Hunger is an Equity Issue
“I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education, and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. poignantly remarked on the intersectionality of hunger and equity when he accepted his Nobel Prize in 1964, and its pertinence remains as strong today.
Hunger is an issue born from inequity. As our country reckons with its racist origins, many people are opening their eyes to the injustices that persist as a result of the decades-long, institutionalized obstruction of resources and opportunities from black and brown people in this country.
The institutions that our country is built upon have maintained that Black people in America are 2.5 times more likely to be hungry than their white counterparts. Predominantly black zip codes have about half the number of supermarkets compared to predominantly white zip codes, and predominantly Latino areas have only a third as many. Life expectancies for black and brown people in America are several years shorter than for white people.
We also know that the wealth divide serves to further immobilize communities of color. According to data from the US Federal Reserve, white households own 85.5% of the wealth in this country while only making up 60% of the population. Black households own 4.2% and Hispanic households own 3.1% of the wealth.
The relationship between race and food insecurity is complex because it is intertwined with other branches of inequity, including poverty, unemployment, incarceration, education, and health. However, it is plain that the overwhelming burden of social and economic disadvantage among people of color is a significant driver of higher rates of hunger.
That is why food security—along with quality education, safe housing, living-wage employment opportunities, and access to healthcare—must be centered during discussions of equity and anti-racism. mRelief has introduced an anti-racist policy in our work, promising to uphold the individual dignity of the people we serve, while working to fulfill what we believe is a human right: access to food. And we amplify the message of Angela Davis, who beckoned us to take action on hunger as an issue of equity when she said “The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
