September 7, 2016 • 63 mins
Ronald Reagan made "welfare queens" a household epithet during his unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. Considering the 20th anniversary of so-called welfare reform, Cristen and Caroline examine the deeper origins and implications of the racist, classist welfare queen stereotype as well as the surprising history of how welfare was originally for white ladies.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from House toupp
Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Christen and I'm Caroline, and listeners, we gotta be honest
with you. This episode that we're about to do focusing
on the straight up racist stereotype of the welfare queen,
(00:29):
did not start. As you know, we didn't start out
intending to do this episode. Now. We intended to do
an episode looking at women and social work, which will
do eventually. Oh yeah, we're gonna revisit because it is
just a rich topic full of amazing, forward thinking, innovative
(00:51):
women such as Jane Adams, you know, one of the
really founders of social work. Um. But first of all,
as we started researching, he realized, oh, this is the huge,
a huge topic who hard hard to pack into one episode.
And then it just so happened that as we were
(01:14):
researching this, the twenty anniversary of so called welfare reform
came and went, and with that, um, this term, the stigmatizing,
awful term welfare queen came up. And so since welfare
queens that that stereotype, that controlling image, and we're going
(01:34):
to talk more about what that exactly means, since it
encapsulates so much of the stigma against welfare and even
social work in general. UM, we felt like it was
worth just focusing in on this because you have so
many intersections of race and gender and class and the
(01:59):
on going issue of poverty and motherhood and and who's
considered a worthy citizen and who's not yes, yes, the
whole rhetoric of deserving versus undeserving poor, And there's there's
so much, so much just embedded racism and classism that
(02:20):
is stitched up with all of this. UM. So we're
going to try to entangle some of that um and
hopefully not get too caught up in all of the
admittedly confusing bureaucracy that can quickly overtake. Yeah, this is
just going to devolve into us screaming the F word
a lot. Uh, So, let's go back to welfare reform quickly. So.
(02:43):
August two thousand sixteen marked the twenty anniversary of so
called welfare reform h This was a key piece of
legislation that President Bill Clinton signed into law. It was
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and it replaced
old school welfare a k A aid to families with
(03:07):
dependent children. And so now in lieu of that, welfare
doesn't really exist anymore. A lot of people might not
know that welfare is now what's called temporary assistance for
needy families. Yeah, I mean, there were some good intentions
behind this. The idea was to connect poor families with
employment so that they wouldn't need welfare, and it also
connect them to programs like job training and child care
(03:29):
and other support. I mean that sounds great, like what
could go wrong? Um? And and you know this, this
shift did cut the welfare recipients in half by the
year two thousand to just six point three million people
receiving it, down from the peak of fourteen point two
million people. And yeah, I mean a lot of millions.
(03:51):
In fact, a lot of low income single mothers in
particular have found work and taking care of their families
thanks to food stamp pro programs and the Earned income
tax credit. But there are some not so great realities
that are behind all of this. Yeah. And you have
to keep in mind too that in ninety six when
Clinton signed this legislation, the economy was going like gangbusters. Um.
(04:18):
So that was one reason why you see within a
four year period after it's signed into law. This major
uptick in the employment of low income single moms UM,
but definitely with influence from the Great Recession happening. You
have really controversial aspects of UH tent, that temporary assistance
(04:42):
for needy families that was controversial at the time. I
mean a lot of people, a lot of feminists and
activists protested it because they felt like it was too
punitive and didn't address more systemic problems of poverty UM
and and the t in tent is temporary because us
the lifetime limit on benefits is five years, so unlike
(05:06):
welfare that you could potentially stay on and definitely if
you needed it UM, this has that limit. And you
also have problems with TAMPA recipients having a hard time
finding and keeping jobs. That job training is a required
part of being of receiving that assistance, and going to
(05:31):
the job training though, can mean losing jobs that mother's
often women often already have. But one major wrinkle in
how this legislation is architected is a it has not
kept up with inflation. Republicans actually vetoed that UM, so
(05:53):
you have funding down in general UM and also you
have being dispersed through state block grants, which means that
Uncle Sam or Aunt Samanthos veminous podcast. I'm just kidding.
It can be Uncle Sam um writes a check and
(06:15):
it's like, okay, Louisiana, here you go, here is your
your federal funding, and Louisiana can then decide or whatever
state we're in, you can then decide how they want
to split up that cash. And I called it Louisiana
because there only four percent of poor families receive TAMP,
(06:41):
six thousand families, a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people,
because only eight percent of its welfare federal welfare grants
are used on cash benefits and only one percent are
used on jobs programs. So the rest is just being diverted. Yeah,
it's being diverted to other programs, to administrative costs. I mean,
(07:06):
it's not like they can take that money and build
like roads and bridges instead, Um, But there are so
many other types of programs that they can in ways
that they can move that money around because of so
many budget cuts um that started really with the Great Recession.
It is up to you know, the states to decide
how much they really how much they really want to
(07:29):
invest in these communities. Yeah, So on average in the US,
about fifty of these grants are argused on actual benefits
job training, in childcare, and thirty are spent elsewhere. Yeah,
there's this weird side of things where only families with
children living in poverty received tamp um, and overall poverty
(07:51):
and deep poverty is higher than it was. Yeah. So,
I mean, one reason why you have such a low
proportion of those emily is receiving this assistance is because
during this time you also have a lot more funding
going to SNAP, which is the food stamps program. Um,
(08:12):
and you also have the Earned Income Tax Credit, which
has been really helpful for a lot of UM working
families and poverty. But there's that issue of deep poverty,
which is pretty much equivalent to living on two dollars
a day. So am I wrong in feeling like it
seems like things are just shifted where instead of saying
(08:35):
like here's this um little sack of money, we're just
gonna take that money and put it into other areas
rather than just helping you. And some of it will
go to childcare things, and some of it will go
to food stamps, but yeah, and some goes to funding
things like Headstart programs which are really important, but there's
(08:55):
still that issue of jobs and um helping also helping
low income single mothers pursue higher education, you know. I
mean there's just there's just a lot that isn't accounted
for consistently. Yeah, Because while it's great to fund something
like Headstart, I mean our mothers well and fathers too,
(09:15):
but our families not struggling to like buy backpacks and
markers for their kids to go back to school exactly. Yeah.
I mean there have been a lot of uh stories
recently because of the twentieth anniversary kind of evaluating whether
welfare reform, so to speak, really reformed much. And one
of the NPR stories was talking to a mother who
(09:39):
uh you know, receives assistance, she lives in a homeless shelter,
and she can still, you know, barely afford to buy
her kids, uh just back to school supplies that they
might need. Um. So this is already really contradicting to
this racist portrayal of the welfare queen where it's like, uh,
you know, people are just sitting back just getting their
(10:02):
government checks and living high on the hog, when of
course that's not the case at all. But also what
you have here too is the product of highly polarized
political system where for years now Republicans UM have used
a lot of dog whistle politics, UM, talking about talking
(10:23):
down about so called entitlement programs and how you know
taxpayers are just you know, paying for all of these things.
What do you think social Security is? We're gonna get that.
We're going to get to that. Can't wait. Um. And
if Hillary Clinton is elected president, it is gonna be
interesting to see what happens on the welfare front, because
(10:44):
she has been asked about this a lot on the
campaign trail, because of course Bill Clinton signed this controversial legislation,
and in interviews in the nine nineties, she was very
explicit to about reforms to welfare and saying that basically
people needed to bootstrap better. Yeah, and one important aspect
of Tampa is that it did pivot attention more to jobs,
(11:09):
connecting you know, recipients straight to jobs. But obviously it
hasn't done a terrific job with that, and she's acknowledged
that too in more recent interviews, saying like, yeah, we
need to reevaluate what's going on, and for today's episode,
we are really going to focus on the stigmatizing of
(11:30):
low income black single mothers, usually on public assistance, and
sort of how all of this hot mess came to
be because, like you said, this like relates to this
old school idea of the deserving versus the undeserving poor.
You have racialized divisions between social insurance, which is social
(11:55):
security and unemployment insurance that rewards work versus welfare or
public assistance that has stigmatized unemployment. Well, yeah, I mean
the whole social insurance thing. Recipients aren't scrutinized. It was
originally intended for white male workers in their wives a
k a. Citizens, And how we treat them versus welfare,
(12:20):
which stigmatizes unemployment. Recipients are heavily scrutinized and stereotyped is irresponsible.
They have to go through judgmental case workers, and they
are viewed in this light as more like subjects of
the government versus you know, active citizens of the country. Well,
(12:41):
and that makes sense, unfortunately, because a lot of these
programs and the predecessors to these programs begin developing right
on the heels of abolition, where you have you know,
African Americans who are fighting truth and nail for full citizenship.
Especially women of color, who are facing double discrimination everywhere
(13:04):
they turn. UM. And when we look at this so
called welfare queen, it is a racist, sexist, controlling image
that perpetuates the myth that African American single mothers are
receiving government assistance because they are lazy, they're promiscuous, and
they're just morally bankrupt fraudsters who are swindling hardworking taxpayers
(13:29):
and perpetuating this so called culture of poverty. UM. And
I call it a controlling image rather than a stereotype,
because that's what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who's a badass,
calls it, because the controlling image is a stereotype that
is so strong that it exerts control not only over
(13:51):
the people that it allegedly represents, but it's also used
as justification to discriminate against them. And I have a
vocabulary question really quickly for social workers who are listening
to this episode, because we are using welfare and public
assistance interchangeably, and I don't know if that is accurate,
(14:15):
if that language is correct, So if someone can let
me know, Like, it's not something that came up explicitly
in our research, but I have a feeling that welfare
refers to something like programmatically different than public assistance. I
don't know. I wish I could tell you. I know.
That's why I'm asking for social workers to let me know,
(14:36):
I mean. And this is also just a heads up
that we are aware that our language might not be precise. Yeah,
This book by Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought, was
such an instructive look at the issues of race and
class and sexism that come up in these discussions about welfare.
(14:58):
Um because you got the welfare mother whose this is
basically the bad mother stereotype that became the welfare queen
that we here talked about in the media. And this
is basically a stereotype that's like the stereotype of the mammy,
but she's even lazier. And that goes back to what
Christian was talking earlier about the controlling image, because this
(15:22):
stereotyping of black people as lazy provides the ideological justification,
as Collins writes, for efforts to harness black women's fertility
to the needs of a changing political economy. This goes
back to I believe it was our Mother's of Gynecology
episode where we talked about how when black people were enslaved. Uh,
(15:44):
slave owners were like, yes, produce more offspring so that
we can get more slaves. But as soon as slavery
as an institution is ended, oh god, black people having
children is something to be stopped. We have to control
black women's fertility well. And it also hearkens to our
episode on the sterilization for African American women, particularly in
(16:08):
the fifties and sixties. So, I mean, when we talk
about reproductive rights, it's so critical that we remember that
historically in the United States, Black women's fertility and motherhood
has been something that for so long was almost not
(16:30):
their own, you know, in terms of the whether it's
a slave owner trying controlling it or uh doctor forcibly
sterilizing them. And this is all why when we think
about reproductive rights, it's so critical to take an intersectional
approach because historically in the United States, Black women's fertility
(16:55):
and motherhood have continually been under siege. Yeah, you know,
so rarely hasn't been something that is so prized and
protected in the way that it is and has been
for white women. Correct. So if we look at then
the welfare Queen as Patricia Hill Collins describes it. Um.
