Every safety net in this country has been stitched with holes just wide enough for many of us to slip through.

We’ve recently had a front row seat to this playing out again. From the billions cut from Medicaid in the sweeping tax and spending bill enacted last summer to the use of SNAP food assistance as a bargaining chip during the government shutdown, the most vulnerable among us continue to be political collateral.

Poverty is once again being weaponized. And poor people, particularly Black and brown families, are once again the target.

There has always been a war on people considered “poor” in America. It is a quiet war, fought with red tape and policy, with silence and forgetting. Its casualties do not lie in foreign fields but on city corners, food lines, and in empty refrigerators. It is the same war that began when this country decided that liberty was a privilege for the landholder, poverty was a moral failing, and human beings could be owned or treated as three-fifths of a person.

When Lyndon Johnson announced the Great Society in 1964, it was a vision of what this nation might finally become if it chose justice over cruelty. Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, food assistance, and fair housing were each weapons in the fight against want and in expanding access to the American Dream. But from the moment the Great Society was born, there were those who plotted its undoing. The ink was barely dry before they called it waste. They said it bred dependency, not dignity. The war on poverty, they said, had failed. But the truth is, it was never allowed to win.

For Black people, this war began long before Johnson ever spoke. It began when our ancestors were enslaved and made to build the wealth that would later be called America. The promise of 40 acres was not simply broken; it was buried.

The Homestead Act of 1862 opened the nation’s vast lands to settlers and dreamers, but for the freedmen, the gates were guarded by violence and greed. Speculators claimed the best soil, railroad companies took the rest, and when Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 to give freedmen a foothold, it offered only swampland and sorrow. What was left to us was labor, not land.

Public universities born from those same lands through the Morrill Land Act of 1862 became the country’s proudest institutions, yet the children of the enslaved could not enter their gates. It took a second Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1890 to even speak our name, to build parallel schools for a segregated nation. And still, the funding came in trickles, never torrents. America harvested the work but not the worth.

When the soldiers returned from the Second World War, the GI Bill offered them a ticket into the middle class, a home, an education and a future. But Black veterans, the men who bled for democracy abroad, were told their skin disqualified them from that dream. They were excluded from the banks, denied at the universities, and redlined out of the neighborhoods where their children might thrive.

Redlining was a blueprint for exclusion. The government mapped out and marked literal red lines around Black neighborhoods, declaring them too risky for investment. And when those neighborhoods finally became desirable again, the same institutions returned to reclaim them. They called this revitalization but gentrification is the new face of a familiar theft. The cycle repeats: disinvestment, neglect, rediscovery, and removal.

Dr. King knew this war. He knew it when he marched with the sanitation workers in Memphis, men carrying signs that said, “I AM A MAN.” He knew it when A. Philip Randolph called for a March on Washington for freedom and for jobs. King’s dream was never a naïve fantasy of colorblind harmony; it was an indictment of economic cruelty. He understood that poverty was a decision and a deliberate choice to value profit over people.