I was in my office fiddling with the giant scissors we bought to cut the big red ribbon for the next day’s grand opening.
Ring! Ring!
Slinging the scissors up over my shoulder, I looked at the caller ID. It was the chef manager of the EAT Café.
Hey, uh …
The toilet in the basement
burst.
There’s sewage running all over the basement floor.
We need a plumber,
ASAP.
It stinks!
It was the end of our workday, and we were finalizing plans for the next morning’s grand opening. For our team, opening the EAT Café signified the culmination of decades of painstaking work on hunger. After years of careful study and research, successful programming, and deliberate and well-thought-out political action, we were going to try something new. It felt as if our team was at the precipice of a great achievement.
The name EAT Café stands for Everyone At the Table. Regardless of people’s ability to pay, we welcomed everyone to join in and enjoy a three-course meal served directly to their table just like they do at a full-service restaurant.
This was the vision: People who do not have enough money can enjoy a meal made from scratch served with care to their table. Wealthy people would come to the EAT Café because not only was the food delicious but they would feel happy and satisfied supporting the mission as well. The EAT Café was based on the idea that people who can afford to pay would pay extra money to supplement the cost of meals for those who could not afford to pay. Everyone orders from the same menu and shares the same energy in this joyous, colorful, and communal place without privilege or marginalization, without separation of rich and poor, Black people and white people, immigrant and citizen, professor and sex worker. Everyone is welcome, equal, celebrated, and nourished.
When a person is hungry, they just want to sit down and eat. They don’t want to wait in line to be served food cafeteria-style like they are in school, the military, or prison. Instead, people should be able to enjoy good food, soothing music, and lovely colors, and receive food without having to prove their worth.
For a person to show that they are “worthy” of getting food at a soup kitchen, food cupboard, food pantry, or food shelf (terms vary by locale), they usually have to show ID or provide proof of residency with their utility bill or some other piece of paper that demonstrates they are “in need.” Often, they sense a side-eye from volunteers for the way they look. Maybe they look pitiful or maybe they look too good—too good to get leftovers or food otherwise headed to the landfill. People must show their worth to get food stamps, or what is now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). They must wait in line for hours at a county assistance office and suffer the stare down from the caseworker who does not trust them to tell the truth. If they succeed, they will get SNAP in such low amounts that the best way to stretch their dollar might be with a dry package of ramen noodles, hot dogs, and a Coke. When people don’t have enough money for food, they often have no social connections to ask for help. They cannot call a neighbor or show up at a friend’s house and hope to get a meal. Hunger is a sign of disbelonging.
We built the EAT Café as an antidote to all of this stress, isolation, and bad food. It was meant to greet the urgency, judgment, and depressing state of affairs with a healing embrace. To walk through the door of the EAT Café would be an opportunity to join community, be nourished, and be welcomed home.
I hung up the phone and emerged from my office dragging the scissors across the floor.
As our team cleaned up the watery sewage in the basement, we debated what to do. If we immediately called off the grand opening, it would raise alarm with the community stakeholders with whom we had worked for three years, not to mention the mayor’s office, city council, and press. Plus the EAT Café staff had been cooking for days. Everything was ready.
A plumber came, we helped clean up, and agreed to wait until the next morning to decide what to do. Our biggest worry? The stench.
After a fitful sleep, the next morning we teamed up to sniff around the café.
“Hmmm.… Sniff. Not too bad.”
“Let’s do this!” we agreed.
The television cameras arrived. People offered heartfelt words of communion. Many hands grasped the big scissors, and we cut the red ribbon. It was a grand opening.
This is where I begin: the beauty, joy, communion, community, and shit exploding underneath.
This is what working on hunger is like. Most initiatives to address hunger in the United States are working on the surface. On the surface, people concern themselves with food and community. Everyone knows the shit is there underneath, but they work hard to hide it, ignore it, pretend it’s not there, or overpower its stink with Lysol, sage, or the smell of corn bread. Our approaches aren’t working.
Most people think hunger has to do with food. Of course, this is true to some extent. But lack of food is only a symptom of hunger, not the cause and certainly not the solution. Because people think hunger has to do with food, and food only, they spend enormous amounts of energy, money, and time trying to help people get food. Researchers and policymakers focus on SNAP and the health consequences of hunger. Advocates focus on promoting more SNAP and emergency food. Others insist the answer is community gardens. The agricultural industry pretends to solve hunger by selling seeds that grow plants that secrete pesticides or that can withstand their overuse, and by doping animals with antibiotics so they will stay healthy enough to gain weight faster to make more burgers and chicken nuggets. Well-meaning people spend their creativity and money trying to get leftover, unharvested, or wasted food, or food that is out of date from farms, universities, grocery stores, restaurants, and hotels, to people whom they deem “hungry.” Grocery stores raise money for hunger relief at the checkout counter while their own employees make so little that their salaries are supplemented with SNAP and Medicaid (government-funded health care). All the while, philanthropists take pleasure in being celebrated for donating their money to such charitable causes.
While engaging in these activities, few people ask, “Who is paying the low wages that keep people impoverished?” or “Who is overproducing so much food that creates so much waste?” or “How is it that US government policies allow people who are disabled to struggle for money?” or “Why are women and children, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and immigrant people, more likely than men and white people to be hungry? Why are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, or nonbinary people (LGBTQIA+) more likely to experience hunger than people who are heterosexual?”
Important fact: there are millions more white people than Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people who experience hunger. For instance, in 2021, a little over 6 million white households reported food insecurity, while 3.3 million Black and 3.1 million Hispanic households reported they were food insecure. But when you break out the rates by percentage of each population, you see that Black and Latinx people have rates that are two to three times higher than white people. Almost 20 percent of Black households and 16.2 percent of Hispanic ones reported food insecurity, while only 7 percent of white households reported food insecurity.1 So the burden on Black and Hispanic communities is far greater than it is for white communities. Worse still, the greatest burden is among Indigenous communities, which have rates ranging between 25 to 90 percent depending on nation, group, and region. To address these inequities, it is necessary to focus on the experiences of people who have the highest rates of food insecurity to learn more about their expertise in navigating toward health and well-being. When we construct a world where those most marginalized can get the supports they need, everyone flourishes. This is standard public health practice to focus on programs for people who have been made vulnerable by oppression and discrimination. By doing so, everyone benefits. A concrete example of this process is in how sidewalks are constructed. Thanks to the advocacy by people who use wheelchairs, sidewalks have dips on many street corners so that people with wheelchairs, walkers, and canes can get to where they are going. It turns out this helps everyone, especially people who use strollers for their infants and toddlers, movers that use dollies for moving large equipment and furniture, and people who tend to shuffle their feet. The people who struggle with the way the world is have the best ideas for ways to improve it to make it more inclusive and supportive. This is why I unapologetically side with people who are the most marginalized. They have the central wisdom that can help us all.
