“If we just give them things, they won’t work to support themselves.”

Who said this, a white politician in 1865 talking about reparations for slavery or a white politician in 2019 talking about food stamps?

Ha! Trick question! The answer is, it’s both.

Heard a radio news piece the other day about the Trump Administration’s proposed rule change that would kick three million people off food stamps. During which a Republican, I didn’t catch his name, said those words. And I froze, because I recently heard a very different voice saying the exact same thing on the audiobook of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

The thing is, studies show that Americans have a serious misconception about who’s on welfare. We think it’s mostly black people. And we are wrong, wrong, wrong. White people are by far the majority of welfare and food stamp recipients. Which only makes sense, because at least for now there’s just more of us whites around. So even though a relatively smaller percentage of whites are on welfare, that still makes for a larger total. And of course it also makes sense that a relatively larger percentage of people of color would be in financially tenuous circumstances so they need help with food, housing, or other necessities, given the historical and current realities of how white people have denied them equal access to education, property, and jobs.

But the belief that welfare is something “we” are “giving” to “them” – and that “they” are mostly black or people of color – is at the core of why we can’t have nice things as a nation. It’s a huge part of why we tear apart our own safety net. It’s out of fear that it might catch someone – in our minds, most likely someone non-white – who doesn’t deserve to be saved from their own laziness. And that false belief is not new. At all.

40 Acres and a Mule?

I’d heard the phrase “40 acres and a mule” before Kendi, of course. Sorta knew it was a reference to some idea that the U.S. government should maybe give former slaves something after the Civil War. But it had a vaguely ludicrous edge to it. Obviously it couldn’t have been a real thing. Must have been just an urban legend, a silly misunderstanding by black people that they’d been promised this mythical quantity of land and, of all ridiculous animals, a mule. Where would all that land supposedly come from in the first place?

Ha! Another trick question! How about, from General Sherman actually ordering the forfeited property of Confederate landowners to be distributed to freed slaves? Y’know, in recognition of centuries of unpaid labor and stolen lives that enabled the supposed “owners” of the people and the land to profit obscenely so that requiring restitution would have been the only morally conscionable course of action?

Freed people had actually settled on the 40-acre plots that they had more than paid for in advance with generations of blood, when President Andrew Jackson rescinded Sherman’s order in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. Why? Because “if we just give them things, they won’t work to support themselves,” as the white people in power argued successfully at the time…

… despite the fact that the skills and labor and the very bodies of enslaved African-Americans had been the engine of the global industrial revolution, which was based on U.S. cotton, so it wasn’t exactly as if “they” were a bunch of useless burdens on an otherwise hardworking and productive white society (thanks to Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told for teaching me that part).

… and despite the fact that at that exact same time in post-Civil War America, the U.S. government’s Homestead Act was giving away up to 160 acres of land for free (after bloodily stealing it from Indigenous people) to 1.6 million settlers… almost all of whom somehow turned out to be white due to “rampant discrimination, systemic barriers and bureaucratic inertia”.

So. Back went the land to the still-powerful white elites of the South, with the approval of the North. And back went the ostensibly freed people who were now required by law to stay and farm their former masters’ land.

I’ll leave it to Kendi to walk you through the next 150 years, in which sharecropping continued through the 1930s and 1940s until agricultural mechanization – rather than any progress in social justice – made it economically disadvantageous to white landowners; Social Security’s new safety net in the 1930’s deliberately excluded jobs primarily held by people of color (farm and domestic workers); and we “ended welfare as we know it” in the 1990s… all the way up until the moment where I’m sitting there in my driveway, gobsmacked at what that Congressman just said on the radio.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh? Or if you want to be less elegant about it: Same shit, different day. And here we are.