(17:16):
She calls it a controlling image that points to working
class Black women as really the symptoms of our deteriorating state.
I mean, it's they're just scapegoats over and over and
over again for what is bigger picture, a lot of
institutionalized racism, institutionalized racism as it intersects with our anxieties
(17:41):
about the state of society and our economy. But I
thought this point that Collins made about the welfare queen
stereotype or controlling image was so perfect and on the nose.
She said that she's typically portrayed as an unwed mother,
and she violates one cardinal tenant of white male dominating ideology.
She is a woman alone. As a result, her treatment
(18:05):
reinforces the dominant gender ideology, positing that a woman's true
worth and financial security should occur through heterosexual marriage. And
that dominant gender ideology was baked into the social work structure,
like the the the initial welfare structure. Um. And we're
(18:27):
going to get into more of that, and it's the
reason why, you know, we have a lot of these
issues today. But if we dig a little bit deeper
into these stereotypes, we came across a paper on Black
Womanhood and Social Policy, which uh links the welfare queen
rhetoric to tropes of the mammy as you've already mentioned,
(18:51):
and also sapphire and Jezebel. Um. So you have that claim,
that stereotypical claim that welfare mothers are unmarried and they
tend to have a lot of children, they don't want
to work, they lack moral character and have just abandoned
traditional family values and quotes and so um. This scholar
(19:14):
notes how in the nineteen eighties you have the welfare
queen hearkening that mammy trope with her presumed obesity that
signaled her laziness, but at the same time abundant food choices,
the whole idea of like, well, she's just you know,
she doesn't have to work, but she can still just
like sit around and eat whatever she wants all day,
which is of course then related to the whole food
(19:35):
stamps stereotypes that we get that you're just using your
food stamps to buy there's either the stereotype that you're
just using your food stamps to buy like cheetahs and coke,
or you're using them to buy lobster and you know,
fancy steak dinners, and then in the nineties, as the
public face of welfare shifted to a quote young inner
(19:56):
city teenage mother that hearkens to the Sapphire trope of
the hyper sexualized black woman who is just driven by
her libido with no interest in child rearing. And as
a paper notes, both of these stereotypes project poor black
women as unfit mothers, breeders of lustful sons, and unchased daughters,
(20:19):
so basically saying that it's black women's fault that they
are creating children like this, and these children then learn
these horrible habits from them and don't want to break
out of this cycle of poverty and food stamp use.
It's basically blaming the people in the system for both
(20:41):
creating poverty and like benefiting from poverty, and it harps
on so many racialized spears when you look at the
politics of it and how um conservatives will then accuse
liberals of also perpetuating a system because we're just all
about you know, high taxes and entitlements and uh, you know,
(21:05):
as a result, our workforce is just deteriorating. UM. And
this leads us to a plot twist, because here comes
Ronald Reagan in nineteen seventy six, and Ronald Reagan really
made Welfare Queen a household term. Yeah. She was a
central character in his stump speeches of nineteen seventy six,
(21:28):
and he talks about how in Chicago they found this
woman who holds the record. He said that she used
eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food Stamp,
Social Security of Veterans, benefits for non existent deceased veteran husbands,
as well as welfare and uh, the big, most often
(21:51):
cited moment of these speeches is that when he tells
the audience that her tax free cash income alone has
been running up to a hundred and fifty dollars a year,
there's a gasp from the audience. They're horrified, who is
this terrible woman? And I mean, what is what Reagan
is doing here is dog whistling that you know the
(22:12):
Welfare Queen is. We we know who you're talking about.
We know that you are implying that she is low income,
that she's African American, and that she is a single mother,
and that she's everywhere. You know, there's just this this
one just happens to stand out but all these women
are just fraudulent. They're driving their Cadillacs to go pick
up their welfare check. That's always the thing, that is
(22:34):
always the thing whenever you hear people not even like
citing Ronald Reagan or citing this period in history when
this was talked about all the time, it's always the
stereotype of the woman in fur coats and in a Cadillac.
It's almost like it's entered our subconscious as a country
that we just stereotype all of these people as that woman,
(22:57):
all of the people who have ever needed money or
financial assistance of any kind. Well, how dare a woman
of color indulged in conspicuous consumption? You know you're about
to tip over some you know, societal balance if that's
the case. Well, the funny thing about the whole welfare
(23:18):
queen stereotype, especially with Ronald Reagan relaying the story, is
that this character that he's citing is based on a
real person. And we don't mean that in the way
of like the hater's meaning of like, oh, this woman's everywhere,
all these welfare recipients in their fur coats. But the
welfare queen, with all of these different identities. Uh, that
(23:40):
term was actually coined by a journalist who was covering
an actual woman. Yeah. And the thing is, like today
a lot of people will say, oh, well, you know,
that is obviously racist rhetoric that Ronald Reagan was using.
And that's totally true. I mean he was he was
gunning for white votes, um. And he was successful, not
(24:01):
in seventy six, but he was successful in Night with that. Um.
But the fact or fiction doesn't even matter. I mean,
it's besides the point now, because those two words were
so successful at encapsulating all and stoking all of the
racist and classist anxieties of these usually more working class
(24:24):
white people. And we're going to get into who that
real woman was, um, but also how all of this
happened in the first place, how we got to nineteen
seventy six with the gipper talking about welfare queens around
the country. When we come right back from a quick break,
(24:53):
so before we introduce you to that Chicago woman with
all of those different fake names, uh, we want to
offer a little welfare plus women history because surprise, welfare
as we think of it was initially set up for
white women, and it was set up for white women
(25:15):
not to get jobs, but to stay home and take
care of children, thus fulfilling their proper feminine duties of
child rearing and domestic caretaking. Yeah, because you still, you know,
if if a white man dies, Uh, you have to
be able to provide the breadwinner salary for the woman
(25:36):
to enable her to preserve her sphere, to stay at
home with the children, cooking and baking and mothering, because
God forbids who leaves the house and get a job.
Of course, the attitudes were not extended to Black women
who were expected. It was just expected that they would
be working outside the house. Well because their their bodies,
(25:56):
especially at that time, had for so long just been
rendered vessels of labor. You know, whether it is them
themselves working or um, if they are enslaved owners wanting
them to get pregnant so that they could then you know,
produce more laborers. Which is all just really disgusting when
(26:18):
you think about it all at once. Um. And this
is something that Gary Delgado and Rebecca Gordon write about
in the book From Poverty to Punishment, How welfare reform
punishes the poor uh, And they say, quote, at first,
welfare is based on a specific if unarticulated ideology of gender,
roles and race, and they go on to talk about,
(26:40):
you know how the idea is that white women's primary
responsibility is child rearing and unpaid domestic labor, whereas white
dudes job is to be family breadwinners. And so with
the introduction of welfare, they right, the government assumed financial
responsibility when no other breadwinner was available. White widows were
(27:04):
cast as quote deserving damsels in distress. Yeah, and a
lot of this goes back to the progressive era with
which I have a love hate relationship. Progressive area you
get a lot of really badass ladies coming out who
were like advocating for the marginalized and want to change
the world and get the vote and all this stuff.
You also get a lot of that bootstrapping rhetoric of like,
(27:27):
poor people are poor because they're poor, and it's their
fault for being poor because they're poor, and and because
of poverty they lack character and we just need to
teach some character. Yeah. So, love hate relationship with that era. Um.
But yeah, so if you go back to the Civil War,
for instance, about six dred and twenty thousand men were killed,
(27:49):
which left behind a lot of white widows that presumably
needed to be cared for so that they could maintain
their hearth and home status. Basically yeah, and at this
time any kind of assistance would have come from charitable organizations,
religious organizations. Um. I mean, historically single mothers would have
(28:14):
been taken care of by the church. And after the
Civil War you also have massive industrialization and urbanization that
leads to an uptick in uh, out of wedlock pregnancies.
So in response, you have all of these like pretty
well meaning white Progressive era women who are advocating for
(28:36):
what's called maternalist legislation essentially, you know, setting up mother's
aid programs um and and trying to figure out whether
the government could possibly help sort of fill in gaps
where private philanthropy and charity leaves off. But it's important
to remember that these progressive era women, while they lived
(28:58):
in the so called progressive era, we're not so progressive
in terms of their perception of the proper role for
women and the intended outcome of mother's aid because they
weren't saying, you know, let's let's give these women the
resources that they need in order to allow them to
support themselves and their children, but rather, let's give them
(29:22):
the support they need so that they can fulfill traditional
gender roles. Well. Yeah, and I mean so this is
where my love hate comes in, because these elitist progressive
era women might have managed to mobilize disenfranchised women and
spur legislators to act on behalf of you know, mothers, um,
(29:45):
but they relied on these fundamentalist notions of gender and
the patriarchal family norm, and therefore, through their efforts, were
basically trying to exert social control on poor immigrant families.
Not just fellow white lady these, but immigrant families as well.
Of course, not black families, just poor immigrant families where
(30:05):
I guess they thought the black families were beyond help. Um,
And hey, these people need to conform to American standards,
so like we need to support them so that they're
not living in that immigrant poverty and in the meantime
get them to completely integrate into American society. Yeah. And
and of course, providing resources and assistance for white immigrant
(30:28):
women is not the problem here. The problem here is
that their definition of a suitable home uh necessarily included
white skin color and completely overlooked black women. But you
also have during this era, a lot of black women
reformers who are noticing all of this and are obviously
(30:48):
like engaged in their communities, and what they're doing during
this time is advocating for assistance for working mothers instead
of fostering economic dependence on men, as well as advocating
for household work to be considered work not just maternal compulsion. Yeah,
(31:10):
didn't they. I can't remember what organization it was, but
it was like a working women's organization, and the these
activists invited mothers and housewives to be a part of
it because they recognize that the work you do at
home is work, and also to think about how domestic
labor paid. Domestic labor was one of the only jobs
(31:30):
available to working class Black women at the time as
well working in white homes. So all sorts of layers
to this. And when we get to ninety nine, uh,
the landmark White House Conference on the Care of Dependent
Children takes place, and this is essentially the first meeting
(31:55):
of charitable organizations and philanthropists coming in saying like, Okay,
we have this issue, especially in terms of urbanization, with
mothers living in poverty, and really the only option right
now is for those women to put their kids in orphanages.
