
taxpayers expect that pandemic-era government
relief programs will end too,” said Nebraska
Gov. Jim Pillen. Another governor, Kim Reynolds of Iowa,
said COVID-era cash relief programs are
unsustainable, and she actually blamed obesity
for rejecting the federal funds. “An E.B.T.
card does nothing to promote nutrition at a
time when childhood obesity has become an
epidemic,” Reynolds said.
It is sad that the GOP has come to this, that this is
their worldview and they don’t want to feed
hungry children. This is outrageous. But if
you’ve been keeping an eye on what the
Republican Party has been doing for over the
past half-century, you should not be
surprised.
Since the 1960s, and most definitely in the Reagan era,
the GOP became the anti-government party. The
Republicans are not against the government
giving tax breaks to the wealthy, intruding in
women’s bodies and empowering gun
manufacturers, but they are against civil
rights and government programs to assist
marginalized people, specifically anything
that helps Black folks.
After the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and the
passage of historic legislation such as the
Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and
other laws designed to bring about racial and
economic justice, Southern, white
pro-segregation racists felt some sort of way
about Black power. They resented it. Those who
are used to white privilege feel oppressed
when white supremacy itself is under threat.
Republicans capitalized on white
resentment of Black progress through the
Southern Strategy. The GOP replaced racial
epithets like the n-word with racially coded
language, support for tax cuts, states’
rights, smaller government and an end to
government programs. As the late GOP
strategist Lee
Atwater said, “…all these things you’re
talking about are totally economic things and
a byproduct of them is [that] Blacks get hurt
worse than whites.”
Just like the project of convincing poor white men to
fight for the confederacy in the Civil War —
to benefit white slaveowners who relied on
free and forced Black labor to build the
plantation economy, and rendered White labor
useless — the Republican politics of white
grievance creates a false sense of white-skin
solidarity among white people. Meanwhile, the
policies are meant to benefit rich white
people. The benefit to poor white people under
such policies is they get to keep their
Bibles, guns and whiteness, for all its
currency and for whatever it’s worth.
As James
Baldwin said of white people at the epic
debate with conservative William F.
Buckley at the University
of Cambridge on Feb. 18, 1965: “No matter what
disaster overtakes them, they have one
enormous knowledge and consolation, which is
like a heavenly revelation: at least they are
not black. Now I suggest that of all the
terrible things that can happen to a human
being, that is one of the worst. I suggest
that what has happened to white southerners is
in some ways, after all, much worse than what
has happened to Negroes there.”
This is how the GOP gained support in the post-civil
rights era, by attracting white racist
Southern Democrats and bringing them over to
the Republican Party with an anti-Black and
anti-government message. Get the poor whites
to hate government programs because they help
Black people, they say with a wink and a nod.
And it matters little that poor white people
might be affected by cuts to these programs.
Add to that the Republican hatred of food
stamps and welfare programs that came with
Ronald Reagan, who scapegoated the poor with
his racialized “welfare queen” trope to
justify cutting the social safety net.
According to Reagan, the welfare
queen, typically Black, “used 80 names, 30
addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect
food stamps, Social Security, veterans’
benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran
husbands, as well as welfare.”
Give the Republicans credit because their
hustle has worked. As President
Lyndon B. Johnson said, “If you can convince the
lowest white man he’s better than the best
colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking
his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look
down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Yet, the more nuanced and coded race-card and dog-whistle
politics of the Republican Party has evolved
into the blatant bullhorn of white supremacy
in the age of Trump. And it’s still a war on
the poor and those with
melanin.
The GOP opposition to anti-hunger
programs is part of their shtick, and it
exposes their hypocrisy as the so-called party
of family values. But Republicans don’t care
about children; their only concern is
controlling women’s bodies, enabling mass
shooters and domestic terrorists, and helping
their corporate benefactors so they can get
that bag. And if you can judge a nation by how
it treats its children, consider that after
all those babies were slaughtered in the Sandy
Hook Elementary School mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, NRA-funded
Republican lawmakers refused to take any
action on gun control or the proliferation of
assault weapons.
Watching children go hungry is par for
the course in red states, the places with the lowest life
expectancies, lower levels of health and education,
less money, least economic mobility and higher
rates of poverty. Red states have the highest infant
mortality rates. Black women have the highest maternal
mortality rates, and many of the worst states for
maternal mortality are red states. These
states that have been conditioned to treat
human beings like dirt certainly believe in
their freedom — the freedom to live in
despair, to suffer from hunger, and to die
without the oppressive government to help
you.
The GOP doesn’t care about children, and they would have
those poor kids starve. And they are doing it
now.
This commentary is also posted on TheGrio.com.