In 1952, Brazilian scholar Josué de Castro, chair of the Executive Council of the International Food and Agriculture Organization, made his blunt assessment: hunger is man-made. That is, people who are wealthy and greedy take more food, resources, and money for themselves, and leave others to suffer and struggle. Long before that, Pëtr Kropotkin in his 1892 book The Conquest of Bread explained how the wealthy seek out the destitute and starving and pay them a paltry wage. In doing so, elites keep people with low incomes in a perpetual state of precarity and suffering so they will be forced to work for low wages. In other words, elites keep people on the verge of hunger to magnify their own wealth. Responsibility for hunger in America lands in the wallets, laps, hearts, and minds of the wealthy, who create inequality for their own profit. To solve it, we have to focus on ending inequality. This is not breaking news; 125 years ago, Kropotkin asserted, “In solving the question of bread, we must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution.”2
Across more than a century since Kropotkin’s treatise, it is rare to hear nonprofit leaders and government officials admit to hunger’s shameful, man-made beginnings. Even fewer talk about working toward equality. Most people working on hunger refuse to point their finger at the people who generate hunger in the United States and around the world. Even fewer attempt to change our social structures to ensure that no one goes hungry.
In the following pages, I introduce you to hunger’s underbelly: collective and individual violence caused by unchecked capitalism along with America’s history of genocide, slavery, colonization, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the intentional abuse and neglect of women and children. In short, hunger is a manifestation of our lack of love for each other, ourselves, and the planet. Hunger exists because our relationships with our families and communities, ourselves, food, and the natural world are dysfunctional or broken altogether.
To address hunger, we must talk about our relationships through the lens of power and control.
Amartya Sen, internationally revered scholar and Nobel prizewinner in economics, started his career by studying famines in India. He recognized that during the great Bengal Famine of 1943, when over three million people died and corpses piled up in the streets, India was experiencing a year of abundant harvests. There was plenty of food in the country—more than enough to feed everyone. Where was the food and money? The English royals, administrators, and businesspeople were stealing and hoarding it.
The stage was set for this massacre by starvation at least fifty years earlier. Mike Davis, in his book The Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, explains that from 1870 to 1914, the British and Americans profited off the mega droughts and monsoons that resulted in crop failure. The worst-hit areas were regions of India, China, and Brazil. Though people in nearby regions could readily and willingly transport food to areas affected by droughts and storms, British companies and elites restricted the transport of desperately needed food, resulting in starvation killings of over thirty million people. Davis showed how a handful of elites controlling the London-centered world economy sucked away people’s food, resources, and livelihoods. “Millions died not outside the modern world system,” he said, “but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered by the powerful elites’ adoption of the economic and political philosophy of free-market capitalism.”3
Hoarding food and resources also occurs within countries. The United States is no exception. During the dust bowl of the 1930s and the Great Depression, while so many people were starving, growers with ample crops dumped truckloads of oranges and other produce into heaps and sprayed them with kerosene to destroy the food because no one could afford to buy it. All the while, children starved or were born with a low birth weight, and many people suffered and died from diseases associated with malnutrition.
Starvation amid plenty is not a paradox. As Janet Poppendieck observes in her book Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression, keeping people hungry is a coordinated and systemic effort by the wealthy to increase profits. Hoarding food and sequestering it from large swaths of society makes food seem scarce, so the wealthy can then put a hefty price tag on it and leave those who can’t pay to suffer the consequences. Poppendieck also demonstrates how the New Deal nutrition assistance efforts failed to help people in poverty. People who were hungry were an afterthought—after the elite, the economy, big agriculture, and big business.4
Jean Drèze and Sen, in their seminal work Hunger and Public Action, insist that the focus on food to solve hunger is rooted in conceptual confusion. Focusing on food alone obstructs effective action and policymaking because it ignores the harmful dynamics of deep inequality that cause hunger.5
The magnitude of our conceptual confusion can be exemplified by hyped-up media coverage of miles-long car lines of people waiting to secure food at food banks throughout the United States during spring and summer 2020 when the COVID-19 emergency forced shelter-in-place orders. Emergency food providers seemed like heroes.
But what was really happening?
In the United States, there was no shortage of food or profits for food companies.6 During the months of the COVID-19 pandemic-related shelter-in-place orders, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs and main sources of income while members of Congress hesitated and debated about what to do. Simultaneously, food hardship skyrocketed in April and May 2020. Scientists at the US Census Bureau quickly attempted to capture levels of hardship in the Household Pulse Survey. The rate of food insufficiency among families with children tripled from pre-COVID-19 rates of 2019. Additionally, despite increases in SNAP use and amounts, people’s reliance on charitable food increased from 2019 rates by 50 percent. At the same time that the COVID-19 disease was disproportionately affecting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, which saw higher rates of infection and death compared to white communities, the same injustices were seen in rates of food and housing hardship. Black and Hispanic families had two and three times the rate of food hardship compared to white families.7
While these racial and social inequities in suffering, pain, and death hit the national consciousness in 2020, none of these injustices are new. Before the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the rate of food insecurity—lack of access to enough food for an active and healthy life—was already astronomical at 10.5 percent of households (35.2 million people). Since the start of the formal measure by the US government in 1995, rates of food insecurity have never been lower than this. Food insecurity peaked during the Great Recession that started in 2008, when 14.9 percent of households (41 million people) experienced food insecurity. When we break the statistics down by race, ethnicity, gender, and ability, we see the patterns that give clues to the truth of what is happening in the United States. Since the beginning of the national measure of food security, single woman–headed households have always experienced food insecurity at extremely high rates (currently 23.4 percent) compared to all other households with children (12.5 percent). The rate for single woman–headed households is more than three times higher than two-person-headed households (7.4 percent). LGBT people also have a greater proportion of their population reporting food insecurity compared to national rates. Results from the Pulse Survey carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic show that among LGBT people the rate of food insufficiency was 12.7 percent compared to 7.8 percent of those who are non-LGBT. Food insufficiency was three times worse for LGBT people of color, whose rate was 17.3 percent compared to 5.6 percent of LGBT white people.8 Finally, one-third of people with disabilities report food insecurity.9
What you see here is a pattern of power relations—populations with less power have higher rates of hunger than people who have more power to control their circumstances to meet their basic needs.