That's what happened. You might have had a foster care
(32:20):
system that was starting to develop, but really the go
to was an orphanage. And then uh, indigent women and
men might live in alms houses where the living conditions
were just deplorable. And Illinois, though, really led the charge
in terms of government assistants because in nineteen eleven it
(32:44):
became the first state to pass a mother's pension law,
which authorized county governments to provide grants to mothers with
dependent children. And this really caught on. By nineteen nineteen,
you have thirty nine states that are providing these with restrictions. Yeah,
I mean, some restricted grants to widows only, um, others
(33:05):
offered money to divorce or deserted mothers. Only Michigan and
Nebraska offered this support to unwed mothers. And really surprising
to no one is that the Southern states were slow
to enact these provisions, and these provisions were afforded pretty
much exclusively to white women. Still by just a scant
(33:28):
three percent of mother's Aid recipients were black. But then
when the Great Depression rolls around states, mother's aid programs
run dry. So this is when we get the new deal.
The federal government steps in, and once it becomes the
poverty becomes such a massive nationwide issue, you do see
(33:53):
this perspective shift that perhaps the economy and not just
moral ailing can cause poverty, and so that allows for
the development of an otherwise unpalatable nationwide welfare system hashtag
deserving poor. Yeah, the idea that, oh, we'll see, that's
(34:17):
okay if it's because of the economy, like an outside factor.
But if it's something that you're doing or that we
perceive you to be doing, then you are hashtag undeserving. Yeah.
Or if the color of our skin leads us to
just assume, well exactly, yeah, that you're deviant in the
first place. Um. So in we have a landmark passage
(34:38):
of the Social Security Act which included aid to families
with dependent children, and that essentially was welfare, but it
was never intended to be a long term, fixed and
it was certainly not intended to assist black women. Instead,
these policy architects figured that future male breadwinners would be
(35:03):
paying into Social Security and so when they died, their
widows would not have to rely on mother's pensions. They
could then access social Security benefits, and in the meantime
you kind of have the stopgap measure of welfare because
in the meantime, before the Social Security coffers, you know,
kind of build up, these white widows can be compensated
(35:25):
for essentially giving birth to future laborers. Here that women,
you're a bunch of tools breeders. Um. But yeah, I
mean there was that assumption that all women across the
board would pursue that moral family ethic of marriage to
a strong white man who would provide for her and
(35:48):
then die before her. Yeah. But here we get the
gendering of public assistance policy where you have social security
and unemployment insurance that largely benefited white men because there
were far more white men who would be um working
outside the home at that time than women. And that
(36:09):
is a fixed entitlement. Yeah, you just get it. You
deserve it because you're a citizen. Yeah, you deserve it,
So there's no there's no shame. Yeah. And white widows eventually,
you know, would be rolled into social Security benefits because
you deserve it because you're white. Yeah. And and you
didn't mean to become poor. You couldn't control your husband dying.
(36:30):
But when it comes to the aid to families with
dependent children that say divorce moms or single moms, low
income mothers might try to access they had to jump
through so many hoops not only to get it, but
also to keep it well. And lest you think that
all of these black mothers in question were just sitting
(36:51):
there accepting their poor treatment, there were a lot of
black activists during this time who were already arguing that
the investigation of their lives was a violation of citizenship rights.
And I mean it's important to use words like citizen
versus subject because again restating what we said earlier, black families,
(37:12):
particularly black women, were being treated as subjects of a
government versus members and active participants of it. And it's
I mean, that's how they were treated. And when we
see surveillance like, we're not using hyperbole because these a
f c D case workers were very interested in recipients
(37:38):
personal lives. They got to determine who received aid, who
had a suitable home um to receive that aid, and
they would also police their sexual activity because they wanted
to make sure that that family epic was being upheld.
So I mean it bears repeating yet again that you
also get that cultural division in between how these programs
(38:01):
are viewed. Social security, you just get it, and you
deserve it. It's a thing that you're entitled to, but
let's not call it an entitlement program versus something like
the welfare program that black mothers were getting, which it
was like, oh, well, I don't know if you really
deserve this. This is a lot of help we're giving you.
(38:21):
We better check up on you. And we know how
hyper sexual women of color can be. I don't know
that they're really going to be suitable. They're all those
man of the house regulations where it's like no, no, no, no, ladies,
you can't have a man over. No, we don't want
to de incentivize marriage. You've already you're already a single mother.
(38:42):
So from the nineteen thirties to nineteen sixty two, a
FDC grew from just a few hundred thousand recipients to
three point six million by nineteen sixty two. But the
thing is, black recipients, especially in the South, had to
fight for it because the federal government was allowing individual
(39:02):
states to define those eligibility requirements well and down to
case workers too. Um, there was a paper I was
looking at about all of this, which noted how ironic
this program quickly became because it functioned much like a
private charity because they, you know, a f CD case
workers were empowered to really pick and choose who received
(39:27):
this aid. And up until the nineteen sixties, households that
included children of color and children born out of wedlock
did not meet requirements for suitable home. So isn't that
so convenient if you don't want to give any assistance
to black mothers? That's kind of a that's a jerk move, says,
(39:48):
a super jerk move. And so you have I mean
activism saying like this is not okay. You have a
lot of court cases. Um. And finally you have in
nineteen six the one a f c D expanding its
qualifying definition of a of a deprived child to include
one who has an unemployed parent, which did bring more
(40:11):
women of color into the program. Um. And it's really
in the sixties that you start to see a lot
more UM women receiving this, partly because in ninety four
LBJ declares the War on Poverty, but also because of
activism by organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization, which
(40:33):
was the first movement to create a distinct political identity
among low income Black women, and that's the group that
invited mothers to be a part of their ranks because
their work mattered too. But even within the broader Black community,
the National Welfare Rights Organization was controversial at times because
(40:55):
it was so largely composed of lower income women who
even among you know, black activists, their voices had been
often marginalized, especially within the civil rights movement. So yeah,
around the time that LBJ declares the War on Poverty,
there is a growing recognition in this country of just
(41:17):
the the yawning gap between the rich and the poor,
and just how bad people in poverty in this country
did have it. Um. But money from this so called
war on poverty helped fund the food stamp program becoming permanent. Uh.
It established the Headstart program you see free and subsidized
(41:39):
school breakfasts and lunches. You also get the creation of
Medicare and Medicaid, which to me, I always am like,
I just kind of shake my head when people criticize
recipients of things like welfare because even though it's not
called welfare anymore, um, because like, are you on medicaid
in Social Security m And as a result of a
(42:02):
lot of this, between nineteen sixty four and nineteen seventy six,
the number of Americans receiving cash assistance. Is that cash
assistance part that always you know, makes people so uneasy
or we're just the government is just an a t M.
The number of Americans receiving cash assistance through a f
DC nearly tripled from four point to million Americans to
(42:23):
eleven point three million. And this is when white taxpayers
really start to lose their chill over all of this,
because of course a lot of those recipients are women
of color. And what doesn't help is the nineteen sixty
five publication of what's nicknamed the Moynahan Report, which really
(42:45):
laid the political foundation for the whole welfare queen construct.
And the Moynahan Report is the shorthand name for a
book called The Negro Family, the Case for National Action,
written by a dude named Daniel Patrick moynihan, who argued
that black quote matriarchal structure is the root of deviance
(43:09):
because these women are too domineering to be nurturers or
attract mats, thus inspiring low education, delinquency and single motherhood.
Oh my god, are we were like reliving a horrifically
nightmarish real life scenario of our romantic comedy episode about
(43:31):
the career woman. Oh god, yeah, too domineering. But isn't
it so much easier to just blame a really marginalized
group for this quote unquote culture of poverty then actually
like fixing the problem just being like, you know what
it's it's it's these women. It's these women's fault. We're
never going to hear from them because we never like
(43:53):
validate or elevate their experiences voices. But this is like
you still see this on Twitter. Our friend, our friend,
friend of the podcast, Raquel Willis was like always dealing
with us on Twitter of of men tweeting at her
about like these independent black women these days. You know,
they're just not leaving any room for men if you
(44:14):
stop devaluing men. And it's like, who what? And speaking
of our rom com series in nine four a what
can be termed a romantic comedy, I first ran across
it when we're searching for our episode on romantic comedies
about people of color. And it's his film Claudine, which
(44:36):
stars Diane Carroll and James Earl Jones and Diane Carroll
is Claudine, and she is a single mother of six
living on welfare, and James Earl Jones comes into her
life and they fall in love. His name is Roupe,
I believe. And Diane Carroll is or Claudine is earning
(44:57):
some money outside the home, which of course is a
big no no if you are on welfare. And whenever
the caseworker, the white case worker would come by, she
would hide any sign of, you know, any extra income
coming in. UM. One time, the case worker comes over
and James Earl Jones's character has left like a six
(45:18):
pack of beer and some food in the fridge, and
so she docks her um, you know, her welfare check,
you know, taking off the value of the beer and
the food. UM. And really it's it's a social commentary
on this trap that welfare became for a lot, a lot,
(45:41):
a lot of single mothers. And there's this quote from
the movie. Claudine is extremely frustrated and says, if I
don't feed my kids, it's child neglect. If I go
out and get a job and make a little money
on the side, then that's cheating. If I stay at home,
I'm crazy, I can't win. Yeah, I mean that basically,
(46:04):
I mean that sums up so many of the issues
that come up around these programs. Yeah. And two years
later you have Ronald Reagan making well for a queen
of household term that further arouses more ire against public assistants. Yeah.
So we told you earlier that this welfare queen, so
(46:24):
to speak, that Ronald Reagan is fighting it was a
real woman. And there's a fascinating, fascinating long form peace
over at Slate by Josh Levin introducing readers to this
woman named Linda Taylor, who was a massive con artist
and very likely a legitimate psychopath, who used and abused
(46:49):
and hustled and possibly murdered just through the decades in
order to get as much money as possible, including stealing
people's coats. Yeah. Her welfare fraud is a footnote in
her criminality. Yeah, no, kidding, compared to everything else she did. Yeah.
And Um, the term, like you said earlier, was coined
(47:11):
by Chicago Tribune reporter George bliss Um, who was covering
Taylor's trial. Um and bliss have been trying to draw
attention to widespread disarray in the Illinois Public Aid Office.
There was a lot of mismanagement happening. No big surprise.
When you have giant government bureaucracies. Uh, sometimes you know things,
(47:35):
things run amok. But that's not a sexy story. Bureaucracy
is not interesting. That's on an interesting headline. And he
was getting frustrated because no one is paying attention to
this really important issue until he comes up with the
welfare queen and suddenly, oh, now that we have a face,
(47:56):
and now that we have this, you know, face that
has been scapegoat it and objectified for so long. Oh,
now everyone's paying attention. Well, and the thing is too
like we also see the alignment in her in this
Linda Taylor person slash all the fifty million different aliases
that she went by. We see the alignment of the
(48:17):
welfare queen and blackness. But the thing is, Linda Taylor
specifically was a shape shifter when it came to race,
like according to I mean Josh Levin, like God bless him.
