For centuries, starvation has been wielded as a strategic and brutally effective tool of colonial and imperial violence. What’s happening in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and elsewhere is nothing new. It’s the latest chapter in an old and devastating playbook.
Black New Orleanians were branded refugees, their hunger criminalized as looting, and they were deliberately abandoned by their own government. Hurricane Katrina was not nature’s work but a sanctioned American crime whose effects are still felt two decades later.