If you had to sum up in two words America’s racialized prejudice and marginalization of
people who rely on government assistance to get by, welfare queen is about as good and
as bad as it gets.
August 2016 marked the 20th anniversary of President Bill Clinton signing out of law
old school welfare, aka Aid to Families with Dependent Children, replacing it with Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families, aka TANF.
And while TANF has succeeded in getting more single, low-income, mothers to work, it arguably
hasn’t altered this controlling image of the welfare queen who allegedly filches taxpayer
dollars, gets pregnant for government paychecks, drives fancy cars and is solely responsible
for perpetuating a so-called “culture of poverty.”
And now it’s time for a super-quick and hyper-condensed history of women and welfare.
Officially, the welfare system began in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act
and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Previously, state-funded mothers’ pensions were given to almost exclusively white widows
with children so they could stay home to care for the kiddos, fulfilling their proper feminine
duty of childrearing and domestic care-taking but of course they didn’t want to give them
so much but not so much money that they wouldn’t still be incentivized to find a husband rather
than a job because of course a man’s proper job is breadwinning.
And that’s an important key theme in the early history of welfare that it was not originally
architected to incentivize women to work but rather to allow white, I repeat white, women
to stay home and take care of their kids until they could find a dude to get married and
we still see echoes of this in Temporary Assisted for Needy Families funds today funding pro-marriage
programs.
Moreover, AFDC was basically intended as a short-term fix to initially compensate these
white widows for giving birth to future laborers and pursuing the “family ethic” of settling
down with a male breadwinner who then would be paying into this newly established Social
Security so that when he kicks the bucket later on, the government doesn’t have to
pay up, Social Security can take care of the wife and kids.
But it took nearly 30 years and the founding of the National Welfare Rights Organization
for more low-income black women to begin genuinely benefitting from the AFDC because until then
mostly white caseworkers had the power that they often exercised to deem children of color
and children born out of wedlock as “unsuitable” welfare recipients.
On top of that, racist state policies and cultural expectations that black women should
work outside the home as opposed to those white mothers who really needed to stay home
to take care of their kids, only deepened the problem and prejudice.
Because even then, many black mothers essentially paid to be on welfare receiving welfare in
exchange for being intensely scrutinized by AFDC caseworkers including being subjected
to random household raids to make sure that their weren’t any dudes around and also
having aid docked or cut off completely if signs of extra income or outside financial
assistance turned up.
So even though regulations at the time prohibited mothers at the time from getting jobs or even
seriously dating guys who might bring over food or extra cash to help out, they were
the ones singled out as being irresponsible and lazy.
And in 1976 then California Governor Ronald Reagan made ‘welfare queen’ a household
term.
But now we’ve got to hop back to 1974 because that’s when the term first appears in the
Chicago Tribune in an article about Linda Taylor, who was a local con artist, possible
murderer and definite kidnapper who also used a ton of fake names and a ton of fake social
security numbers to swindle the government out of a ton of money.
Then hopping back to ’76, Ronald Reagan anonymously references this ‘welfare queen’
in his standard stump speech, repeating again and again about how all you hardworking white
taxpayers are just being swindled out of cash by all of these lazy, de-incentivized welfare
queens who are driving their Cadillacs around to pickup their government cheese and that
my friends is dogwhistle politics 101 because Reagan never said she was black, everyone
just knew when you said ‘welfare queen’ you meant a low-income, single, African-American
mother.
And seemingly overnight that controlling image of the welfare queen became our narrative
script or presumed common knowledge that welfare recipients equaled undeserving black woman.
And FYI: while today’s recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are disproportionately
black, it and related programs like SNAP food stamps still benefit more white Americans.
But why even dig through the complicated history and bureaucracy of public assistance programs
when it’s sooooo much easier to just foist all of the blame on the shoulders of low-income,
single black women whose lived experiences, needs and aspirations are seldom validated,
much less elevated, in national conversations?
Now who are the lazy ones.