Trying to get people to think beyond food, Drèze and Sen call hunger a manifestation of “entitlement failure.” Entitlements are access to basic necessities to which everyone has a right. These rights are access to food, water, housing, health care, social services, a job that pays a living wage, and—in the event of illness, disability, age, or other circumstances—financial and other supports that can help people pay for and acquire resources to meet basic needs. Again, when there is widespread hunger, there is a clear indication that the powerful are withholding and restricting people’s rights and “entitlements.”
Through this lens, reasons for hunger in the United States are glaringly obvious. Historic, systemic, and ongoing discrimination is at its core.
Knowing that most people get food by buying it, we must pay attention to money and how people make it. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been raised in over thirteen years, nor has it been indexed to inflation. If the minimum wage were indexed to inflation and kept up with productivity since 1973, when the poverty rate in the United States was at its lowest at 11.1 percent, it would currently be over $24.00 per hour. Today, meeting basic needs is no longer a guarantee if someone is working. Public assistance benefit calculations are based on outdated ideas about the real cost of food, housing, and health care. Despite expansion of health insurance through the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), millions of people still have no health insurance, and medical expenses are the prevailing reason for bankruptcy.10 Childcare and quality education are accessible only for those who can pay. Disability benefits are almost impossible to get, and do not meet the true cost of self-care and need. For seniors, Social Security payments are notoriously low. Overall, adequate entitlements have never been established for the majority of people in the United States.
But people are distracted by the generations-old conceptual confusion that hunger has something to do with food. In the meantime, the social structures and political processes stay the same, and hunger is regenerated. Hunger is by design. It is as American as apple pie.
These dynamics at play today are products of systems and processes in the United States that are hundreds of years old. Ahead I show how the history of genocide, enslavement, and capitalism are just a few of the seeds that allow hunger to flourish today. These seeds are also at the root of our climate crisis, which is causing global catastrophic destruction of our food and water. But these violent seeds have yet to be fully named and recognized as a trauma that needs to be addressed, touched, or described in our education, health care, and welfare systems, the media, the US nonprofit and philanthropy world, and even among those of us who do research on food insecurity. Nor has there been a nationwide effort to create opportunities for healing, remediation, reparations, and decolonization.
Most people know this violence lies deep in their bones, but in trying to solve hunger and poverty, they are doing the same old thing with tiny steps within the same systems we have in place now. There are many recommendations for solving hunger that thousands of people are already working on. You can read those solutions on any major antihunger organization website. Or you could go to the cybercemetery and exhume the recommendations from the National Commission on Hunger, on which I served as the cochair. Some approaches are on the Biden-Harris administration website as a result of a months-long call for recommendations by advocates, researchers, and experts through lived experience in preparation for a highly disappointing White House Conference on Hunger in September 2022 where many pundits expressed concern but made few promises and took even fewer actions to end hunger. These initiatives will not suffice. So with the intent to transform approaches to hunger, I’m inviting you to recognize the violence and trauma underneath hunger. Only by facing the violence can new opportunities to heal the wounds of hunger emerge.
People of Indigenous nations in the United States have the highest rates of food insecurity compared to all other groups. This is due to state-supported impoverishment and genocide carried out by white people over the past five hundred years. No Indigenous nation was spared US government–backed massacres, forced removal, exploitation, war, child abductions to boarding schools, plundered lands, religious conversion, and cultural and economic genocide. If Indigenous people did not die of hunger, disease, or murder, they were often starved into submission.
For instance, after the Southern Cheyenne were forced to walk from Colorado to a small region in Oklahoma, then called “Indian territory,” the US government promised to provide food rations. But it would do so only if Cheyenne parents and grandparents gave up their children to be sent far away to government “boarding schools,” which were more like child labor camps. Here, the children were stripped of their language, heritage, and sense of belonging. Oftentimes they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Others were neglected to death.
“That was the way the Cheyenne people gave in to the United States government,” explained Willie Fletcher, chair of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Health Board and spiritual leader, in 1995. “It was through forced starvation.” In other words, the US government weaponized food assistance, using it as an act of war. When the US government did supply food rations, it sent flour and many other unrecognizable, rancid, or low-quality items that were never part of the Cheyenne traditional diet.
As a result of this exploitation, violence, and food provision today, it is no wonder but rather by design that Indigenous people have the highest rates of food insecurity and diabetes in the United States. Contemporary food insecurity is maintained by long-standing land theft, active racism, and restricted access to affordable, nutritious foods for the 50 percent of Indigenous people who live in cities, as well as the Indigenous people living in their traditional homelands or reservations onto which they were forced and who must travel long distances to a grocery store.
There are so many examples of extreme rates of household food insecurity among Indigenous nations that it causes overwhelm, so I cite just a few. Among the Diné (Navajo), for example, rates of food insecurity are around 80 percent.11 In the Klamath River Basin, the area of Southern Oregon and Northern California that is home to the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath peoples, rates of food insecurity are at 92 percent, and over half report very low food security, the severest form of struggles with hunger. People interviewed insist that in addition to poverty, lack of jobs, and low income, the combined effects of land loss, loss of salmon due to polluted waters, and overkilling of doe by white people have caused food insecurity.12
Hold these atrocities in one hand, and with the other consider 250 years of enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Even with the supposed abolition of slavery, white people continued to exploit and abuse Black people through Black codes (laws that restricted Black people from working for fair wages, or punishing and imprisoning them for being unemployed), convict leasing, Jim Crow laws, lynching, housing discrimination, mass incarceration, debtors’ prison, and police brutality, which still keep many African American people in a state of precarity, disenfranchised, and unsafe today. This ongoing subjugation of Black people is evidence of what historian and cultural scholar Saidiya Hartman refers to as the “nonevent of emancipation,” when white people and their lawmakers simply found new ways to subjugate and limit the flourishing of Black people.13 Black families have suffered generations of residential segregation and historically racist policies that exploit communities of color. White homeowners and politicians were complicit in harnessing local and national laws to exclude, exploit, and marginalize Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.14 Residential segregation concentrates economic and social disadvantage and simply encourages systemic neglect of key infrastructure that helps people build wealth and stay healthy. These disinvestments result in poorer housing quality, inadequate school funding, increased exposure to environmental toxins, and lower access to affordable, healthy foods. The fact that African Americans also have rates of food insecurity that are more than twice the national rate and almost three times that of white people is a symptom of this ongoing discrimination by white people, who are the lawmakers, agency heads, schoolteachers, and the like.
