For the past two months or so, I have been interning at a clinic that I will call Bridges Wholistic Clinic. The clinic is situated in a down-trodden part of town with a community of mostly African Americans. The walk from the bus stop to my internship is a curious affair. The bus lets me down in front of a restaurant that serves vegan sweet potato quinoa burgers and green tea cupcakes. I walk two blocks down and there are several tattoo parlors and another vegetarian café and an antiques shop. But then things take a funny turn. I cross a street ironically named Wealthy, and the landscape changes. The houses are old and discordantly colorful, paint peels off the walls, the lawns are overgrown with weeds, and by Thursday the air smells of sour trash. Beyond this street called Wealthy, just three blocks down, I arrive at Bridges, which is surrounded by these old houses, mostly inhabited by African Americans.

Although redlining is a very real and very inconspicuous issue, when it comes to cyclical poverty amongst minority groups, the political discussions tend to center less on redlining and infrastructural policies and more on the question of whether welfare (especially medical) should or should not be provided. People on both sides of the argument get caught up on the individual merits of welfare recipients: Were they in prison? Do they have jobs? What will they do with the help they’re given? How many children do they have? It’s easy to think life is as binary as the political divide in America. But life is more complex than that, and to argue how deserving someone is to receive help on the basis of their individual moral merit evades a deeper and more important issue that should be considered in welfare.

Bridges clinic is small, but its size allows it to intimately serve an underserved population that has come out of touch with the medical establishment due to a historical relationship fraught with oppression. Perhaps the most blood-curdling example is the Tuskegee Study (beginning in the 1930s and ending in 1972) in which the U.S. Public Health Service infected African American males in rural Alabama with syphilis to study the progression of the disease. The horrific experiment in the name of science affected not only the males who were infected, but their wives, and their children born with congenital syphilis. Less than fifty years have transpired since then, and medicine and civil rights have made for better societal development. Yet the relationship between medicine and many ethnic groups is still as pervaded by tension, uncertainty, and missteps as the relationship between two spouses in a marriage that has been wrecked by infidelity. However, during my time at Bridges, I’ve seen that it is possible to create a space for racial reconciliation in medical practice by creating a more wholistic view of healthcare and welfare.

It so happens that Bridges is in the same building as a community center that provides daycare and summer programs for children, counseling for grieving community members, mentoring, academic help, community gardens and food relief for the hungry. A hallway and a staircase away from the clinic, I found myself walking into a gym that has been transformed into a pantry. At a desk by the far-left wall sat a lady I will call Angela. Her official job is to sign up people who walk in through the door and give them a few food items for temporary relief. Her unofficial job is to sit with them for as long as it takes while they recognize in her a fellow human who will listen to them and see them as people. Poverty, prison, abandonment, addiction and chronic pain have a way of dehumanizing you, but staring into the eyes of a person who really, truly sees you makes some of the feeling come back to the raw numbness of survival.

As I sat with Angela, she told me her work and personal philosophy were actually challenged by a person speaking from a pulpit. She told me the pastor had decried welfare programs because they didn’t help the poor and unemployed to become independent. Those programs only coddled them, and thus they should be discontinued so that recipients begin to work hard and become self-empowered. The logic of this statement assumes that laziness is what afflicts welfare recipients (who are mostly people of color) and that if they only work hard enough, they’ll have the same benefits as everyone else for the same effort. Frankly, this statement’s logic isn’t new. I see this logic as the progeny of the American Dream, that wonderful mythology that all things are possible for us because of our unlimited agency, our ability to choose, our power to be the causes of a desired effect.

I believe that humans are autonomous creatures with free will. However, I also think that the amount of agency we have is not unconditional. It’s tied to our socioeconomic status, to the family we were born into, to our education, and, yes, even in this day and age, to the color of our skin and our ethnic background. When your voice is heard and your agency is wide and influential, you don’t have to worry about survival because you can think about organic farming and genetic research and recipes on Pinterest while sipping your morning latte and your time and resources are enough for that. You can go to the store to buy what you need whenever you need it and your possibilities are endless. Your agency allows you to trust that your choices will be, to a degree, unquestioned and unchallenged. And your agency will be so asserted in society that you won’t even think about it until it’s being hindered by something or someone.

Now imagine your ability to choose and have an effect on society is suddenly diminished by a law that’s being passed, or worse yet, by a law that was passed a hundred years ago that still affects you today. Imagine that the prejudices and attitudes that harmed your ancestors decades ago still have an impact on you today. Imagine that you no longer have the assets to secure your freedom—and your freedom gets diminished. Imagine going from decisions of whether or not to eat that fro-yo with the extra hundred calories to decisions of whether to go to that welfare center today to get food or go at a later day in the week, when you or your kids might no longer be able to cope with the hunger. Some factors that we could never control shape our ability to choose, which shapes our agency to contribute to society. Our agency, in turn, shapes how we identify ourselves.

My point here isn’t that money or privilege will make us happy or more important. My point is that we are more complicated and interconnected than we imagine. Even as we discuss issues regarding welfare, more than likely our agency is significant, because we have enough time in our hands to think about these issues as opposed to being so busy with survival that we don't have the privilege to think of these matters

The end of the matter, as Angela told me, is that the system isn’t structured so that people can become self-empowered without help. Thus, welfare programs are necessary in order to satisfy people’s basic needs while we work for policies that address inequality at a structural level.

While we advocate at a policy-level for those with little to no agency, we can increase that agency at a grassroots level, too. For Angela, that means having a peanut butter sandwich ready for whoever comes in hungry. It means going out to the community and training leaders to empower themselves and to speak on behalf of their community’s needs. It means satisfying basic needs so that people can focus on finding their abilities and passions and contribute something to society.

Whether the welfare we provide is social, medical, or economic, we begin restoring agency when those oppressed by poverty and hunger understand that they are needed, that their contributions matter. We begin by devoting our own empowered agencies and our time to these discussions that will benefit the oppressed. If they cannot stop the cold, hard race of survival because they simply can’t, the least we can do is spark these conversations as we work towards the resources and infrastructure to pull them into these conversations and a place at the table of choices.

So. For anyone who asks whether to welfare or not to welfare, I invite them to think harder, join this conversation, consider the complexities involved, and then try again, with a better, more meaningful question.