I remember the trips to Kroger and the local grocery store with my mom and siblings to use what was left from our SNAP funds, if anything, to get food for the holidays. I always hated that both Thanksgiving and Christmas fell at the end of the month. It often seemed cruel that what little was given was intended to feed and support six kids through a month plus holidays. 

For me, even with the promise of some help, the season of happiness and hope was full of stress and worry. Being reminded as you walk in that we have thirty dollars left and to make it stretch. Becoming math experts at an early age while we learned to check and compare prices versus unit price.

Fast forward and now, as the holiday season approaches, political leaders are flooding social media with images of overflowing tables, warm fireplaces, and scripted messages about gratitude and generosity. But for millions of families across the country — particularly Black, poor, and working‑class households — this winter is shaping up to be the harshest in years. The 2025 cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the broader assault on the social safety net have ensured that, in the season when Americans talk most about giving, our government is busy taking.

The symbolism of December makes the policy decisions of this year even more painful. The holidays are supposed to signal abundance, care, and community. Instead, 2025 has become the year the nation reaffirmed a deeper truth about itself: Hunger is an acceptable political strategy, and the well‑being of Black and low‑income families is optional.

Cuts Cuts Cuts

This year’s SNAP rollbacks were not minor adjustments. They were a systematic restructuring meant to shrink eligibility, reduce benefits, and create administrative barriers that would ultimately push people out. Stricter work requirements, narrower income thresholds, and more frequent verification demands have made it harder for families already stretched thin to keep food on the table. For many, the cuts come on top of inflation, rising rent, and stagnant wages. As a kid, I’m not sure how we would have fared in this current environment. Six kids in one household, limited access to jobs in a small town, and trying to find time to address bureaucratic paperwork seems cruel.

The impact of the SNAP cuts is not evenly distributed. Black families, single mothers, rural poor white communities, and immigrant households bear the brunt — communities whose economic vulnerability is not accidental but the result of decades of discriminatory policy. SNAP was never a luxury; It has always been a lifeline. Cutting it now, as food prices spike for the fourth consecutive holiday season, reveals a level of political cruelty, not fiscal responsibility.

It is not just the recent attacks on the ability to eat. SNAP is only one part of a much larger and coordinated dismantling. In 2025, the Trump Administration and GOP-led federal government did the following:

• Made deep cuts to federal rental assistance and homelessness prevention programs, hitting historically redlined neighborhoods hard.
• Shrank Medicaid access, including weakened postpartum coverage and the return of work requirements in some states.
• Allowed the expiration of pandemic‑era child care stabilization funds, forcing thousands of families, especially Black women, out of the workforce.
• Made healthcare premiums double for millions, even forcing a government shutdown over it

These decisions paint a clear picture: this administration is focused on breaking systems that allow marginalized families to survive and ensuring billionaires reap more profits.

The Impacts of a Withering Safety Net on Black Communities

The holiday season exposes an uncomfortable truth: In the United States empathy has boundaries, and those boundaries are oftentimes racial. When policymakers speak about “dependency,” “restoring dignity,” or “responsible budgeting,” they are invoking a well‑worn system of coded language used for decades to justify divesting from Black communities.

Black households rely on SNAP not because of personal failure but because of the predictable outcomes of discriminatory housing policy, wage suppression, and exclusion from generational wealth. Yet these households are the ones punished when politicians decide that cutting safety‑net programs is politically expedient.

The history is unmistakable. Every major reduction in anti‑poverty programs — from welfare reform in the 1990s to work‑requirement expansions in the 2010s — has been rooted in narratives created to stigmatize Black families. The 2025 cuts are not an aberration but a continuation. Most damning, the stigmatization also makes it harder already to access assistance anyway. The administrators in the office already pass judgment when certain families attempt to fill out paperwork and often shame people for their efforts to just survive. I remember the looks, the pushback, the snarky comments– they all make it feel like you are already failing and should be ashamed to seek help. 

The administration continues to insist that its policies champion “working people,” but this term has become a political euphemism meaning only one thing: white voters. The irony is that the majority of SNAP recipients are employed, but underpaid. If this administration truly cared about working people, it would not have taken food from the workers who stock the grocery shelves, clean holiday event spaces, drive delivery trucks, and keep the service sector operating.

A narrative has been crafted in which the poor are undeserving, and the working class exists only when it fits a racial and partisan mold. But the people who will feel the SNAP cuts most acutely this December are workers — many working two or three jobs — whose labor sustains the holiday cheer others get to enjoy.

Meanwhile, winter magnifies every inequity. December is expensive. Heating bills rise. School breaks mean children growing up in low-income households like I did, lose access to free meals. This is all happening while grocery prices surge as families attempt to celebrate amid rising costs. Food banks across the South and Midwest report record‑breaking demand this year. Community centers are overwhelmed, and mutual aid efforts are stretched to their limits.

Policy violence doesn’t always look like police lights or courtrooms. Sometimes it looks like a mother comparing prices in an aisle and realizing her benefits won’t last through Christmas.

Communities Are Stepping Up

When the holidays rolled around as a kid and there was a worry of what, if anything, would be on the table — there were some safety nets available that made it not as dreadful as it could have been. Community organizations helped. Food banks were not overrun, and I vividly remember the hams being dropped off at the door complete with some canned foods and for some reason, oranges. 

Today, Black communities, faith networks, nonprofits, and local mutual aid groups are doing what the federal government refuses to do: keeping people alive. They are organizing food drives, paying utility bills, delivering meals, and building the kind of safety net that public officials seem determined to unravel.

And yet we must resist the temptation to celebrate resilience without naming what produces it. Survival is not a policy solution. It is a coping mechanism in a country that continues to disinvest from the communities that need support most.

That’s why community-led efforts to ensure people are fed, clothed, and warm are step one. Next, we must organize not just for survival, but to transform our system so we can thrive.

As 2025 ends, we must confront what current policies say about who we are becoming. A nation that takes food from its poorest children cannot call itself compassionate. A nation that leaves families to starve cannot call itself free. The holiday season asks us what we believe in. Policies reveal who we actually care about.

No amount of happy holiday messaging can cover up the truth: the safety net is collapsing, and it is by GOP design. But building it back up and expanding it further can be by our design.