A similar fate affects immigrants, especially those from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. My colleagues and I found that among 19,275 mothers of children under age four, children of immigrants experience a rate of food insecurity that is twice as high as for children of US-born mothers.15 After the introduction of legislation that barred noncitizen participation in SNAP in 1996, the rate of food insecurity among children of noncitizens became much higher compared with children of citizens.16 Such injustices are simultaneously national and hyperlocal. Among immigrant farmworkers in Georgia, undocumented workers are nearly three times as likely to be food insecure compared with documented workers.17 The rate of food insecurity among families that migrated from Mexico is five times that of the general US population.18
These disparate rates of food insecurity are the result of clear policy choices rooted in colonization, racism, and imperialism.
Theft of land—about 2.5 billion acres—is also the theft of Indigenous people’s lifeways, waterways, spiritual depth, tens of thousands of years of history, and access to food. Second, 30 million Africans were ripped away from their lands, and those who survived (and their descendants) were not allowed to “own” land or work it for their own livelihood. When they were “allowed” to own it, their land was often stolen or swindled by white people armed with guns and white supremacist laws. Indigenous and Black people have almost no access to land. With no land sovereignty, access to food becomes extremely challenging.
Going deeper, the primary way in which bodies and lands were stolen and exploited was through rape. Sarah Deer, a Muscogee lawyer and professor who works to support Indigenous rape victims, explains that rape, as a violent act as well as metaphor for subjugation and exploitation, is the primary way through which colonization was enacted. She insists that to decolonize the United States and end the domination, we must end rape culture, which perpetuates the oppression of Indigenous people.19 In similar fashion, Hartman asserts that enforced Blackness (or racialization) built into the institution of slavery and carried out through today’s times is a “perpetual condition of ravishment.”20 That is, again, until we grapple with how our social, cultural, and political systems promote and allow the rape and domination of women, especially Indigenous and Black women, we cannot understand the power dynamics that allow poverty and hunger to persist. Simply put, with no body sovereignty, one cannot even enjoy nor absorb the food provided or bought. Nor can one function to earn money. This mega exploitation, domination, and theft is central to understanding hunger in America.
These threads of heteronormative, patriarchal, white domination hold together the US political, economic, and cultural institutions and shape our relationships. They influence how people succumb to greed and the desire to own (land, people, and even ideas), dominate, surveil, control, diminish, or murder. Cultural critic and sociologist bell hooks described these characteristics as a “culture of domination.”21 This culture of domination is woven into all US systems—the justice system, child welfare system, and public assistance programs, including those providing nutrition assistance. These systems have a major impact on our health, well-being, and belonging. In her recent book America Goddam, Treva Lindsey describes these intersecting systems as a “death-dealing superstructure” that generates food insecurity.22
When the structures of domination are so huge, penetrating our institutions and the ways of organizing ourselves, we have to look for ways to completely transform our society, dismantle the institutions grounded in enslavement and genocide, and build a new world based on values of care and equanimity.
There are three interconnected ways of transforming our society and healing hunger. They are personal, political, and spiritual. These domains overlap. If you wanted to, you could find a scrap of paper and make a standard Venn diagram with three overlapping circles to identify each, find their overlaps, and perhaps create your own atlas for self-discovery and action. First, it takes deep personal work to undo racism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. This personal work requires us to self-reflect and engage with friends and family. Second, it takes political work to change our policies and economic systems. Political systems penetrate our bodies, enter our bloodstream, and influence the way we think, feel, and do. The personal and political each feed off each other. So third, to build the strength necessary to transform our society, one needs to build spiritual depth that includes a willingness to express love for ourselves, each other, and the world. The work to end hunger demands our whole body, mind, and spirit in order to revolutionize the structures we develop to care for each other. It’s a daunting task.
To build the courage and resilience necessary requires recognition of the truth underneath hunger. The best way to do this is to acknowledge and understand that we are in a trauma-organized society that allows for hunger to persist. Understanding trauma gives us good grounding for the hard work ahead.
The first half of this book is devoted to describing how underneath hunger is a violence that causes trauma-related responses in our body, beliefs, emotions, and behavioral practices. I learned about the trauma of hunger directly from the people I talked to about their experiences. While I began our discussions speaking about food, money, or social systems, the conversations often landed on the most important challenges they wanted to talk about: having been traumatized by rape, sexual assault, child abuse, and emotional neglect. As a result, I was forced to learn about trauma.
