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President Donald Trump and the GOP are playing Russian roulette with people’s food. Food pantries across the United States are emptying out as Trump and Republicans in Congress use SNAP benefits as a bargaining chip to end the government shutdown they created.

As the hunger emergency deepens—the Trump administration is promising to send half the usual aid while Trump himself insists on sending nothing—I’ve seen Black folks on social media urging each other to sit this one out. To not do interviews. To not let the media trot out starving Black mothers to put a familiar face on the crisis that can then be ignored.

Because we already know how that story ends: The country sees Black suffering and shrugs. Black pain isn’t enough to stir the nation’s conscience.

Take the welfare queen trope, for example.

Ronald Reagan first popularized the term “welfare queen” during his 1976 presidential campaign. He claimed there was a Black woman from Chicago, Linda Taylor, who was gaming the system, driving around in Cadillac while cashing government checks she didn’t deserve.

Reagan presented this story as fact to convince voters of the wastefulness of welfare programs, but it was a lie. There was a real woman named Linda Taylor who had committed welfare fraud. But she was white (at least according to the 1930 census), and she was a prolific scam artist who was even arrested for kidnapping.

Reagan latched on to Taylor, dubbed “welfare queen” in 1974 by the Chicago Tribune, to make the case that welfare recipients were profligate scammers. He repeated Taylor’s story again and again during speech after speech, claiming that she was collecting $150,000 a year through welfare scams. The true total was somewhere around $40,000 over multiple years,........

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