Tens of millions of people are going hungry in the United States as Senate Republicans refuse to pass a new coronavirus stimulus bill. According to new data from the Census Bureau, 23 million adults live in households that had sometimes or often had “not enough to eat” over the previous seven days—a huge increase over 2019. And though adults in most families will go without food before letting their children go hungry, 9% to 14% of adults with children said those children sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat.
Another survey, from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that one in six households is delaying payment on or missing major bills to buy food. Nearly half of people told the pollster that they were experiencing “serious financial problems,” with nearly one in three having spent most or all of their savings.
The census data showed massive racial disparities on food insecurity, with Black and Latino respondents more than twice as likely as white respondents to say their households were short of food.
About 13 million people are behind on rent, and the racial disparities are serious there, too, with 25% of Black renters, 24% of Asian renters, 22% of Latino renters, and just 12% of white renters having fallen behind. There, too, households with children were struggling—those with children were twice as likely to be behind on rent as those without. The NPR poll also found Black and Latino families to be twice as likely as white families to have fallen behind on rent or the mortgage.
“For every dollar of wealth white households have, African American households have 10 pennies and Latino households have 12 pennies," David Williams, a sociologist and public health professor at Harvard, told NPR. "So it's really not surprising that they are really being hurt badly in the context of the pandemic.”
It’s also not surprising that, given such stark racial disparities, Senate Republicans are less worried than you’d think lawmakers would be, looking at their constituents and seeing one in 10 households, overall, going hungry.