He went into such heavy, detailed research in terms of
this woman's life and her background and her story and everything.
(48:37):
And according to the census, when she was a child,
she was listed as a white girl in a white family,
but she had darker skin, and they were like, maybe
it's from some like Native American or black ancestor, were
not really sure, but basically her skin was dark enough
(48:58):
that she was able to pass a black when it
was convenient, but also able to pass as white when
it suited her as well. She even passes Filipino, she
passes Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's not a black or white.
This is not a black or white to shoe. This
is like she was passing is whatever she needed to
pass as in order to steal, in order to take
advantage of, in order to kidnap. I mean, did all
(49:21):
of this though, remind you a little bit of Rachel
Dolas All? Oh god, hopefully she's never a kidnapped anyone,
the white woman who claims to be transracial. Um. Yeah,
I mean we don't even have time to go into. Yeah,
it's insane all of Taylor's criminality. But I mean, she
was a con artist. She was a big us said,
(49:43):
like multiple husbands at a time so that she could
um so then they could die in quotes and she
could get government funds for that. She was a kidnapper
and identity thief um and despite her criminality, though she
was only convicted on bilking eight thousand dollars of government
funds in nine and that conviction it just stands in
(50:08):
such stark contrast to the societal impact of Ronald Reagan
spreading her alleged story, you know, and only and only
focusing in on one aspect of it. But as a result,
welfare investigations and criminalization for fraud went through the roof.
(50:31):
If you think that those case workers were scrutinizing wealth
or recipients before that, oh this time because now there
was a face, there was a bufferred bejeweled face to
go with all of these fears, and they would set
up in different This was focused more on Chicago, UM,
(50:51):
but they set up hotlines where people could call in
and report folks that they thought were cheating on wealth there.
So I mean, you have these hotlines getting flooded with calls,
and it's just it's just a mess. And since then,
I mean not to just gloss over a lot more history,
(51:12):
but we have to. Since then, the Welfare Queen, even
though she has been largely debunked, I think in in
uh Today's commentary, but her specter is still there. The
animous behind it is absolutely still there. Yeah, because it's
an easy way. It's almost like an easy way to
(51:33):
disengage yourself or dissociate yourself from your racism, because you
can be like, well, no, it's not that I'm racist.
It's just that these welfare queens who happen to be
black women are abusing the system. And that is an
especially potent um argument to make too low income white people. Yeah,
(51:56):
because it plays on all of those racialized fears. So
you see, you know, repeated time and again. Um. And
in sociological terms, the welfare queen has become what's called
a narrative script or presumed common knowledge that most welfare
recipients are women, even though in reality, most welfare recipients
(52:19):
or children. Um. And they're specifically black, single women, and
that this whole situation must be the product of their
moral failing and they're you know, de incentivized work ethic
or non existent work ethic. Yeah, lie down, progressive era,
You're done. And that's what you still hear. Uh. And
(52:39):
I'm I don't remember it directly because if you remember
every Donald Trump quote, your mind had just turned to garbage. Um.
But in researching this piece of course he's played on
this rhetoric. I mean, he's he hasn't used the words
welfare quam, but he doesn't have to um hashtag dog
whistle politics. But he does talk about, you know, entitlements
(53:01):
and de incentivizing work. We're going to get people back
to work because people want to some people want to work.
And before we wrap up, though, we do want to
hop back to a couple of realities for single moms
today on public assistance, and the fact of the matter
is it is tough. There's nothing queenly about it. And
(53:26):
fraud does exist, but it's not as simple as fraud
only being perpetuated by recipients. You have a whole system
set up. Yeah, well so, I mean, speaking of that fraud,
tant fraud is there's like a two percent max fraud rate,
(53:47):
and across the board, it's likelier to be instigated by
the providers rather than the actual recipients of UH public assistance.
And a lot of that is not necessarily people being
like mo, I'm going to game the government my employer,
but rather like just deficiencies in the system itself. Yeah,
(54:08):
and being overwhelmed. I mean, you have case workers who
are probably overloaded, you have mismanagement going on, and especially
in terms of Medicaid and Medicare, you do have a
lot of provider fraud happening. Um and uh. If we
look though at the situation, the income situation for single
(54:28):
mothers on public assistance, on average, Bureau of Labor Statistics
data find that just families in general receiving public assistant
spend uhty two dollars a year, very precise, compared to
sixty six thousand for families not on public assistance. And
(54:49):
The Atlantic pointed that out, um to sort of settle
the score on this idea that, oh, you know, the
entitlement programs are allowing these families to of high on
the hog and buy lobster. Yeah, like I didn't buy
a new PlayStation, and all these people on welfare buying
PlayStations left and right, and lobsters to put on top
of the PlayStation because is the decoration. It's delicious. But
(55:11):
if we talk about lobster, families receiving assistant spent about
a third less on food, half as much on housing,
and sixty less on entertainment. So we've got some debunking
going on there. And if we look at snap benefits
the food Stamps program. Over nine of that money assist
(55:34):
people who are elderly, seriously disabled, or members of working households,
not able bodied, working age Americans who just choose not
to work. Yeah, and and so I mean, just imagine
the massive damage it's being done by us like wilfully
buying into these stereotypes and these narratives about who is
(55:57):
on public assistance and how the system is like rife
with welfare queens who are gaining it. I mean, again,
that's not to say that fraud doesn't happen, but it's
in such a minority of cases it's almost non existent. Yeah,
and just how degrading it is to, you know, point
your finger at a group of people and say, like,
(56:19):
you are categorically lazy and have no desire to improve
your station in life. While kids raised um in public
assistance situations are statistically likelier to themselves receive public assistance
later in life, many many many of them do not.
(56:40):
They end up becoming middle class citizens. Because you do
have really hard working single mothers who are not making
anything but are making it work for their kids. And
that's why during the Obama administration it has been such
a big deal the number of times, especially in big
speeches such as State of the Union. Addrest is that
(57:00):
he's called out the contributions, the positive contributions of single
mothers because for so long they've been really demonized in
our society because of all of this stuff that we've
been talking about. Well, and that's why all of the
traps and strange loopholes, uh in these systems, that's why
they're so heartbreaking, because you know, you do read stories
about mothers who were at least getting by and able
(57:23):
to buy their kids supplies to go back to school
and things like that, until they hit some weird you know,
public assistance loophole and they were made homeless. Because kids
who grow up homeless they do perform a lot poorer
in school, and so that does set up just a
really unfortunate cycle for a lot of families. Yeah, and
(57:45):
and again, UM to any social workers listening, Uh, hopefully
we're not conflating too much the case worker situation under
h A f d C versus today with temporary assistance
for needy families. And I'm curious to know more about
how individual cases are handled UM and regulations about who
(58:12):
receives it and please help us fill in the gap, yeah,
and whether it's gotten any better, because I mean, it's
just as I was telling Caroline before we started recording
this episode, this was such a puzzle to put together
because it's such a big system. There is not a
lot of clear information, and it's so politicized as well
(58:34):
that it's challenging to find objective information as well. So
I mean, we're relying a lot on academic sources as
much as possible for this, but hopefully this is shed
at least some historical light on today's situation. So with that,
we want to hear all of your thoughts and feedback
how this resonated with you, whether you have, yeah, any
(58:57):
information that can help us sort of fill in, uh,
this broad conversation that we've just had. Mom Stuff at
how stuff works dot com is our email address. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages
on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages to
share with you when we come right back from a
quick break and now back to the show. All right,
(59:24):
I've got a letter here from Adriana, subject line the
unicorns with lots of exclamation points. Okay, she says, thank you,
so much for covering this topic. I too was obsessed
with unicorns when I was little, and maybe still am.
I think for me it had a lot to do
with the unicorns and Fantasia you mentioned in the episode.
The little flying horses were also the best. I mean,
(59:46):
who wouldn't want to fly through a rainbow with them? Anyways,
I promise I'm not the type of person who corrects
people all the time, but I did notice that you
made a small slip up in Greek goddess names. Side note,
a lot of you guys also are crazy see about
Greek mythology and have written in to tell us this,
and you're so right. We just we just got a
little mixed up. And and Adriana is like really nice
(01:00:08):
and sympathetic about it. She says, you mentioned that Athena
was the virginal goddess of the hunt, when actually it
is Artemis. Athena is the goddess of wisdom, which, fun fact,
is why there is a bust of her over the
doorway of the Dough Library at Yust Berkeley. In the
Roman tradition, Artemis is known as Diana. You were right
that she's associated with deer, and not only because she
(01:00:29):
hunted them in the forest. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a man
named acting On is hunting with his hounds in the
woods when he discovers Diana and her nymphs bathing. This
is a site no man is supposed to see, because
Diana is a virgin goddess. She notices him watching and
furious turns him into a deer as punishment for spying
on her. He runs away and is later killed by
(01:00:51):
his own hounds. Acting On's transformation into a deer. It's
really beautifully described in the poem and I definitely recommend
reading it. I like the Ted Hughes translate and myself.
Thank you so much for the work you do on
this podcast. I very much enjoyed this episode. I just
finished a master's and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, and let
me tell you, there are a lot of weird and
(01:01:11):
sometimes scary unicorn illustrations and Renaissance manuscripts and printed books. Well,
we're definitely gonna have to google some of those, Adriana,
so thank you so much for writing in. And I
got a little here from Cynthia about our Lisa Frank episode,
who writes I grew up in a single mother household
and lived in hand me downs from friends and relatives
deep into my high school years. That's made going to
(01:01:34):
a school full of upper middle class kids extraordinarily challenging. However,
despite the fact that we were always on money and
rarely looked stylish or cool, our mother always tried to
give my siblings and me small things to help make
us enjoy our childhood in any way possible. Welcome super affordable, crazy,
psychedelic Lisa Frank during the height of her empire. I
(01:01:54):
was in junior high school and, just like all the
other girls and a few boys in my class, absolutely
upset with all things Lisa, and because of how affordable
the stickers and folders were, this was something I could
finally be a part of and I felt so cool.
I had all the folders, notebooks, the racers, and stickers.
My favorite were the Cheetahs. I even got ahold of
(01:02:15):
a binder at some point as a birthday gift. I
created a vast sticker collection, which my classmates and I
traded during recess, and I became the go to Lisa
Frank gal. It was awesome. Lisa Frank patterns said a
way of making me truly happy at first gaze happiness
and childhood in a sense or things that I didn't
really have as a kid. But whenever I flipped through
(01:02:35):
my Lisa Frank folders and notebooks and the carefully placed
the racers on my desk that I never used, I
felt happy and just like any other kid, listening to
your episode had me laughing with all the puns and jokes,
but also super nostalgic for a time in my life
when despite the challenges, I could escape on the back
of a rainbow unicorn and visit trippy dolphins. Well, thank
(01:02:55):
you so much, Cynthia, and thanks to everybody who's written
into us Moms stuff at how stuff where dot com
is our email address and for links to all of
our social media as well as all of our blogs,
videos and podcasts with our sources. So you can learn
more about women in welfare, head on over to stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com. For more on this
(01:03:17):
and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from House toupp
Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Christen and I'm Caroline, and listeners, we gotta be honest
with you. This episode that we're about to do focusing
on the straight up racist stereotype of the welfare queen,
(00:29):
did not start. As you know, we didn't start out
intending to do this episode. Now. We intended to do
an episode looking at women and social work, which will
do eventually. Oh yeah, we're gonna revisit because it is
just a rich topic full of amazing, forward thinking, innovative
(00:51):
women such as Jane Adams, you know, one of the
really founders of social work. Um. But first of all,
as we started researching, he realized, oh, this is the huge,
a huge topic who hard hard to pack into one episode.