Trauma is not only a critical physical insult. It is a response to an insult. Trauma can be a psychological and emotional response to a severely and deeply distressing incident, or a series of chronic or recurring extremely stressful situations. Among adults, such incidents that cause trauma are experiences on the battlefield—many are familiar with this already: post-traumatic stress syndrome. Exposure to murder, witnessing killings, killing other people, torture, and many other outrageous, soul-shattering experiences can cause a person to have distressing flashbacks, physical responses such as adrenaline rushes, lack of sleep, depression and anxiety, fragmented personality, dissociation or loss of emotion, and “loss of self.” These same experiences are also reported by people who have experienced rape, assault, sexual violence, emotional abuse, economic abuse, and racial and ethnic discrimination. Historical trauma is a trauma response to genocide and enslavement that has reverberated throughout a people’s history. This includes a response to the traumatic devastation of a people along with their culture, family ties, and economic and social systems, thereby generating major biological, psychological, and social responses that pass on through successive generations. This collective trauma can manifest in unresolved grief, which has a major impact on health and well-being, and can influence parenting and other social practices.23 Among Indigenous people, there is an understanding that the trauma of genocide and colonization is a deep wound to the soul, a shattering of spirit.24 Scholars and health practitioners addressing trauma among descendants of enslaved Africans also recognize that unaddressed trauma of the torture and terror of enslavement in their families has been passed down through the generations over four hundred years.25
To separate, dominate, exploit, violate, and rape based on the lie of racial difference is called racialized trauma. It is not just Indigenous and Black people and people of color who suffer from the racist legacies of the United States but white people, too, are long traumatized by genocide and enslavement. This trauma is hardly noticeable compared to the magnitude of suffering that Black and Indigenous people have experienced. Because US society maintains a culture of whiteness, and white people have more power and privilege, the trauma manifests very differently. It is important to remember that perpetrators of violence are traumatized by the violence they inflict; they just might not have the depth of emotion and maturity to be aware of it. As well, people who hurt others have likely been traumatized themselves. In the healing professions, the saying goes, “hurt people hurt people.” Violence and trauma regenerate if they are not processed and healed. Racialized trauma lands in our bodies, changes our neurons, and affects the way we carry our bodies and express our emotions. Resmaa Menakem, an expert on racialized trauma, suggests that Europeans were deeply traumatized by the plague, massive famines, and, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the torturing, hanging, and burning of tens of thousands of women because they refused to comply with male-dominated social norms and the newly advancing economic systems. Identified as potentially thwarting the burgeoning new world order, most people identified as “witches” were women. This practice was then exported to the Americas and became a type of weapon of colonization.26 To cope with or project their pain and unresolved trauma from these terrifying and painful collective ordeals, people from Europe violently harmed Indigenous people of the Americas and Africa. This unbearable trauma of genocide, enslavement, and unbridled violence against women is handed down across the generations and manifests in many people’s behaviors today. Over time, Menakem explains, the original traumas are forgotten, and the way people have adapted to the trauma and behaved “starts to look like culture.”27
I can attest to this as a white woman. Because I regularly absorbed and utilized a culture of “whiteness” and internalized sexism, I considered the way I behaved as the norm. I was taught to keep my emotions tucked away, shoved deep down inside. Menakem underscores that this cultural pattern of a white-bodied person like me leads to an inability to deeply feel our emotions, especially unprocessed grief. This makes us seem frozen in mind, body, and heart. Such iciness is what trauma specialists refer to as dissociation, or a turning off of one’s emotions, one’s sense of being whole. A dissociative response to trauma can be taken as the way things are or should be. So many of us, millions in fact, can get caught up living lives devoid of emotional and spiritual depth. Spiritual leader and psychologist Larry Ward, a Buddhist teacher in the Plum Village tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, ventures to diagnose this emotional numbness as an American pathology.
Nesting within that icy pathology is America’s tolerance for hunger.
In summary, trauma—the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual response to extreme violence and suffering (whether from the perspective of the victim, perpetrator, witness, or bystander)—fragments the mind and heart, truncates our thinking, and limits our capacity to feel and express emotional breadth and depth. If the trauma resulting from enslavement and genocide, murder, abuse, torture, rape, and exploitation is unattended, then that original cause of trauma can often be forgotten or obscured. Our emotional responses to original traumas land and stay in our bodies. They are there but unnamed and unidentified. No wonder we are so confused!
Another word for emotional numbness is indifference. Indifference is the incapacity to deeply feel or express emotions such as grief, empathy, and compassion. It is a lack of feeling for people and complex or disturbing social situations; indifference is a demonstration of lack of concern, care, interest, or curiosity. It is a dulling of the mind, heart, and gut. Ward explains, “This is the wizardry of America’s racial karma passed from generation to generation through the actions of thinking, speaking, and physical behaviors. Our very constitutional history contrives it, our lived suffering testifies to it, and our cultural indifference gives permission for the retribution to continue.”28
So what do we do? We have to address our collective trauma. To do so requires that we reveal the truth and open up the wounds that cause hunger, no matter how painful. This helps us to heal the wounds and transform them into a source of strength.
To do this work, one must be willing to see what has always been there, but that most people ignore or shove away. We must deal with our dissociation due to physical, social, political, and economic violence at an individual, family, organizational, community, systems, and societal level. Looking in the wrong place to solve hunger is a part of this dissociation. It’s as if antihunger advocates know something is there but refuse to address it.
To heal the trauma that goes back in time and manifests today, we have to allow ourselves to feel the grief caused by generations of oppression, early death, and murder. Our avoidance of grief is deeply entrenched in the psyches of many people in the Americas. Part of the way to avoid the experience of grief is to either stay indifferent or seek constant pleasure in dominating and controlling the world around us. The pleasure of domination is derived from objectifying or viewing people as “things” that can be owned, manipulated, or exploited. Hartman observes that this pleasure typifies the sensations of white people’s enslavement of Africans and all the ensuing practices of racially motivated domination of Black people. Hartman’s work builds on that of sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, especially his book Black Reconstruction, where he outlines how the subjugation and exploitation of Black people was directly tied to southern whites’ penchant for ownership and grand living.29 Racism and sexism have roots in the pleasure of domination, allowing it to be entrenched in everyday behavior and thought.30 The emotional pleasure of domination also allows capitalism to flourish through the commodification of people and the natural world (including food) as things that can be bought, sold, and owned.31 The idea that people and land can be owned and controlled through a racialized, gendered hierarchy is backed by European and US legal systems. It is the basis for capitalism.32
So what are we avoiding? Do we know how to feel and express grief? Can we truly empathize with people and join with them in solidarity? Or do we follow the endless dopamine hit of pleasure and quick fixes we can click, buy, own, and sell? Or do we numb our emotions and become indifferent altogether? These are good starter questions for the personal work.
For all the exploitation, forced disappearances, and abuse in US history, Indigenous nations and communities that currently struggle with comparatively high rates of food insecurity and hunger have enacted as well as maintained an equally long history of subversion and resistance to survive violence and hunger. These traditions of resilience and resistance have kept generations of people alive and fighting for their right to live and be healthy. Indigenous people have fought for their sovereignty through self-defense, the courts, intellectual and spiritual engagement, stealth hunting, fishing, gathering, their own governance, businesses, and courageous resistance in the present day. Their resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline and Line 3, for instance, have been noticed worldwide. While many times Indigenous activists and lawyers get violently overruled, their actions have kept one-quarter of the potential emissions in the United States in the ground.33 Their resilience and resistance should embolden the rest of the people in the United States to do the same.
