What I Hear When You Say

Ive never been on welfare.

Ive never been on food stamps.

But if I were, itd be because Im struggling, not because I want a handout.

[MUSIC] I think welfare queens is an oxymoron.

I cant think of a situation where a queen would be on welfare.

I feel like theyre clowning us.

Its almost a joke at this point.

People are suffering for that.

There are actually things called food deserts.

Look at the peppers; they just look depressed.

They look like the people whose bodies they go into.

Thats an inanimate object.

Like you can just rot and die.

And I go outside and Im like, Yea that what people think about me. Its the same thing.

Fruits and vegetables that are a direct relation to everything, quality of life.

Now go to a Whole Foods, and they have cherry tomatoes.

That fruit has hope.

These people have hope.

These white people have hope.

You know?

White lives matter.

And you never have to say that.

Food stamps, welfare and support from other types of government and nonprofit agencies - is why Im here today.

Most people who get called welfare queens, are black people.

And 40% of all people who are on welfare are actually white.

If a person told me that I was a welfare queen or somehow someone in my family was a welfare queen, itd be extremely extremely offensive.

So what I hear when I hear, I dont want my tax dollars paying for a welfare queen, is one of the oldest intersectional pieces of discrimination that one can think about.

I hear the success of an anti-feminist backlash.

So intersectionality is basically the idea that race, gender, class - are all different kinds of axes that come together.

We know that women generally experience sex discrimination, but we dont know women experience sex discrimination differently depending on their race.

If anyone has ever had to try to live on $300 a week, they know how impossible it is to actually raise a family on less than that amount over a month.

So this is basically an effective piece of stereotyping that was used to drive a public policy of completely defunding the welfare system, as we know it.

The bottom 20% of all Americans get less than 3% of all of the resources that are set aside to enhance and to better peoples lives.

Whats important to recognize is the top 20% gets more than 60% of all the money.

The wealthiest people in the United States get the most money in terms of government expenditures.

And the least among us, and that is the growing numbers of poor children get the least in terms of dollars.

So you have two problems that many poor people experience.

Number one - they dont have enough money to buy healthy food.

Not enough healthy food.

And number two - they often dont live in neighborhoods where there is actually an opportunity for them to buy healthy food.

They cannot go and actually get fresh fruits and vegetables.

Its the people who live next to convenience stores, bodegas, other kinds of stores, where the basic thing you buy there is food that is artificial.

Its saturated with all sorts of not healthy things for you and thats the kind of food people that have the access to when theyre poor.

And thats the only kind of food that many of them can afford.

Here, in the United States.

There is absolutely a racist element to using the phrase welfare queens.

If you are a white person on welfare, you get treated a lot differently than say an African-American family on welfare or a Hispanic family on welfare.

We make it really really easy to eat cheap and crappy food.

And we make it kind of difficult for people to find good quality food.

We make it difficult in terms of work life for them to be able to prepare it.

And then we say, Oh you chose this bad diet. When in reality, weve built a society where the easiest way to eat is crappy.

The average welfare benefit in Michigan is $500 a month for a family of three.

Average food stamp benefit is a few hundred dollars more.

So at most youre looking at a family thats at about half of the federal poverty line.

So if youre in a neighborhood thats mostly got small scale stores, youre gonna have very little produce because its really difficult for small scale entrepreneurs to handle a produce section right.

It takes a lot of work and skill to keep like lettuce, tomato, onions, bananas, all that stuff rotating and in good quality.

Kids who arent eating that healthfully are going to have problems in school.

They are gonna have problems developing the kinds of discipline you need to be in the workforce.

All that just keep telegraphing forward and causing problems.

So there are a number of things we can do to sort of improve this stuff.

One, we could start looking at healthy food as a basic social right and sort of be taking a lot more proactive stance as a society to make sure every community has access to fresh healthy food.

Here in Michigan, we have double up food bucks, so for every dollar you spend up to $20 a week; you can get a matching dollar for fresh fruits and vegetables at the farmers market.

And what you see at farmers markets that introduce that is that there is much more food stamp sales there and that people with food stamps are even spending their own money out of their pockets at farmers markets to get that food.

So you see that when low-income communities have access to affordable food, they actually do go for the healthy stuff.

If I go into a deli and I see a banana and it looks like its been war-torn.

I dont feel good about my own safety.

If an apple has holes in it, theres a good chance that theres a lot of gun violence in that neighborhood, you know.