And then it just so happened that as we were
(01:14):
researching this, the twenty anniversary of so called welfare reform
came and went, and with that, um, this term, the stigmatizing,
awful term welfare queen came up. And so since welfare
queens that that stereotype, that controlling image, and we're going
(01:34):
to talk more about what that exactly means, since it
encapsulates so much of the stigma against welfare and even
social work in general. UM, we felt like it was
worth just focusing in on this because you have so
many intersections of race and gender and class and the
(01:59):
on going issue of poverty and motherhood and and who's
considered a worthy citizen and who's not yes, yes, the
whole rhetoric of deserving versus undeserving poor, And there's there's
so much, so much just embedded racism and classism that
(02:20):
is stitched up with all of this. UM. So we're
going to try to entangle some of that um and
hopefully not get too caught up in all of the
admittedly confusing bureaucracy that can quickly overtake. Yeah, this is
just going to devolve into us screaming the F word
a lot. Uh, So, let's go back to welfare reform quickly. So.
(02:43):
August two thousand sixteen marked the twenty anniversary of so
called welfare reform h This was a key piece of
legislation that President Bill Clinton signed into law. It was
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and it replaced
old school welfare a k A aid to families with
(03:07):
dependent children. And so now in lieu of that, welfare
doesn't really exist anymore. A lot of people might not
know that welfare is now what's called temporary assistance for
needy families. Yeah, I mean, there were some good intentions
behind this. The idea was to connect poor families with
employment so that they wouldn't need welfare, and it also
connect them to programs like job training and child care
(03:29):
and other support. I mean that sounds great, like what
could go wrong? Um? And and you know this, this
shift did cut the welfare recipients in half by the
year two thousand to just six point three million people
receiving it, down from the peak of fourteen point two
million people. And yeah, I mean a lot of millions.
(03:51):
In fact, a lot of low income single mothers in
particular have found work and taking care of their families
thanks to food stamp pro programs and the Earned income
tax credit. But there are some not so great realities
that are behind all of this. Yeah. And you have
to keep in mind too that in ninety six when
Clinton signed this legislation, the economy was going like gangbusters. Um.
(04:18):
So that was one reason why you see within a
four year period after it's signed into law. This major
uptick in the employment of low income single moms UM,
but definitely with influence from the Great Recession happening. You
have really controversial aspects of UH tent, that temporary assistance
(04:42):
for needy families that was controversial at the time. I
mean a lot of people, a lot of feminists and
activists protested it because they felt like it was too
punitive and didn't address more systemic problems of poverty UM
and and the t in tent is temporary because us
the lifetime limit on benefits is five years, so unlike
(05:06):
welfare that you could potentially stay on and definitely if
you needed it UM, this has that limit. And you
also have problems with TAMPA recipients having a hard time
finding and keeping jobs. That job training is a required
part of being of receiving that assistance, and going to
(05:31):
the job training though, can mean losing jobs that mother's
often women often already have. But one major wrinkle in
how this legislation is architected is a it has not
kept up with inflation. Republicans actually vetoed that UM, so
(05:53):
you have funding down in general UM and also you
have being dispersed through state block grants, which means that
Uncle Sam or Aunt Samanthos veminous podcast. I'm just kidding.
It can be Uncle Sam um writes a check and
(06:15):
it's like, okay, Louisiana, here you go, here is your
your federal funding, and Louisiana can then decide or whatever
state we're in, you can then decide how they want
to split up that cash. And I called it Louisiana
because there only four percent of poor families receive TAMP,
(06:41):
six thousand families, a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people,
because only eight percent of its welfare federal welfare grants
are used on cash benefits and only one percent are
used on jobs programs. So the rest is just being diverted. Yeah,
it's being diverted to other programs, to administrative costs. I mean,
(07:06):
it's not like they can take that money and build
like roads and bridges instead, Um, But there are so
many other types of programs that they can in ways
that they can move that money around because of so
many budget cuts um that started really with the Great Recession.
It is up to you know, the states to decide
how much they really how much they really want to
(07:29):
invest in these communities. Yeah, So on average in the US,
about fifty of these grants are argused on actual benefits
job training, in childcare, and thirty are spent elsewhere. Yeah,
there's this weird side of things where only families with
children living in poverty received tamp um, and overall poverty
(07:51):
and deep poverty is higher than it was. Yeah. So,
I mean, one reason why you have such a low
proportion of those emily is receiving this assistance is because
during this time you also have a lot more funding
going to SNAP, which is the food stamps program. Um,
(08:12):
and you also have the Earned Income Tax Credit, which
has been really helpful for a lot of UM working
families and poverty. But there's that issue of deep poverty,
which is pretty much equivalent to living on two dollars
a day. So am I wrong in feeling like it
seems like things are just shifted where instead of saying
(08:35):
like here's this um little sack of money, we're just
gonna take that money and put it into other areas
rather than just helping you. And some of it will
go to childcare things, and some of it will go
to food stamps, but yeah, and some goes to funding
things like Headstart programs which are really important, but there's
(08:55):
still that issue of jobs and um helping also helping
low income single mothers pursue higher education, you know. I
mean there's just there's just a lot that isn't accounted
for consistently. Yeah, Because while it's great to fund something
like Headstart, I mean our mothers well and fathers too,
(09:15):
but our families not struggling to like buy backpacks and
markers for their kids to go back to school exactly. Yeah.
I mean there have been a lot of uh stories
recently because of the twentieth anniversary kind of evaluating whether
welfare reform, so to speak, really reformed much. And one
of the NPR stories was talking to a mother who
(09:39):
uh you know, receives assistance, she lives in a homeless shelter,
and she can still, you know, barely afford to buy
her kids, uh just back to school supplies that they
might need. Um. So this is already really contradicting to
this racist portrayal of the welfare queen where it's like, uh,
you know, people are just sitting back just getting their
(10:02):
government checks and living high on the hog, when of
course that's not the case at all. But also what
you have here too is the product of highly polarized
political system where for years now Republicans UM have used
a lot of dog whistle politics, UM, talking about talking
(10:23):
down about so called entitlement programs and how you know
taxpayers are just you know, paying for all of these things.
What do you think social Security is? We're gonna get that.
We're going to get to that. Can't wait. Um. And
if Hillary Clinton is elected president, it is gonna be
interesting to see what happens on the welfare front, because
(10:44):
she has been asked about this a lot on the
campaign trail, because of course Bill Clinton signed this controversial legislation,
and in interviews in the nine nineties, she was very
explicit to about reforms to welfare and saying that basically
people needed to bootstrap better. Yeah, and one important aspect
of Tampa is that it did pivot attention more to jobs,
(11:09):
connecting you know, recipients straight to jobs. But obviously it
hasn't done a terrific job with that, and she's acknowledged
that too in more recent interviews, saying like, yeah, we
need to reevaluate what's going on, and for today's episode,
we are really going to focus on the stigmatizing of
(11:30):
low income black single mothers, usually on public assistance, and
sort of how all of this hot mess came to
be because, like you said, this like relates to this
old school idea of the deserving versus the undeserving poor.
You have racialized divisions between social insurance, which is social
(11:55):
security and unemployment insurance that rewards work versus welfare or
public assistance that has stigmatized unemployment. Well, yeah, I mean
the whole social insurance thing. Recipients aren't scrutinized. It was
originally intended for white male workers in their wives a
k a. Citizens, And how we treat them versus welfare,
(12:20):
which stigmatizes unemployment. Recipients are heavily scrutinized and stereotyped is irresponsible.
They have to go through judgmental case workers, and they
are viewed in this light as more like subjects of
the government versus you know, active citizens of the country. Well,
(12:41):
and that makes sense, unfortunately, because a lot of these
programs and the predecessors to these programs begin developing right
on the heels of abolition, where you have you know,
African Americans who are fighting truth and nail for full citizenship.
Especially women of color, who are facing double discrimination everywhere
(13:04):
they turn. UM. And when we look at this so
called welfare queen, it is a racist, sexist, controlling image
that perpetuates the myth that African American single mothers are
receiving government assistance because they are lazy, they're promiscuous, and
they're just morally bankrupt fraudsters who are swindling hardworking taxpayers
(13:29):
and perpetuating this so called culture of poverty. UM. And
I call it a controlling image rather than a stereotype,
because that's what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who's a badass,
calls it, because the controlling image is a stereotype that
is so strong that it exerts control not only over
(13:51):
the people that it allegedly represents, but it's also used
as justification to discriminate against them. And I have a
vocabulary question really quickly for social workers who are listening
to this episode, because we are using welfare and public
assistance interchangeably, and I don't know if that is accurate,
(14:15):
if that language is correct, So if someone can let
me know, Like, it's not something that came up explicitly
in our research, but I have a feeling that welfare
refers to something like programmatically different than public assistance. I
don't know. I wish I could tell you. I know.
That's why I'm asking for social workers to let me know,
(14:36):
I mean. And this is also just a heads up
that we are aware that our language might not be precise. Yeah,
This book by Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought, was
such an instructive look at the issues of race and
class and sexism that come up in these discussions about welfare.
(14:58):
Um because you got the welfare mother whose this is
basically the bad mother stereotype that became the welfare queen
that we here talked about in the media. And this
is basically a stereotype that's like the stereotype of the mammy,
but she's even lazier. And that goes back to what
Christian was talking earlier about the controlling image, because this
(15:22):
stereotyping of black people as lazy provides the ideological justification,
as Collins writes, for efforts to harness black women's fertility
to the needs of a changing political economy. This goes
back to I believe it was our Mother's of Gynecology
episode where we talked about how when black people were enslaved. Uh,
(15:44):
slave owners were like, yes, produce more offspring so that
we can get more slaves. But as soon as slavery
as an institution is ended, oh god, black people having
children is something to be stopped. We have to control
black women's fertility well. And it also hearkens to our
episode on the sterilization for African American women, particularly in
(16:08):
the fifties and sixties. So, I mean, when we talk
about reproductive rights, it's so critical that we remember that
historically in the United States, Black women's fertility and motherhood
has been something that for so long was almost not
(16:30):
their own, you know, in terms of the whether it's
a slave owner trying controlling it or uh doctor forcibly
sterilizing them. And this is all why when we think
about reproductive rights, it's so critical to take an intersectional
approach because historically in the United States, Black women's fertility
(16:55):
and motherhood have continually been under siege. Yeah, you know,
so rarely hasn't been something that is so prized and
protected in the way that it is and has been
for white women. Correct. So if we look at then
the welfare Queen as Patricia Hill Collins describes it. Um.
