During a House Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) argued President Donald Trump’s 2021 budget proposal harkened back to racist beliefs that “poor people, particularly African Americans, and now immigrants and others, are lazy.”

Jackson Lee said, “All that it seems to gear toward is to ensure the most vulnerable people of this country get the short end of the stick. Let me share some information with you very quickly, from the Center of Social Study of Policies, ‘The Racist Roots of Work.’ Work requirements do not support work. They harm families. The most basic part of it, in the years since temporary assistance for needy families, mandated work for families, hundreds of thousands of families have been left with less than $2 of cash in America.”

She continued, “When Arkansas and other states began to implement their work requirements, thousands of people have lost their health insurance. This spring, 700,000 people will likely lose food assistance as states begin to implement the Trump administration’s expanded SNAP time limit. What they are gearing toward is that in slavery, they begin to characterize the descendants of enslaved Africans as lazy. That is all the stereotypes. There were laws put in place that if you are picking cotton, you could not get assistance. This document is trying to uproot the long belief that poor people, particularly African Americans, and now immigrants and others, are lazy. This budget clearly emphasized that unfortunately racially charged direction in cutting Medicaid, in cutting nutrition program, in cutting housing.”

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