The war we never stopped fighting
By Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries
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.
Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement of the “Great Society” in 1964 imagined 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 the outline of the American Dream. But from the moment the Great Society was born, detractors 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 when our ancestors were enslaved and made to build the wealth that would later be called America. The promise of forty acres was not simply broken. It was buried. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened the nation’s vast lands to settlers and dreamers, but not to freedmen. 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.
The GI Bill offered soldiers returning from the Second World War a ticket into the middle class: a home, an education and a future. But Black veterans, the men who bled for democracy abroad, were denied at the banks, excluded from the universities and redlined out of neighborhoods where their children might thrive. |
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Tuskegee Airmen (circa May 1942 to Aug 1943). (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) |
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And when those neighborhoods finally became desirable again, the same institutions returned to reclaim them. They called this “revitalization.”
The cycle repeats today through gentrification: disinvestment, neglect, rediscovery and removal. It is also called emmedifying, turning the people's struggle into the aesthetic of progress, replacing residents while keeping their rhythm, turning community into a commodity.
The Reagan administration turned welfare into a weapon of shame in the 80s, giving 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. 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 also gave poverty a race, gender and ethnicity.
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 yet, 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, who turn to Medicaid and who need the social safety net that has been frayed and starved.
Today, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food assistance to 42 million people (nearly 40 million of them children) and serves as a lifeline for families who might otherwise go without food, is being used as a bargaining tool at the expense of those who need it most.
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, known better.
But this has never been only about poverty. It is about race, about history, about a nation that wages war on its own and calls it policy. It’s 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 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 finally decide that the so-called "working poor” are not the problem. We are the proof of it. |
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