Demands for Indigenous sovereignty have also fueled the food sovereignty movement. While food sovereignty is not always related to Indigenous sovereignty, food sovereignty from pluralistic Indigenous perspectives from the Global South and North can be understood to be grounded in the principles that land is sacred and that sovereignty is not based on the ownership and domination of land. Rather, it is people’s relationships with land, water, and wildlife that allow for mutual benefit for all humans and more-than-humans.34 Additionally, developed by many Indigenous peoples and global organizations such as Via Campesina, the food sovereignty movement merges deep reverence and respect for land, plants, and animals with actions for securing rights for farmworkers, laborers, and small farmers.
Resilience and self-reliance have a long tradition in Black communities ranging from times people were enslaved up through the present day, explains ethnographer Ashanté Reese. In her analysis of the history of food acquisition in the Washington, DC, area, she describes how African Americans have built up communities of self-reliance parallel to and in spite of white supremacy. This has involved long-standing traditions of mutuality and adaptation that support growing, getting, preparing, and sharing food.35 In the midst of enslavement, enslaved people held secret gardens, started mutual aid efforts, and established other types of solidarity economies.36 Maroon communities built by fugitives, people formerly enslaved, and many communities of the Gullah Geechie tradition in the low country of North and South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia have taken care of each other as well as stewarded their land and syncretic lifeways up through today. Many from those traditions migrated north too, including the family of Valerie Erwin, chef and manager of the EAT Café. That wisdom of food growing, preparation, sharing, and mutual aid continues to thrive.37
Beyond the focus on food, seed, and cultural heritage, both traditions have a long history of insisting on decolonization and abolition. Though decolonization seems impossible, bold attempts to decolonize can take many forms, such as through the Land Back movement, actions of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and “Red Power” movements like the takeover of Alcatraz, the American Indian Movement, and collective resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline and Line 3.38 Such ongoing and relentless resistance makes plain that the United States is an illegitimate state power.39 Additionally, calls from the Black Panther Party to end police brutality and for reparations in the 1960s helped provide some grounding for the modern and robust Black Lives Matter movement.40
Movements for abolition, fought for and sharpened over hundreds of years, are still very much alive. Building on the tradition of abolishing slavery, contemporary calls for the abolition of police and prisons along with an overhaul of all programs for families in poverty were strengthened with support from Black queer feminism, which coalesced with the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s. It asserted that sexism, racism, heteronormativity, and imperialism collide in the vast majority of US systems.41 This coalesced again in the abolitionist work shared widely by many. This can be found in learning and action collectives such as Critical Resistance, Project Nia, and Black Lives Matter.42 Once people see the “death-dealing superstructure” in the United States and learn about Indigenous and Black practices of resistance, counterresurgence, and fugitivity, a way forward is to do political work to dismantle the superstructure while caring for and supporting people harmed by it, and collaborating with each other to build structures that are life-giving and equanimous.
Following abolitionist approaches in the living footsteps of the Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Andrea Ritchie, Dorothy Roberts, and many others, I demonstrate ahead how the systems that are meant to address food insecurity and poverty are working as designed: to subdue Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.43 By extension, these systems also harm millions of white people. If the systems do not destroy, they keep people subjugated. Hungry.
How do we incline toward abolition? In the words of Gilmore, a geographer and abolitionist, to solve today’s problems, we have to “change just one thing.” That is, “everything.”44
To do this takes political will and action, and personal and spiritual growth.
I did not come to abolition easily. As an upper-middle-class white woman, I was miseducated by my family, community, schools, and universities. I was hardly ever introduced to the truth of how the United States began or maintains itself or invited to question its political and social infrastructure or learn about transformative alternatives. I came to abolition through listening deeply to Indigenous people in my early career, and then from listening to Black women, people who are Latinx, and white women too—almost all of whom experienced food insecurity, trauma, and hunger, and who experienced the challenges of public assistance programs like SNAP and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), housing subsidies, energy assistance, and Medicaid. They brought me straight to the root of hunger. Thanks to listening to their wisdom, I became radicalized.
Radical is another word for foundation or root. It is a place of beginning. To be radical is rational and practical. We cannot SNAP or WIC our way out of hunger in America. Yes, these programs are important, but the way they were built and sustained relies on the status quo. As long as we try to simply tweak these programs, we may make it easier for people to withstand racism, sexism, and colonialism. But the same injustices will still be here thirty years down the road while the slow genocide continues. You and I will be listening to the same old conversations about why there is hunger in America and what to do about it. We’ll be sitting in the back of the room rolling our eyes thinking, “We’ve been here before,” and our hearts will be crushed.
I felt this recently as I participated in the White House Conference on Hunger that occurred in September 2022. It was the first time the White House hosted a conference on hunger in over fifty years. But the solutions offered were few and limited while deeply entangled with for-profit companies that contribute to the problem. Meanwhile, the administration was getting ready to end COVID-era universal free meals in schools and cut the SNAP program for millions. It was a shameless display of self-importance that diverted attention from addressing ongoing harms enabled by the US government.
Neither of us want to be involved in this charade. So to change course, let’s break through this deceitful status quo and start again by working with the truth, however painful.
The people I interviewed about hunger not only talked about food insecurity but also reported problems of rape, neglect, abuse, racism, misogyny, and unrelenting systemic violence. As I carried out my research, I used to think the people I interviewed had all the problems with trauma and that I did not. I thought I was healthy and they were not. What a racist I was—thinking that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people had all the problems, and I was learning how to fix the problems as if I was not somehow complicit as a white person and had no problems myself. Many people call this the “white savior complex.” The antihunger world is filled with white people thinking they are there to solve other people’s problems—problems that many white people created and maintain.45 I thought I was working hard, hard to the bone. In truth, I was just floating along as I enjoyed all the privileges of the systems founded on keeping white people in a dominant position (I’m a professor), and thinking that who I was and what I was doing were the norm (doing research and policy work without trying to transform the systems). With each interview those “layers of nonsense,” as Regina Jackson and Saira Rao refer to white women’s racism, began to shred, tear, and rip off.46 While I have thousands more layers to dissolve, my heart, mind, and gut have become more exposed in ways that allowed me to soften enough to look at myself in the mirror. And I mean really look at the tyranny in my skin, body, and ways of thinking and being. I talk more about this in part III. Since I began my work, I’ve been keeping at least one eyeball on myself and how I show up, how I utilize “whiteness” or “white culture.” What I see is not pretty. Throughout this book, white supremacy culture, the culture based on five hundred years of racist and sexist ideas about how the world should be, will be a constant theme. Many white people unconsciously use the tools, thoughts, and ideas of white supremacy culture, but all kinds of people can use it to survive and thrive in schools, universities, workplaces, and health systems as well as on playgrounds. I invite you to join me and keep at least one eyeball on yourself; that’s primarily part of the personal work. This includes spiritual work too.
