Place, History, and Food Apartheid: Reframing How Low-Income Black Mothers Make Ends Meet

Thirty years after Making Ends Meet, poor mothers continue to labor intensively to sustain their families. Following scholars emphasizing the fundamental causes of social inequalities, we address the social, civil, and historical processes that structure and complicate this labor. Drawing on interviews with forty-four low-income Black mothers, most of whom are single, in a historically Black Houston neighborhood, we explore how they meet their families’ food needs in a context where welfare is essentially dead. Through the lens of food apartheid, we examine how processes of accumulation and disinvestment shape mothers’ work to feed their families. Respondents highlight place-based barriers stemming from welfare, housing, and transportation policies that disadvantage entire neighborhoods. In this way, providing for one’s family is best understood as an intergenerational struggle under food apartheid. Situating contemporary narratives in a broader historical context, this analysis challenges deficit-oriented discourses that blame individuals and communities and paves the way for reparative action.