It’s an election year and although in the last couple of presidential elections we seem to have had a reprieve from the rather shameful practice of demonizing the poor and trafficking in racializing welfare, here we are again.
There have been claims that Mitt Romney has made in campaign ads (and on the campaign trail as well) about President Obama removing the work requirement from receiving public assistance funds.
The fact that this has been debunked by every credible source (of every political persuasion) has not stopped Romney one bit. Yet, this recent revisiting of an old racial political and social line of attack gives us the opportunity to reflect on the economic, social and political realities surrounding the historic, social and cultural views regarding welfare.
Separate narratives, disparate understanding … same needs
There is a photograph that has become inextricably linked to the narrative concerning the Great Depression; a woman (white woman) sits staring into the distance with two (of her seven) children huddled around her; her face looks weathered, yet proud. This became the face of poverty during the Depression and it persists to this day.
It created a narrative regarding the (white) poor that gave them a sense of dignity and nobility in the midst of their economic deprivation; overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control. Contrast that image with that of the poor of color.
Reagan used the stereotype of the black “welfare queen” to great advantage. Over a period of about five years, Reagan told the story of the “Chicago welfare queen” who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and collected benefits from “four nonexistent husbands,” bilking the government out of “over $150,000.”
Even after certain members of the press pointed out that no such individual existed, he persisted in telling the story. Ronald Reagan, considered the “great communicator,” was able to make the racist stereotype stick and thereby cementing the already-hardcore prejudices regarding the urban poor.
Let’s face it, when one is asked to picture a welfare recipient they usually see a black woman with too many children using her EBT card in the grocery store line (even though statistically there is no difference between the birth rates of families who need welfare and those who do not). Maybe they envision a black person lacking the desire to work hard enough to get out of poverty.
Although at the height of the discussion concerning welfare reform most Americans believed that welfare was causing a financial hardship to many working-class Americans, the actual cost of welfare programs was about 1 percent of the federal budget and 2 percent of state budgets which is proportionally less than was generally believed. During the 104th Congress, more than 93 percent of the budget reductions in welfare benefits came from programs for low-income people (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1996).
Ironically, what created real financial hardship on working- and middle-class Americans was the rising percentage of American wealth gravitating to the top 1 percent of the population. Spending on AFDC or TANF, the programs normally referred to as welfare, totaled less than $500 billion from 1964 to 1994 (compare that to one year of Pentagon spending).
The deconstruction of a myth
As the myth of the black “welfare queen” took root, in the heat of the offensive against this nation’s poor and people of color, the belief was that the majority of welfare beneficiaries were black women when in fact children, not women, were the largest group of people receiving public assistance.
Less than 5 million of the 14 million public assistance recipients were adults, and 90 percent of those adults were women. The majority of the welfare recipients were white (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1995). The breakdown of the ethnicity of the recipients were white (38 percent), followed by 37 percent African-Americans, and 25 percent other minority groups (Latinos, Native Americans and Asian-Americans) (McLaughlin, 1997). This reality flies in the face of what was (and still is) bandied about concerning blacks and welfare.
Barbara Ehrenreich in her TIME piece titled, Welfare: A White Secret, stated “So our confession stands: white folks have been gobbling up the welfare budget while blaming someone else. But it’s worse than that. If we look at Social Security, which is another form of welfare, although it is often mistaken for an individual insurance program, then whites are the ones who are crowding the trough. We receive almost twice as much per capita, for an aggregate advantage to our race of $10 billion a year — much more than the $3.9 billion advantage African Americans gain from their disproportionate share of welfare. One sad reason: whites live an average of six years longer than African Americans, meaning that young black workers help subsidize a huge and growing overclass of white retirees.”
In this same article she goes on to say, “Whites, near poor and middle class, need help too — as do the many African Americans, Hispanics and ‘others’ who do not qualify for aid but need it nonetheless.”
Christopher Federico, assistant professor of psychology and political science at the University of Minnesota, in his essay Racial Perceptions and Evaluative Resources to Welfare, details “a growing body of research that indicates that welfare attitudes may be strongly shaped by negative perceptions of blacks.
“This raises questions about what might inhibit the racialization of welfare attitudes. In this vein, a long line of work indicating that education leads to increased tolerance suggests that the relationship between negative racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be weaker among the highly educated.
“However, recent studies suggest that the role of education may be more complex: While negative racial perceptions may be less prevalent among the highly educated, the relationship between these perceptions and policy attitudes appears to be stronger among highly educated individuals.
“The present study attempts to extend this finding by examining the hypothesis that the presence of a racial cue would be more (rather than less) likely to strengthen the relationship between negative racial perceptions and evaluative responses to welfare among college-educated whites. Data from a survey-based experiment included in the 1991 National Race and Politics Study provided a clear pattern of support for this hypothesis.”
Further, Mark Rank, professor of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also challenges the widely-held views of welfare being a program for blacks (and other people of color) and that it is frequently passed on generationally: “About two-thirds of people who receive welfare are white. Overall, there are more whites than blacks.
“When we think ‘poor,’ we think ‘city.’ We forget there is severe poverty in parts of rural America.” According to Rank’s research, only 1 out of 4 welfare recipients had parents who also used welfare, while 1 in 20 recipients using welfare frequently grew up in a household that frequently used welfare as well.
Stigmatizing minority poverty … sanitizing corporate welfare
To be sure, there are many programs that function for the same purpose and to the same end as welfare, but are not stigmatized in the same way. Let’s consider the roughly 30,000 cotton growers in America who receive billions of U.S. tax dollars every year through government subsidies.
Economists say that without taxpayer help, some of America’s cotton growers would lose money growing cotton. And with price guarantees and a wide array of other payment programs, the farmers receive this layer of protection.
The taxpayer makes up the difference between many cotton farmers operating at a profit or at a loss. Yet, this is not considered a “hand-out” or an “entitlement.” There are no questions being asked about what impact these programs will have on the self-esteem of farmers — and in my opinion, there shouldn’t be.
Finally, during the run-up to welfare reform, a more expensive form of “entitlement” programs was largely being ignored … corporate welfare. According to a Boston Globe series on corporate welfare in 1996, the $150 billion for corporate subsidies and tax benefits eclipsed the annual budget deficit of $130 billion.
Further, that $150 billion price tag for corporate welfare was more than the then-$145 billion paid out annually for the core programs of the social welfare state — AFDC, student aid, housing, food and nutrition, and all direct public assistance (excluding Social Security and Medicare). Here is a breakdown of corporate entitlement programs from 1990 to 1994 comparing and contrasting the monies received to the number of layoffs:
For all the money that was channeled into the pockets of corporations, only Motorola added more workers during the four-year period, while the others laid-off a total of 339,038 workers.
Corporations are frequently cursed by the masses, but rarely challenged. The lobbyists and Congress not only made sure that this most expensive welfare program stayed in place, but helped it grow and expand as well.
Conclusion
How does such an erroneous notion and easily disproved stereotype still get so much traction? No one (of any ethnicity or walk of life) should be demonized when they are in need of help and assistance. It rises to the level of a certain moral cowardice to make people of color the scapegoats and targets of the vitriol and animus that’s spewed when we talk about welfare — especially when they are not the largest beneficiaries of it.
I know that there will be some who will accuse me of going on some sort of angry, anti-white rant, and that is regrettable (and couldn’t be further from the truth). Yet, this is what often happens when we are disabused of the security blanket of our prejudices and preconceived notions. We see those who are merely attempting to lift a veil of ignorance as the antagonizers, instead of holding those who lie and continue to repeat the lies accountable.