(17:16):
She calls it a controlling image that points to working
class Black women as really the symptoms of our deteriorating state.
I mean, it's they're just scapegoats over and over and
over again for what is bigger picture, a lot of
institutionalized racism, institutionalized racism as it intersects with our anxieties
(17:41):
about the state of society and our economy. But I
thought this point that Collins made about the welfare queen
stereotype or controlling image was so perfect and on the nose.
She said that she's typically portrayed as an unwed mother,
and she violates one cardinal tenant of white male dominating ideology.
She is a woman alone. As a result, her treatment
(18:05):
reinforces the dominant gender ideology, positing that a woman's true
worth and financial security should occur through heterosexual marriage. And
that dominant gender ideology was baked into the social work structure,
like the the the initial welfare structure. Um. And we're
(18:27):
going to get into more of that, and it's the
reason why, you know, we have a lot of these
issues today. But if we dig a little bit deeper
into these stereotypes, we came across a paper on Black
Womanhood and Social Policy, which uh links the welfare queen
rhetoric to tropes of the mammy as you've already mentioned,
(18:51):
and also sapphire and Jezebel. Um. So you have that claim,
that stereotypical claim that welfare mothers are unmarried and they
tend to have a lot of children, they don't want
to work, they lack moral character and have just abandoned
traditional family values and quotes and so um. This scholar
(19:14):
notes how in the nineteen eighties you have the welfare
queen hearkening that mammy trope with her presumed obesity that
signaled her laziness, but at the same time abundant food choices,
the whole idea of like, well, she's just you know,
she doesn't have to work, but she can still just
like sit around and eat whatever she wants all day,
which is of course then related to the whole food
(19:35):
stamps stereotypes that we get that you're just using your
food stamps to buy there's either the stereotype that you're
just using your food stamps to buy like cheetahs and coke,
or you're using them to buy lobster and you know,
fancy steak dinners, and then in the nineties, as the
public face of welfare shifted to a quote young inner
(19:56):
city teenage mother that hearkens to the Sapphire trope of
the hyper sexualized black woman who is just driven by
her libido with no interest in child rearing. And as
a paper notes, both of these stereotypes project poor black
women as unfit mothers, breeders of lustful sons, and unchased daughters,
(20:19):
so basically saying that it's black women's fault that they
are creating children like this, and these children then learn
these horrible habits from them and don't want to break
out of this cycle of poverty and food stamp use.
It's basically blaming the people in the system for both
(20:41):
creating poverty and like benefiting from poverty, and it harps
on so many racialized spears when you look at the
politics of it and how um conservatives will then accuse
liberals of also perpetuating a system because we're just all
about you know, high taxes and entitlements and uh, you know,
(21:05):
as a result, our workforce is just deteriorating. UM. And
this leads us to a plot twist, because here comes
Ronald Reagan in nineteen seventy six, and Ronald Reagan really
made Welfare Queen a household term. Yeah. She was a
central character in his stump speeches of nineteen seventy six,
(21:28):
and he talks about how in Chicago they found this
woman who holds the record. He said that she used
eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food Stamp,
Social Security of Veterans, benefits for non existent deceased veteran husbands,
as well as welfare and uh, the big, most often
(21:51):
cited moment of these speeches is that when he tells
the audience that her tax free cash income alone has
been running up to a hundred and fifty dollars a year,
there's a gasp from the audience. They're horrified, who is
this terrible woman? And I mean, what is what Reagan
is doing here is dog whistling that you know the
(22:12):
Welfare Queen is. We we know who you're talking about.
We know that you are implying that she is low income,
that she's African American, and that she is a single mother,
and that she's everywhere. You know, there's just this this
one just happens to stand out but all these women
are just fraudulent. They're driving their Cadillacs to go pick
up their welfare check. That's always the thing, that is
(22:34):
always the thing whenever you hear people not even like
citing Ronald Reagan or citing this period in history when
this was talked about all the time, it's always the
stereotype of the woman in fur coats and in a Cadillac.
It's almost like it's entered our subconscious as a country
that we just stereotype all of these people as that woman,
(22:57):
all of the people who have ever needed money or
financial assistance of any kind. Well, how dare a woman
of color indulged in conspicuous consumption? You know you're about
to tip over some you know, societal balance if that's
the case. Well, the funny thing about the whole welfare
(23:18):
queen stereotype, especially with Ronald Reagan relaying the story, is
that this character that he's citing is based on a
real person. And we don't mean that in the way
of like the hater's meaning of like, oh, this woman's everywhere,
all these welfare recipients in their fur coats. But the
welfare queen, with all of these different identities. Uh, that
(23:40):
term was actually coined by a journalist who was covering
an actual woman. Yeah. And the thing is, like today
a lot of people will say, oh, well, you know,
that is obviously racist rhetoric that Ronald Reagan was using.
And that's totally true. I mean he was he was
gunning for white votes, um. And he was successful, not
(24:01):
in seventy six, but he was successful in Night with that. Um.
But the fact or fiction doesn't even matter. I mean,
it's besides the point now, because those two words were
so successful at encapsulating all and stoking all of the
racist and classist anxieties of these usually more working class
(24:24):
white people. And we're going to get into who that
real woman was, um, but also how all of this
happened in the first place, how we got to nineteen
seventy six with the gipper talking about welfare queens around
the country. When we come right back from a quick break,
(24:53):
so before we introduce you to that Chicago woman with
all of those different fake names, uh, we want to
offer a little welfare plus women history because surprise, welfare
as we think of it was initially set up for
white women, and it was set up for white women
(25:15):
not to get jobs, but to stay home and take
care of children, thus fulfilling their proper feminine duties of
child rearing and domestic caretaking. Yeah, because you still, you know,
if if a white man dies, Uh, you have to
be able to provide the breadwinner salary for the woman
(25:36):
to enable her to preserve her sphere, to stay at
home with the children, cooking and baking and mothering, because
God forbids who leaves the house and get a job.
Of course, the attitudes were not extended to Black women
who were expected. It was just expected that they would
be working outside the house. Well because their their bodies,
(25:56):
especially at that time, had for so long just been
rendered vessels of labor. You know, whether it is them
themselves working or um, if they are enslaved owners wanting
them to get pregnant so that they could then you know,
produce more laborers. Which is all just really disgusting when
(26:18):
you think about it all at once. Um. And this
is something that Gary Delgado and Rebecca Gordon write about
in the book From Poverty to Punishment, How welfare reform
punishes the poor uh, And they say, quote, at first,
welfare is based on a specific if unarticulated ideology of gender,
roles and race, and they go on to talk about,
(26:40):
you know how the idea is that white women's primary
responsibility is child rearing and unpaid domestic labor, whereas white
dudes job is to be family breadwinners. And so with
the introduction of welfare, they right, the government assumed financial
responsibility when no other breadwinner was available. White widows were
(27:04):
cast as quote deserving damsels in distress. Yeah, and a
lot of this goes back to the progressive era with
which I have a love hate relationship. Progressive area you
get a lot of really badass ladies coming out who
were like advocating for the marginalized and want to change
the world and get the vote and all this stuff.
You also get a lot of that bootstrapping rhetoric of like,
(27:27):
poor people are poor because they're poor, and it's their
fault for being poor because they're poor, and and because
of poverty they lack character and we just need to
teach some character. Yeah. So, love hate relationship with that era. Um.
But yeah, so if you go back to the Civil War,
for instance, about six dred and twenty thousand men were killed,
(27:49):
which left behind a lot of white widows that presumably
needed to be cared for so that they could maintain
their hearth and home status. Basically yeah, and at this
time any kind of assistance would have come from charitable organizations,
religious organizations. Um. I mean, historically single mothers would have
(28:14):
been taken care of by the church. And after the
Civil War you also have massive industrialization and urbanization that
leads to an uptick in uh, out of wedlock pregnancies.
So in response, you have all of these like pretty
well meaning white Progressive era women who are advocating for
(28:36):
what's called maternalist legislation essentially, you know, setting up mother's
aid programs um and and trying to figure out whether
the government could possibly help sort of fill in gaps
where private philanthropy and charity leaves off. But it's important
to remember that these progressive era women, while they lived
(28:58):
in the so called progressive era, we're not so progressive
in terms of their perception of the proper role for
women and the intended outcome of mother's aid because they
weren't saying, you know, let's let's give these women the
resources that they need in order to allow them to
support themselves and their children, but rather, let's give them
(29:22):
the support they need so that they can fulfill traditional
gender roles. Well. Yeah, and I mean so this is
where my love hate comes in, because these elitist progressive
era women might have managed to mobilize disenfranchised women and
spur legislators to act on behalf of you know, mothers, um,
(29:45):
but they relied on these fundamentalist notions of gender and
the patriarchal family norm, and therefore, through their efforts, were
basically trying to exert social control on poor immigrant families.
Not just fellow white lady these, but immigrant families as well.
Of course, not black families, just poor immigrant families where
(30:05):
I guess they thought the black families were beyond help. Um,
And hey, these people need to conform to American standards,
so like we need to support them so that they're
not living in that immigrant poverty and in the meantime
get them to completely integrate into American society. Yeah. And
and of course, providing resources and assistance for white immigrant
(30:28):
women is not the problem here. The problem here is
that their definition of a suitable home uh necessarily included
white skin color and completely overlooked black women. But you
also have during this era, a lot of black women
reformers who are noticing all of this and are obviously
(30:48):
like engaged in their communities, and what they're doing during
this time is advocating for assistance for working mothers instead
of fostering economic dependence on men, as well as advocating
for household work to be considered work not just maternal compulsion. Yeah,
(31:10):
didn't they. I can't remember what organization it was, but
it was like a working women's organization, and the these
activists invited mothers and housewives to be a part of
it because they recognize that the work you do at
home is work, and also to think about how domestic
labor paid. Domestic labor was one of the only jobs
(31:30):
available to working class Black women at the time as
well working in white homes. So all sorts of layers
to this. And when we get to ninety nine, uh,
the landmark White House Conference on the Care of Dependent
Children takes place, and this is essentially the first meeting
(31:55):
of charitable organizations and philanthropists coming in saying like, Okay,
we have this issue, especially in terms of urbanization, with
mothers living in poverty, and really the only option right
now is for those women to put their kids in orphanages.
