What The Trump Admin’s ‘Milk Bill’ Means For Black Children
What Does The Trump Administration’s ‘Milk Bill’ Mean For Black Children?
When the Trump administration signed the so-called “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act,” the mainstream media conversation remained narrowly focused on debates over fat content, calories, dairy farmers, and school lunch menus. But for Black people, milk has never been just . . . milk. It has always been bound up with power, race, whose bodies are valued, and whose children are expected to thrive.
To understand why this moment feels so loaded, you have to go all the way back to the plantation.
Under slavery, Black women’s bodies were turned into infrastructure for white survival. Enslaved mothers were routinely forced to serve as wet nurses, breastfeeding the children of enslavers while their own babies went hungry, were weaned too early, or were left to die. Their milk, literally the substance meant to sustain Black life, was extracted to nourish white life instead. That meant future white supremacists, slavers, and lynchers were suckled at Black breasts, while Black infants paid the cost in malnutrition, illness, and death.
This was an early form of American biopolitics, in which the state and the plantation decided whose bodies would be supported and whose would be depleted. Black motherhood was exploited to strengthen white childhood and the future of the white race, while Black children were rendered disposable.
By the 19th century, the politics of milk became a full-blown public health crisis. In Northern cities, the so-called “milk problem” referred to contaminated, watered-down, diseased cow’s milk sold to the poor. Infant mortality rates soared. But as with everything else, the response was racialized. Reformers and pediatricians focused their concern, resources, and “pure milk” campaigns on saving white babies. Black infants who were forced into crowded, segregated neighborhoods, denied clean water, refrigeration, and medical care, continued to die at disproportionate rates. Their deaths were treated as tragic but inevitable and explained away as a reflection of “ignorance” and “backwardness” rather than state neglect.
At the same time, racist imagery flooded American culture: the Black “mammy” holding a plump white baby, the loyal wet nurse whose milk and love were imagined as natural resources for white families. Milk became a symbol of civilization and purity. Whiteness was associated with clean, wholesome nourishment. Blackness was associated with dirt, deficiency, and biological lack.
Fast-forward to the 20th century, and school lunch programs emerged. On the surface, they were about child welfare. In practice, they reproduced inequality. Segregated schools received inferior food, outdated kitchens, and smaller budgets. Federal nutrition standards were built around European dietary norms, with cow’s milk at the center, even though large segments of the population, particularly Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino children, were and are lactose intolerant.
That biological fact matters in this conversation. Lactose intolerance is not a defect. It is a normal human variation, especially common among people whose ancestral diets did not center on dairy. Today, most Black children, many Latino children, most Indigenous children, and a majority of Asian children do not digest cow’s milk easily. Bloating, stomach pain, inflammation, diarrhea, and nausea are routine outcomes when these bodies are forced to treat dairy as a staple.
And here’s the demographic reality: children of color are now the majority of children in the United States. By 2045, people of color will be the majority of the entire population. The future of this country is not lactose-tolerant by default.
So what does it mean, in this context, for a federal government to re-center whole cow’s milk as the symbolic and nutritional anchor of “healthy childhood”?
It means reasserting a white European digestive norm as universal. It means treating whiteness as the biological baseline. And it means asking the nation’s actual future to adapt, endure discomfort, or be marked as “problem bodies” to fit a standard never designed for them.
This is happening against the backdrop of food apartheid in Black America. In many Black neighborhoods, full-service grocery stores are miles away. Public transportation is unreliable. Fresh produce is expensive. Ultra-processed foods are cheap and omnipresent. Schools are often the most consistent source of daily nutrition for children, yet those same schools are underfunded, overcrowded, and subject to policy whiplash driven by political ideology rather than community health.
The result is a landscape shaped by structural, not personal, factors like higher rates of childhood obesity, asthma, diabetes, and other chronic conditions rooted in environmental racism, zoning decisions, and economic abandonment. These are not failures of individual families. They are the predictable outcomes of a system that has never prioritized Black children’s well-being.
And yet, in the face of poisoned water in places like Flint, Mich., and Jackson, Miss., in the face of crumbling school infrastructure, in the face of children whose biggest nutritional crisis is food insecurity itself, this administration chose to make milk a political centerpiece.
Why?
Milk has always been deeply racial. It has long been coded as white, pastoral, wholesome, “natural,” and civilizational. It is bound up with images of the sturdy white farm child, the white nuclear family, the myth of white biological strength and moral purity. In far-right and white-nationalist subcultures, milk has even become an explicit symbol of whiteness and supposed genetic superiority.
Layer that symbolism onto an administration and a political movement obsessed with falling white birthrates and being “outnumbered” by non-whites, openly invoking “replacement” and “civilizational decline.” Listen to the language around the bill: “real food,” “traditional nourishment,” “strong growth,” “healthy development.” All of these echo older eugenic and racial-fitness narratives. It is about vitality and about who is imagined as the future stock of the nation.
Meanwhile, the actual children who will make up that future, disproportionately Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian, are the very ones most likely to experience discomfort and exclusion under a dairy-centric standard.
This is how policy becomes symbolic violence. Not through overt declarations of racial hierarchy, but through the quiet normalization of whose bodies are “standard” and whose are “deviations;” through whose biology is designed around and whose is expected to conform.
History has come full circle again.
Once, Black women’s milk was extracted to nourish white children while Black babies were deprived. Now, a white-coded nutritional norm is elevated in a school system where Black and Brown children are the majority, even when their bodies are less able to tolerate it. Then as now, the question is the same: whose future is being fed, and whose is being risked?
This is not to say that whole milk has no nutrients, or that dairy farmers do not matter, or that dietary science is simple. It is to say that in a nation built on racial hierarchy, no policy about children’s bodies is ever just technical or neutral. Food is power. Nutrition is governance. Childhood is always a political project.
When a government that polices reproduction, fears demographic change, and flirts with white nationalist mythology decides to symbolically center milk, of all things, as the marker of “healthy kids,” Black people must pause and listen to the deeper frequencies.
Because we remember when our bodies were literally used to sustain a future that was never meant to include us as equals. We remember when our children’s hunger was treated as collateral damage. We remember when “science” and “health” were invoked to naturalize inequality.
The question, then, is not simply what kind of milk will be poured into school cartons. The question is what vision of the nation is being nourished, and what vision of Black childhood is being quietly written out of the frame.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
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