Back to my own layers of nonsense. The horrors that the people I interviewed experienced started to become my horrors. Their harrowing experiences began to draw out deep experiences of pain from within myself that I couldn’t seem to understand or identify. I became deeply unsettled. Some may call this secondary trauma. That is, by hearing about other people’s traumatic experiences, the listener can start to manifest trauma-related symptoms.
But no, it goes deeper than that. It forced me to reckon with myself along with my family, politics, and spiritual understanding of how I move through the world.
After reading Menakem’s book, I was encouraged to acknowledge that, as a white person, I too suffer from racialized trauma. I began to recognize that I and my people developed a way of being as if we had been frozen into a place of dissociation and disconnection from the pain of others. This means that we were also disconnected from the pain in ourselves in response to violence inflicted on Black and Indigenous peoples through their bodies, lands, and lifeways. These ongoing trauma responses to the original violences of America and the political, social, and economic world order keep us fragmented and alienated from one another. And they keep us alienated from ourselves. People in the antihunger community, academia, and the political and nonprofit realms often have this kind of trouble, which we refuse to name or discuss. To address our emotions about it all is taboo.
But breaking taboo can help us evolve. According to Ward, to evolve, we need to become “whole” and recover, or emerge from our social despair rooted in “the absence of genuine connection.”47
In the midst of the climate catastrophe, the urgency to change our ways to be resilient in the years ahead demands our evolution. We will not evolve through our intellect alone. We need a lot of guts, intuition, and a deep understanding of our own bodies. Our bodies are a form of land. Part of the technology of the human body is our capacity to feel deep emotion, our ability to recognize ourselves in each other, and our ability to seek solidarity with each other to survive and thrive.
Love, that ability to seek and experience communion with each other, is also the glue that holds together cultural, social, political, and economic movements. You and I both know this focus on love is nothing new. But it bears repeating. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that love be at the root of nonviolent struggles. He said love is not a weak sentiment. Instead, it is an ethos of powerful action “that does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.”48 Writer James Baldwin agreed. All of us, he insisted, need to get wise and courageous to turn this country around. We cannot reduce ourselves and our world to simplified concepts, ideas, and answers. It takes appreciation for complexity and love. “Love,” he said, “is the only key to our maturity.”49 In her trilogy on love, hooks explained that an “ethic of love” is the antidote to the US culture of domination. She described love as “the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth.” By “spiritual,” hooks means where the body and spirit are experienced as one, where the principle of the self (the life-force) can be more fully self-actualized. It is the ability to engage in communion with the world around us.50 Additionally, hooks embraced the teachings of Zen Buddhism in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, who has shared his wisdom with millions through his retreats, books, and the ongoing teachings of the monastics, lay teachers, and practitioners committed to holding the space for people to experience and generate peace in the world. Thich Nhat Hanh describes four facets of love that emerge from Buddhist traditions. They are understanding, compassion, joy, and equanimity.51
Most scholars and academics I know start to squirm when I talk about love or spirituality. That squirming indicates discomfort as it threatens the supremacy of the intellect that we have all toiled so hard to sharpen so we can dominate and control the narrative in education and policy as well as on the media airwaves. To survive and be taken seriously as an academic and advocate, I used to be pretty quiet about love. But now I want to make it plain, I want to shout it out across the crevasse that separates so many of us. Loving openly and fully can help us heal. Love should be a central tenet of promoting public health and human flourishing.
Now that that’s clear, I want to take things a step further. I invite us into the energy of the erotic, as writer and poet Audre Lorde comes to it. She explains that erotic comes from the Greek root eros, or the “personification of love” as a creative life force. This can be a deep source of power, especially for women, who have been deprived of their own power to be fully satisfied, and fully seen, heard, and valued. Women’s erotic power threatens all that is rooted in patriarchal capitalism. This is because it is a source of deep satisfaction, spirituality, excellence, fulfillment, and creativity, and it doesn’t need men, nor the male gaze. It is deeply sourced and transcends boundaries. Lorde asserts, “The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love in its deepest meanings.”52
Further, Lorde insists that the connection to the erotic functions as an open and fearless underlining of “capacity for joy.” This occurs when one has a deep connection with oneself; to know that oneself is “capable of feeling.” This is what makes so many people fear the erotic and try to relegate it only to the bedroom or, worse, to press it down to a useless nub that blunts human potential. When the erotic is fully expressed, we can feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, ensuring that our life pursuits are in accordance with joy. “This is a grave responsibility,” she says, “projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”53
She, too, maintains that focusing only on the “outside” systems of oppression without attention to what is within us reduces us to self-negation and numbness. “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.” Because “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change in the world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”54
So if the personal, political, and spiritual were a Venn diagram, then body sovereignty, deep emotion, complete satisfaction, and extraordinary potential might just land at its center—that gorgeous place where all three overlap.
I invite you to get close to your feelings. Crack them open and see what’s there in your own soil. Your soil is the source of all the change that’s possible.
This book is comprised of three parts. In part I, “The Trauma of Hunger,” I demonstrate how racism, colonialism, enslavement, rape culture, and capitalism are visible in every aspect of the experience of hunger. Hunger is a trauma to the body, mind, and spirit. It is also a sign that, despite their tremendous resilience and ability to survive, the people who are the true hunger experts have been neglected and disrespected. It consists of four chapters. Starting with Juleen’s experiences and the gift that emerged from our connection, I provide an overview of food insecurity in the United States and review the social, political, and economic context for why there are inequities in rates of hunger. I introduce you to the brilliant Black, Latinx, and white women whom I met in Philadelphia, and what they have to teach us about different ways of understanding the hunger experience. I describe how those who have known poverty and hunger help reveal violence, discrimination, and lack of love as root causes. So you know what to expect, I bring you to the taproot: rape. Rape in the family, rape in the community, rape in US history of enslavement and colonization, and state-sanctioned rape of people’s land and ecosystems. I also demonstrate that there are many ways to heal trauma, including through healing-centered peer support coupled with financial empowerment to build wealth.