That's what happened. You might have had a foster care
(32:20):
system that was starting to develop, but really the go
to was an orphanage. And then uh, indigent women and
men might live in alms houses where the living conditions
were just deplorable. And Illinois, though, really led the charge
in terms of government assistants because in nineteen eleven it
(32:44):
became the first state to pass a mother's pension law,
which authorized county governments to provide grants to mothers with
dependent children. And this really caught on. By nineteen nineteen,
you have thirty nine states that are providing these with restrictions. Yeah,
I mean, some restricted grants to widows only, um, others
(33:05):
offered money to divorce or deserted mothers. Only Michigan and
Nebraska offered this support to unwed mothers. And really surprising
to no one is that the Southern states were slow
to enact these provisions, and these provisions were afforded pretty
much exclusively to white women. Still by just a scant
(33:28):
three percent of mother's Aid recipients were black. But then
when the Great Depression rolls around states, mother's aid programs
run dry. So this is when we get the new deal.
The federal government steps in, and once it becomes the
poverty becomes such a massive nationwide issue, you do see
(33:53):
this perspective shift that perhaps the economy and not just
moral ailing can cause poverty, and so that allows for
the development of an otherwise unpalatable nationwide welfare system hashtag
deserving poor. Yeah, the idea that, oh, we'll see, that's
(34:17):
okay if it's because of the economy, like an outside factor.
But if it's something that you're doing or that we
perceive you to be doing, then you are hashtag undeserving. Yeah.
Or if the color of our skin leads us to
just assume, well exactly, yeah, that you're deviant in the
first place. Um. So in we have a landmark passage
(34:38):
of the Social Security Act which included aid to families
with dependent children, and that essentially was welfare, but it
was never intended to be a long term, fixed and
it was certainly not intended to assist black women. Instead,
these policy architects figured that future male breadwinners would be
(35:03):
paying into Social Security and so when they died, their
widows would not have to rely on mother's pensions. They
could then access social Security benefits, and in the meantime
you kind of have the stopgap measure of welfare because
in the meantime, before the Social Security coffers, you know,
kind of build up, these white widows can be compensated
(35:25):
for essentially giving birth to future laborers. Here that women,
you're a bunch of tools breeders. Um. But yeah, I
mean there was that assumption that all women across the
board would pursue that moral family ethic of marriage to
a strong white man who would provide for her and
(35:48):
then die before her. Yeah. But here we get the
gendering of public assistance policy where you have social security
and unemployment insurance that largely benefited white men because there
were far more white men who would be um working
outside the home at that time than women. And that
(36:09):
is a fixed entitlement. Yeah, you just get it. You
deserve it because you're a citizen. Yeah, you deserve it,
So there's no there's no shame. Yeah. And white widows eventually,
you know, would be rolled into social Security benefits because
you deserve it because you're white. Yeah. And and you
didn't mean to become poor. You couldn't control your husband dying.
(36:30):
But when it comes to the aid to families with
dependent children that say divorce moms or single moms, low
income mothers might try to access they had to jump
through so many hoops not only to get it, but
also to keep it well. And lest you think that
all of these black mothers in question were just sitting
(36:51):
there accepting their poor treatment, there were a lot of
black activists during this time who were already arguing that
the investigation of their lives was a violation of citizenship rights.
And I mean it's important to use words like citizen
versus subject because again restating what we said earlier, black families,
(37:12):
particularly black women, were being treated as subjects of a
government versus members and active participants of it. And it's
I mean, that's how they were treated. And when we
see surveillance like, we're not using hyperbole because these a
f c D case workers were very interested in recipients
(37:38):
personal lives. They got to determine who received aid, who
had a suitable home um to receive that aid, and
they would also police their sexual activity because they wanted
to make sure that that family epic was being upheld.
So I mean it bears repeating yet again that you
also get that cultural division in between how these programs
(38:01):
are viewed. Social security, you just get it, and you
deserve it. It's a thing that you're entitled to, but
let's not call it an entitlement program versus something like
the welfare program that black mothers were getting, which it
was like, oh, well, I don't know if you really
deserve this. This is a lot of help we're giving you.
(38:21):
We better check up on you. And we know how
hyper sexual women of color can be. I don't know
that they're really going to be suitable. They're all those
man of the house regulations where it's like no, no, no, no, ladies,
you can't have a man over. No, we don't want
to de incentivize marriage. You've already you're already a single mother.
(38:42):
So from the nineteen thirties to nineteen sixty two, a
FDC grew from just a few hundred thousand recipients to
three point six million by nineteen sixty two. But the
thing is, black recipients, especially in the South, had to
fight for it because the federal government was allowing individual
(39:02):
states to define those eligibility requirements well and down to
case workers too. Um, there was a paper I was
looking at about all of this, which noted how ironic
this program quickly became because it functioned much like a
private charity because they, you know, a f CD case
workers were empowered to really pick and choose who received
(39:27):
this aid. And up until the nineteen sixties, households that
included children of color and children born out of wedlock
did not meet requirements for suitable home. So isn't that
so convenient if you don't want to give any assistance
to black mothers? That's kind of a that's a jerk move, says,
(39:48):
a super jerk move. And so you have I mean
activism saying like this is not okay. You have a
lot of court cases. Um. And finally you have in
nineteen six the one a f c D expanding its
qualifying definition of a of a deprived child to include
one who has an unemployed parent, which did bring more
(40:11):
women of color into the program. Um. And it's really
in the sixties that you start to see a lot
more UM women receiving this, partly because in ninety four
LBJ declares the War on Poverty, but also because of
activism by organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization, which
(40:33):
was the first movement to create a distinct political identity
among low income Black women, and that's the group that
invited mothers to be a part of their ranks because
their work mattered too. But even within the broader Black community,
the National Welfare Rights Organization was controversial at times because
(40:55):
it was so largely composed of lower income women who
even among you know, black activists, their voices had been
often marginalized, especially within the civil rights movement. So yeah,
around the time that LBJ declares the War on Poverty,
there is a growing recognition in this country of just
(41:17):
the the yawning gap between the rich and the poor,
and just how bad people in poverty in this country
did have it. Um. But money from this so called
war on poverty helped fund the food stamp program becoming permanent. Uh.
It established the Headstart program you see free and subsidized
(41:39):
school breakfasts and lunches. You also get the creation of
Medicare and Medicaid, which to me, I always am like,
I just kind of shake my head when people criticize
recipients of things like welfare because even though it's not
called welfare anymore, um, because like, are you on medicaid
in Social Security m And as a result of a
(42:02):
lot of this, between nineteen sixty four and nineteen seventy six,
the number of Americans receiving cash assistance. Is that cash
assistance part that always you know, makes people so uneasy
or we're just the government is just an a t M.
The number of Americans receiving cash assistance through a f
DC nearly tripled from four point to million Americans to
(42:23):
eleven point three million. And this is when white taxpayers
really start to lose their chill over all of this,
because of course a lot of those recipients are women
of color. And what doesn't help is the nineteen sixty
five publication of what's nicknamed the Moynahan Report, which really
(42:45):
laid the political foundation for the whole welfare queen construct.
And the Moynahan Report is the shorthand name for a
book called The Negro Family, the Case for National Action,
written by a dude named Daniel Patrick moynihan, who argued
that black quote matriarchal structure is the root of deviance
(43:09):
because these women are too domineering to be nurturers or
attract mats, thus inspiring low education, delinquency and single motherhood.
Oh my god, are we were like reliving a horrifically
nightmarish real life scenario of our romantic comedy episode about
(43:31):
the career woman. Oh god, yeah, too domineering. But isn't
it so much easier to just blame a really marginalized
group for this quote unquote culture of poverty then actually
like fixing the problem just being like, you know what
it's it's it's these women. It's these women's fault. We're
never going to hear from them because we never like
(43:53):
validate or elevate their experiences voices. But this is like
you still see this on Twitter. Our friend, our friend,
friend of the podcast, Raquel Willis was like always dealing
with us on Twitter of of men tweeting at her
about like these independent black women these days. You know,
they're just not leaving any room for men if you
(44:14):
stop devaluing men. And it's like, who what? And speaking
of our rom com series in nine four a what
can be termed a romantic comedy, I first ran across
it when we're searching for our episode on romantic comedies
about people of color. And it's his film Claudine, which
(44:36):
stars Diane Carroll and James Earl Jones and Diane Carroll
is Claudine, and she is a single mother of six
living on welfare, and James Earl Jones comes into her
life and they fall in love. His name is Roupe,
I believe. And Diane Carroll is or Claudine is earning
(44:57):
some money outside the home, which of course is a
big no no if you are on welfare. And whenever
the caseworker, the white case worker would come by, she
would hide any sign of, you know, any extra income
coming in. UM. One time, the case worker comes over
and James Earl Jones's character has left like a six
(45:18):
pack of beer and some food in the fridge, and
so she docks her um, you know, her welfare check,
you know, taking off the value of the beer and
the food. UM. And really it's it's a social commentary
on this trap that welfare became for a lot, a lot,
(45:41):
a lot of single mothers. And there's this quote from
the movie. Claudine is extremely frustrated and says, if I
don't feed my kids, it's child neglect. If I go
out and get a job and make a little money
on the side, then that's cheating. If I stay at home,
I'm crazy, I can't win. Yeah, I mean that basically,
(46:04):
I mean that sums up so many of the issues
that come up around these programs. Yeah. And two years
later you have Ronald Reagan making well for a queen
of household term that further arouses more ire against public assistants. Yeah.
So we told you earlier that this welfare queen, so
(46:24):
to speak, that Ronald Reagan is fighting it was a
real woman. And there's a fascinating, fascinating long form peace
over at Slate by Josh Levin introducing readers to this
woman named Linda Taylor, who was a massive con artist
and very likely a legitimate psychopath, who used and abused
(46:49):
and hustled and possibly murdered just through the decades in
order to get as much money as possible, including stealing
people's coats. Yeah. Her welfare fraud is a footnote in
her criminality. Yeah, no, kidding, compared to everything else she did. Yeah.
And Um, the term, like you said earlier, was coined
(47:11):
by Chicago Tribune reporter George bliss Um, who was covering
Taylor's trial. Um and bliss have been trying to draw
attention to widespread disarray in the Illinois Public Aid Office.
There was a lot of mismanagement happening. No big surprise.
When you have giant government bureaucracies. Uh, sometimes you know things,
(47:35):
things run amok. But that's not a sexy story. Bureaucracy
is not interesting. That's on an interesting headline. And he
was getting frustrated because no one is paying attention to
this really important issue until he comes up with the
welfare queen and suddenly, oh, now that we have a face,
(47:56):
and now that we have this, you know, face that
has been scapegoat it and objectified for so long. Oh,
now everyone's paying attention. Well, and the thing is too
like we also see the alignment in her in this
Linda Taylor person slash all the fifty million different aliases
that she went by. We see the alignment of the
(48:17):
welfare queen and blackness. But the thing is, Linda Taylor
specifically was a shape shifter when it came to race,
like according to I mean Josh Levin, like God bless him.
He went into such heavy, detailed research in terms of
this woman's life and her background and her story and everything.
