Attorney General Andrea Campbell speaks about the impending cutoff of SNAP benefits at a rally outside the State House on October 28, 2025. (Photo by Chris Lisinski/CommonWealth Beacon)

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.

And then came the Reagan ‘80s. The administration did not just cut welfare; it turned it into a weapon of shame. It gave the war on poverty a new enemy: the “welfare queen.” She was not real, but she was powerful, conjured from the nation’s oldest fear, the myth of the undeserving Black woman. (And to make matters worse, the woman whose case was the foundation of this fearmongering trope wasn’t actually Black).

The story of her Cadillac and her food stamps was about narrative. It turned public compassion into contempt. It told the white working class that “the poor” were not victims but thieves, that the problem was not exploitation but excess and fraud. It gave a moral gloss to greed and dressed cruelty in the guise of common sense. It also gave poverty a race, gender, and ethnicity.

And here we are again. Decades after King’s death, the same battle lines remain. The same moral cowardice dresses itself in a new language. The same myths about laziness and dependency are whispered about those who rely on food assistance, those who turn to Medicaid, and those who need the social safety net that has been frayed and starved.

With the Medicaid cuts it calls for, the so-called “big, beautiful bill” that promised prosperity offers only pain. On top of those cuts, subsidies to help low- and middle-income Americans who obtain insurance through the Affordable Care Act are set to expire at the end of the month. Our collective acknowledgment through these programs that health should not be a luxury is under siege.

Meanwhile, threatened with cuts and conditions that would harm those who need it most, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was held hostage in the recent government showdown over spending. Though the shutdown has ended, the message was clear: food assistance is a political pawn, not a moral commitment. SNAP is now not just an acronym but a four-letter word.

SNAP provides food assistance to 42 million people. It serves as a lifeline for families who might otherwise go without food. Nearly 40 percent of those who rely on it are children, proof that this program feeds futures as much as it fills plates. It is, in essence, a benefit of democracy, an echo of the Great Society’s original promise in its war on poverty.

But the social contract has been broken. It is the same old war, wrapped in new rhetoric.

The cruelest part of this war is that most cannot see it. Or worse, some refuse to acknowledge it. Poverty is a product of deliberate design, yet it is cast as personal failure. Those who rely on public assistance to feed their children are told they should have worked harder, dreamed smaller, and known better. But this has never only been about poverty. It is about race, about history, about a nation that wages war on its own and calls it policy. The war on poverty has always been, in truth, a war on Blackness and a hazing of all those who are different and dare call themselves American.

Yet even in the wreckage, we Americans keep building. We build out of memory, out of faith, out of the fragments this country leaves us. We build kitchens that feed when policy starves. We build churches that remember when history forgets. We build movements that refuse to die.

The Great Society was once a promise that America might learn mercy. That promise still waits for its fulfillment. To end this war, we must close the empathy gap: the distance between what this nation says it feels for the working class and what it owes them. We must tell the truth about who we are and what we have done.

We must decide, finally, that the so-called “working poor” are not a burden on this nation. We must see ourselves when we see our neighbors, friends, and family. They are the ones holding it up. They are not the problem. They are the evidence of America’s unfinished promise as well as the blueprint for how we can still fulfill it.

Imari Paris Jeffries is the president and CEO of Embrace Boston.