Part II, “Reconsider Everything,” explores the personal experiences of members of Witnesses to Hunger and the Building Wealth and Health Network (programs we developed at the Center for Hunger-Free Communities) as they navigate public assistance. Through their experiences and my work on nutrition assistance policy, I lift the veil on the programs to show how most public assistance programs meant to address food and economic insecurity uphold racist, sexist, and capitalist structures that pry children away from their parents, and actively separate us from each other.
I demonstrate how a parallel process is at play in our public assistance and emergency food systems. This parallel process is the mechanism through which our systems inadvertently recapitulate the very experiences that have proven to be so traumatic for people who need help. Just as the lives of people exposed to repetitive and chronic abuse and maltreatment become organized around the traumatic experience, so too can entire systems become organized around regenerating trauma by pathologizing, penalizing, surveilling, and dominating people, and separating them from each other.
I also expose the toxicity of the emergency food system that is dominated by Feeding America, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and, sadly, your child’s third grade teacher. I show that well-meaning people often cause harm through disempowering and humiliating people living in poverty.
Part III, “Nourishing Our World,” offers a way forward through personal, political, and spiritual lenses. To begin with the personal, part III relies on the centrality of enslavement and genocide to demonstrate the harms of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism in the United States that generate poverty and hunger, and then launches into the political importance of reparations, rematriation, and universal programs. I also offer up transformative policy approaches such as universal basic income (UBI), universal health care, prison abolition, and solidarity economies. I then describe how to advance human rights, build on the rights of nature, support Indigenous sovereignty, and engage in reciprocity. Finally, I show how it is possible to address the painful truth about hunger through friendship, love, joy, and equanimity. Awakening this loving approach can help us to begin anew and promote the flourishing of future generations.
1. Alisha Coleman-Jensen et al., “Household Food Security in the United States in 2021,” Economic Research Report No. ERR-309 (USDA Economic Research Service, September 2022), http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=104655.
2. Pëtr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), 36, https://
3. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, reissue ed. (London: Verso, 2017), 9.
4. Janet Poppendieck, Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression, rev. and exp. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
5. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
6. Molly Kinder and Laura Stateler, “Amazon and Walmart Have Raked in Billions in Additional Profits during the Pandemic, and Shared Almost None of It with Their Workers,” Brookings (blog), December 22, 2020, https://
7. James P. Ziliak, “Food Hardship during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Great Recession,” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 43, no. 1 (March 2021): 132–152, https://
8. Kerith Conron et al., “Food Insufficiency among LGBT Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, April 2022), https://
9. Alisha Coleman-Jensen and Mark Nord, “Food Insecurity among Households with Working-Age Adults with Disabilities,” Economic Research Report No. ERR-144 (US Department of Agriculture, January 2013), http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=45040.
10. Lorie Konish, “This Is the Real Reason Most Americans File for Bankruptcy,” CNBC, February 11, 2019, https://
11. Marla Pardilla et al., “High Levels of Household Food Insecurity on the Navajo Nation,” Public Health Nutrition 17, no. 1 (January 2014): 58–65, https://
12. Jennifer Sowerwine et al., “Reframing Food Security by and for Native American Communities: A Case Study among Tribes in the Klamath River Basin of Oregon and California,” Food Security 11, no. 3 (June 2019): 579–607, https://
13. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, rev. and updated ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022), 203.
14. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
15. Mariana Chilton et al., “Food Insecurity and Risk of Poor Health among US-Born Children of Immigrants,” American Journal of Public Health 99 (2009): 556–562.
16. J. Van Hook and K. S. Balistreri, “Ineligible Parents, Eligible Children: Food Stamps Receipt, Allotments, and Food Insecurity among Children of Immigrants,” Social Science Research 35, no. 4 (2006): 486–509.
17. Brittany G. Hill et al., “Prevalence and Predictors of Food Insecurity in Migrant Farmworkers in Georgia,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 5 (May 2011): 831–833, https://
18. Mariana Chilton et al., “La alimentación y el bienestar de los ciudadanos Estadounidenses más jóvenes de madres Mexicanas, Centroamericanas, y Caribeñas,” Cahiers Alhim de La Universidad de Paris 8 de Saint-Denis (January 2008).
19. Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
20. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 371.
21. bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018), 93.
22. Treva B. Lindsey, America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 9.
23. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart et al., “Women Finding the Way: American Indian Women Leading Intervention Research in Native Communities,” American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research (online) 23, no. 3 (2016): 24–47.
24. Eduardo Duran, Allen E. Ivey, and Derald Wing Sue, Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and Other Native People (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).
25. Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland, OR: Joy DeGruy Publications, 2017).
26. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
27. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 39.
28. Larry Ward, America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2020), 75.
29. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois and David Levering Lewis, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 35.
30. David R. Roediger, “The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (1999): 579, https://
31. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” June 10, 1993, https://
32. Cedric J. Robinson, Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 2019); Walter Johnson and Robin D. G. Kelley, Race, Capitalism, Justice (Boston: Boston Review, 2017).
33. Dallas Goldtooth and Alberto Saldamando, “Indigenous Resistance against Carbon,” Indigenous Environmental Network, August 19, 2021, https://
34. Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover, eds., Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).
35. Ashanté M. Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
36. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
37. Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African-American Culinary History in the Old South (New York: Amistad, 2017); Emily Meggett et al., Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2022).
38. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012), https://
39. Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021).
40. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
41. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977),” statement, April 1977, https://
42. “Critical Resistance,” Critical Resistance, accessed October 14, 2022, https://
43. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)”; Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Mariame Kaba, Tamara K. Nopper, and Naomi Murakawa, We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021); Andrea Ritchie and Angela Y. Davis, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color, rep. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Dorothy E. Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (New York: Basic Books, 2022).
44. Chenjari Kumanyika, “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition,” Intercepted (podcast), June 10, 2020, https://
45. Rebecca De Souza, Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).
46. Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), 85.
47. Ward, America’s Racial Karma, 70.
48. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 162.
49. James Baldwin, “To Crush the Serpent,” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage, 2010), 204.
50. hooks, All about Love.
51. Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007).
52. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, rep. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 89.
53. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 89, 90.
54. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 91.