I’ve been told that pride goeth before a fall, which is to say that pride is a negative thing and will lead to bad consequences. But I’ve also been told to hold my head up high. Have some pride. Take pride in yourself. Where’s your sense of pride? Your self-respect? Your dignity? And so I have wrestled over the past several weeks with not only the meanings of these expressions but also with how they should affect my decision about whether to apply for food stamps.

As an AmeriCorps member, I have agreed to dedicate a year of my life to working toward the good of society. In exchange, I am provided with a stipend in the amount of $12,000—before taxes. In other words, I earn less than minimum wage. With this money, I have to keep a roof over my head, pay my bills, keep gas in my car to drive back and forth to my work site, and keep myself fed. Having looked at things from this angle, it was clear to me that pride indeed goeth before a fall. That my valuation of myself as a person is not a tangible, but the numbers in my bank account very much are. So the scale tipped in favor of reason and, like most of my fellow AmeriCorps members, I went online to find the food stamps application.

I started to skim the sixteen-page application on the screen, and before I even reached the end of the first page, the scale had tipped back in the other direction. Why? Because of the racial-heritage-check-all-that-apply question. There it was—the “Black or African American” checkbox, glaring out at me. For your information, I am a black woman from a middle- to upper-middle class family, and I hold a juris doctorate from a top ten law school. Further, and more importantly, neither my parents nor my parents’ parents nor any previous generation of my family has ever been a recipient of public aid—not because they were wealthy but because they worked hard to provide for themselves and took pride in doing so.

Each generation before mine, under its own steam, has made sure that the subsequent generation was able to have more opportunities, get more education, and go farther than it had, the unspoken goal being that these subsequent generations be instilled with an even greater sense of—dare I say it—pride. Self-respect. Dignity. For me and for my family, food stamps represent the opposite of dignity; they are the opposite of what my parents and my parents’ parents stood for and strived for.

I didn’t have to look up any data on African Americans and food stamps to know that the statistics would be grimly disproportionate, but for the sake of this discourse, I looked anyway. Here is some of what I found:

• One in three food stamp households is headed by an African American. More than a third of food stamp benefits are issued to African Americans although, according to Census data, African Americans make up only about twelve percent of the U.S. population. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

• Nearly nine million African Americans receive food stamps each month. This represents a quarter of the African-American population. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

• More than 85 percent of African Americans will use food stamps some time between the ages of 20 and 65, compared with 37 percent of white Americans. (Thomas A. Hirschl, professor of development sociology at Cornell University)

Whether I were to check the “Black or African American” box on the form or not, I would know that I had become a statistic, that I would not be able to exclude myself from data like this, whether its purveyors be biased or not, or from conversations, present and future, about black people and their use of public assistance.

Meanwhile, conversations among my white AmeriCorps counterparts these days often turn to a gleeful “I got my food stamps!” They flash their EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards with wide smiles unburdened by the weight of history, statistics, or stigma. To them, it is merely much-welcomed assistance in keeping food in the cupboard on an income that makes doing so almost prohibitive. And here my scale tips back in favor of reality. We—all of us in AmeriCorps—are working for the government for an insanely low amount of compensation. It makes sense that we would supplement our income in the form of food stamps. We have to eat, and pride goeth before a fall. So I found myself leaving my white AmeriCorps friend’s house on a Saturday night with every intention of filling out the application.

On the way home, I stopped at a grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner. At the register, I took out my debit card, swiped it, and keyed in my PIN. Perhaps there was a unaccustomed delay between my entering the information and the computer processing it. Perhaps my blue Capital One debit card looked like a Louisiana Purchase program EBT card to the girl who was ringing me up. Perhaps certain forces had conspired to provide me with a cosmic test of whether I was doing the right thing. The sum total was that the girl at the register looked at me and asked:

“Food stamps?”

“No,” I replied, emphatically. Oh, my God…no, I thought with relief. And right then and there, back tipped the scale. So instead of coming home and filling out that sixteen page application, I came home and wrote this…with my head held high.