(48:37):
And according to the census, when she was a child,
she was listed as a white girl in a white family,
but she had darker skin, and they were like, maybe
it's from some like Native American or black ancestor, were
not really sure, but basically her skin was dark enough
(48:58):
that she was able to pass a black when it
was convenient, but also able to pass as white when
it suited her as well. She even passes Filipino, she
passes Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's not a black or white.
This is not a black or white to shoe. This
is like she was passing is whatever she needed to
pass as in order to steal, in order to take
advantage of, in order to kidnap. I mean, did all
(49:21):
of this though, remind you a little bit of Rachel
Dolas All? Oh god, hopefully she's never a kidnapped anyone,
the white woman who claims to be transracial. Um. Yeah,
I mean we don't even have time to go into. Yeah,
it's insane all of Taylor's criminality. But I mean, she
was a con artist. She was a big us said,
(49:43):
like multiple husbands at a time so that she could
um so then they could die in quotes and she
could get government funds for that. She was a kidnapper
and identity thief um and despite her criminality, though she
was only convicted on bilking eight thousand dollars of government
funds in nine and that conviction it just stands in
(50:08):
such stark contrast to the societal impact of Ronald Reagan
spreading her alleged story, you know, and only and only
focusing in on one aspect of it. But as a result,
welfare investigations and criminalization for fraud went through the roof.
(50:31):
If you think that those case workers were scrutinizing wealth
or recipients before that, oh this time because now there
was a face, there was a bufferred bejeweled face to
go with all of these fears, and they would set
up in different This was focused more on Chicago, UM,
(50:51):
but they set up hotlines where people could call in
and report folks that they thought were cheating on wealth there.
So I mean, you have these hotlines getting flooded with calls,
and it's just it's just a mess. And since then,
I mean not to just gloss over a lot more history,
(51:12):
but we have to. Since then, the Welfare Queen, even
though she has been largely debunked, I think in in
uh Today's commentary, but her specter is still there. The
animous behind it is absolutely still there. Yeah, because it's
an easy way. It's almost like an easy way to
(51:33):
disengage yourself or dissociate yourself from your racism, because you
can be like, well, no, it's not that I'm racist.
It's just that these welfare queens who happen to be
black women are abusing the system. And that is an
especially potent um argument to make too low income white people. Yeah,
(51:56):
because it plays on all of those racialized fears. So
you see, you know, repeated time and again. Um. And
in sociological terms, the welfare queen has become what's called
a narrative script or presumed common knowledge that most welfare
recipients are women, even though in reality, most welfare recipients
(52:19):
or children. Um. And they're specifically black, single women, and
that this whole situation must be the product of their
moral failing and they're you know, de incentivized work ethic
or non existent work ethic. Yeah, lie down, progressive era,
You're done. And that's what you still hear. Uh. And
(52:39):
I'm I don't remember it directly because if you remember
every Donald Trump quote, your mind had just turned to garbage. Um.
But in researching this piece of course he's played on
this rhetoric. I mean, he's he hasn't used the words
welfare quam, but he doesn't have to um hashtag dog
whistle politics. But he does talk about, you know, entitlements
(53:01):
and de incentivizing work. We're going to get people back
to work because people want to some people want to work.
And before we wrap up, though, we do want to
hop back to a couple of realities for single moms
today on public assistance, and the fact of the matter
is it is tough. There's nothing queenly about it. And
(53:26):
fraud does exist, but it's not as simple as fraud
only being perpetuated by recipients. You have a whole system
set up. Yeah, well so, I mean, speaking of that fraud,
tant fraud is there's like a two percent max fraud rate,
(53:47):
and across the board, it's likelier to be instigated by
the providers rather than the actual recipients of UH public assistance.
And a lot of that is not necessarily people being
like mo, I'm going to game the government my employer,
but rather like just deficiencies in the system itself. Yeah,
(54:08):
and being overwhelmed. I mean, you have case workers who
are probably overloaded, you have mismanagement going on, and especially
in terms of Medicaid and Medicare, you do have a
lot of provider fraud happening. Um and uh. If we
look though at the situation, the income situation for single
(54:28):
mothers on public assistance, on average, Bureau of Labor Statistics
data find that just families in general receiving public assistant
spend uhty two dollars a year, very precise, compared to
sixty six thousand for families not on public assistance. And
(54:49):
The Atlantic pointed that out, um to sort of settle
the score on this idea that, oh, you know, the
entitlement programs are allowing these families to of high on
the hog and buy lobster. Yeah, like I didn't buy
a new PlayStation, and all these people on welfare buying
PlayStations left and right, and lobsters to put on top
of the PlayStation because is the decoration. It's delicious. But
(55:11):
if we talk about lobster, families receiving assistant spent about
a third less on food, half as much on housing,
and sixty less on entertainment. So we've got some debunking
going on there. And if we look at snap benefits
the food Stamps program. Over nine of that money assist
(55:34):
people who are elderly, seriously disabled, or members of working households,
not able bodied, working age Americans who just choose not
to work. Yeah, and and so I mean, just imagine
the massive damage it's being done by us like wilfully
buying into these stereotypes and these narratives about who is
(55:57):
on public assistance and how the system is like rife
with welfare queens who are gaining it. I mean, again,
that's not to say that fraud doesn't happen, but it's
in such a minority of cases it's almost non existent. Yeah,
and just how degrading it is to, you know, point
your finger at a group of people and say, like,
(56:19):
you are categorically lazy and have no desire to improve
your station in life. While kids raised um in public
assistance situations are statistically likelier to themselves receive public assistance
later in life, many many many of them do not.
(56:40):
They end up becoming middle class citizens. Because you do
have really hard working single mothers who are not making
anything but are making it work for their kids. And
that's why during the Obama administration it has been such
a big deal the number of times, especially in big
speeches such as State of the Union. Addrest is that
(57:00):
he's called out the contributions, the positive contributions of single
mothers because for so long they've been really demonized in
our society because of all of this stuff that we've
been talking about. Well, and that's why all of the
traps and strange loopholes, uh in these systems, that's why
they're so heartbreaking, because you know, you do read stories
about mothers who were at least getting by and able
(57:23):
to buy their kids supplies to go back to school
and things like that, until they hit some weird you know,
public assistance loophole and they were made homeless. Because kids
who grow up homeless they do perform a lot poorer
in school, and so that does set up just a
really unfortunate cycle for a lot of families. Yeah, and
(57:45):
and again, UM to any social workers listening, Uh, hopefully
we're not conflating too much the case worker situation under
h A f d C versus today with temporary assistance
for needy families. And I'm curious to know more about
how individual cases are handled UM and regulations about who
(58:12):
receives it and please help us fill in the gap, yeah,
and whether it's gotten any better, because I mean, it's
just as I was telling Caroline before we started recording
this episode, this was such a puzzle to put together
because it's such a big system. There is not a
lot of clear information, and it's so politicized as well
(58:34):
that it's challenging to find objective information as well. So
I mean, we're relying a lot on academic sources as
much as possible for this, but hopefully this is shed
at least some historical light on today's situation. So with that,
we want to hear all of your thoughts and feedback
how this resonated with you, whether you have, yeah, any
(58:57):
information that can help us sort of fill in, uh,
this broad conversation that we've just had. Mom Stuff at
how stuff works dot com is our email address. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages
on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages to
share with you when we come right back from a
quick break and now back to the show. All right,
(59:24):
I've got a letter here from Adriana, subject line the
unicorns with lots of exclamation points. Okay, she says, thank you,
so much for covering this topic. I too was obsessed
with unicorns when I was little, and maybe still am.
I think for me it had a lot to do
with the unicorns and Fantasia you mentioned in the episode.
The little flying horses were also the best. I mean,
(59:46):
who wouldn't want to fly through a rainbow with them? Anyways,
I promise I'm not the type of person who corrects
people all the time, but I did notice that you
made a small slip up in Greek goddess names. Side note,
a lot of you guys also are crazy see about
Greek mythology and have written in to tell us this,
and you're so right. We just we just got a
little mixed up. And and Adriana is like really nice
(01:00:08):
and sympathetic about it. She says, you mentioned that Athena
was the virginal goddess of the hunt, when actually it
is Artemis. Athena is the goddess of wisdom, which, fun fact,
is why there is a bust of her over the
doorway of the Dough Library at Yust Berkeley. In the
Roman tradition, Artemis is known as Diana. You were right
that she's associated with deer, and not only because she
(01:00:29):
hunted them in the forest. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a man
named acting On is hunting with his hounds in the
woods when he discovers Diana and her nymphs bathing. This
is a site no man is supposed to see, because
Diana is a virgin goddess. She notices him watching and
furious turns him into a deer as punishment for spying
on her. He runs away and is later killed by
(01:00:51):
his own hounds. Acting On's transformation into a deer. It's
really beautifully described in the poem and I definitely recommend
reading it. I like the Ted Hughes translate and myself.
Thank you so much for the work you do on
this podcast. I very much enjoyed this episode. I just
finished a master's and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, and let
me tell you, there are a lot of weird and
(01:01:11):
sometimes scary unicorn illustrations and Renaissance manuscripts and printed books. Well,
we're definitely gonna have to google some of those, Adriana,
so thank you so much for writing in. And I
got a little here from Cynthia about our Lisa Frank episode,
who writes I grew up in a single mother household
and lived in hand me downs from friends and relatives
deep into my high school years. That's made going to
(01:01:34):
a school full of upper middle class kids extraordinarily challenging. However,
despite the fact that we were always on money and
rarely looked stylish or cool, our mother always tried to
give my siblings and me small things to help make
us enjoy our childhood in any way possible. Welcome super affordable, crazy,
psychedelic Lisa Frank during the height of her empire. I
(01:01:54):
was in junior high school and, just like all the
other girls and a few boys in my class, absolutely
upset with all things Lisa, and because of how affordable
the stickers and folders were, this was something I could
finally be a part of and I felt so cool.
I had all the folders, notebooks, the racers, and stickers.
My favorite were the Cheetahs. I even got ahold of
(01:02:15):
a binder at some point as a birthday gift. I
created a vast sticker collection, which my classmates and I
traded during recess, and I became the go to Lisa
Frank gal. It was awesome. Lisa Frank patterns said a
way of making me truly happy at first gaze happiness
and childhood in a sense or things that I didn't
really have as a kid. But whenever I flipped through
(01:02:35):
my Lisa Frank folders and notebooks and the carefully placed
the racers on my desk that I never used, I
felt happy and just like any other kid, listening to
your episode had me laughing with all the puns and jokes,
but also super nostalgic for a time in my life
when despite the challenges, I could escape on the back
of a rainbow unicorn and visit trippy dolphins. Well, thank
(01:02:55):
you so much, Cynthia, and thanks to everybody who's written
into us Moms stuff at how stuff where dot com
is our email address and for links to all of
our social media as well as all of our blogs,
videos and podcasts with our sources. So you can learn
more about women in welfare, head on over to stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com. For more on this
(01:03:17):
and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
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