Welfare queen
"Welfare queen" is a derogatory term used in the United States to describe individuals who are perceived to misuse or abuse the welfare system, often through fraudulent means, child endangerment, or manipulation. The media's coverage of welfare fraud began in the early 1960s and was featured in general-interest publications such as Reader's Digest. The term gained widespread recognition following media reporting in 1974 regarding the case of Linda Taylor. It was further popularized by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign when he frequently embellished Taylor's story in his speeches.
Since its inception, the phrase "welfare queen" has remained a stigmatizing label and has at times been disproportionately associated with black, single mothers. This stereotype implies that these women intentionally have multiple children to maximize their welfare benefits, avoid seeking employment, and live extravagantly at the expense of taxpayers. As a result, it has been widely criticized as racist by many observers. Besides, many white, Latino, Asian, and Arab Americans are welfare recipients.
Although women in the U.S. could no longer stay on welfare indefinitely after the federal government launched the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program in 1996, the term remains a trope in the American dialogue on poverty and negatively shapes welfare policies and outcomes for these families.
Origin
The idea of welfare fraud goes back to the early-1960s, when the majority of known offenders were male. Despite this, many journalistic exposés were published at the time on those who would come to be known as welfare queens. Reader's Digest and Look magazine published sensational stories about mothers gaming the system. The emergence of the "Welfare queen" stereotype occurred during a period of significant social change in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged racial segregation and discrimination, leading to legal and societal changes aimed at promoting racial equality.The term was coined in 1974, either by George Bliss of the Chicago Tribune in his articles about Linda Taylor, or by Jet magazine. Neither publication credits the other in their "Welfare Queen" stories of that year. Taylor was ultimately charged with committing $8,000 in fraud and having four aliases. She was convicted in 1977 of illegally obtaining 23 welfare checks using two aliases and was sentenced to two to six years in prison. During the same decade, Taylor was investigated for alleged kidnapping and baby trafficking, and is suspected of multiple murders, but was never charged.
Accounts of her activities were used by Ronald Reagan, beginning with his 1976 presidential campaign, although he never identified her by name or race.
Used to illustrate his criticisms of social programs in the United States, Reagan employed the trope of the "Welfare Queen" in order to rally support for reform of the welfare system. During his initial bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, and again in 1980, Reagan constantly made reference to the "Welfare Queen" at his campaign rallies. Some of these stories, and some that followed into the 1990s, focused on female welfare recipients engaged in behavior counter-productive to eventual financial independence such as having children out of wedlock, using AFDC money to buy drugs, or showing little desire to work. Reagan's characterization of these individuals was used to justify real-life changes to policies and play a role in the shrinking of the social safety net. These women were understood to be overwhelmingly women of color in an effort to push racialized narratives. They were also understood to be social parasites, while engaging in self damaging behavior while draining society of valuable resources. Stories about able-bodied men collecting welfare continued to dominate discourse until the 1970s, at which point women became the main focus of welfare fraud stories.
In political discourse
Prior to former President Ronald Reagan's campaign, in the 1960s, the Moynihan Report was created. This report addressed the ways that black people experienced poverty and tried to cite a cause of the inequality in income this group faced. Moynihan's central argument of the report was that the "breakdown" of the black family was the cause of poverty among African-Americans. This argument had two key points, which were black children growing up without a father, and in matriarchal systems, was damaging which contributes to deviancy in children. The report changed the thought process surrounding welfare, specifically concerning welfare laws and policy and the "solution" to poverty. Politicians began to place blame on gender and cultural differences between black and white people rather than welfare laws. While feminists and other activists fought against the ideas birthed from this report, the belief of a fractured black family began to take hold and influence policy.The term "welfare queen" became a catchphrase during political dialogue of the 1980s and 1990s. The term came under criticism for its supposed use as a political tool and for its derogatory connotations. Criticism focused on the fact that individuals committing welfare fraud were, in reality, a very small percentage of those legitimately receiving welfare. Use of the term was also seen as an attempt to stereotype recipients in order to undermine public support for AFDC.
The welfare queen idea became an integral part of a larger discourse on welfare reform, especially during the bipartisan effort to reform the welfare system under Bill Clinton. Anti-welfare advocates ended AFDC in 1996 and overhauled the system with the introduction of TANF with the belief that welfare discouraged self-reliance. Despite the new system's time-limits, the welfare queen legacy has endured and continues to shape public perception and policy. The current TANF policies restrict welfare support in ways that appear to align with and may be the result of the fears and concerns centered around the welfare queen trope. For example, welfare payments are intended for temporary support and restrict welfare support through work requirements and family caps to avoid the fear of "welfare queens" and other "undeserving" recipients from taking advantage of welfare benefits or from an overly generous welfare system encouraging financial and moral irresponsibility.
Despite the fact that the majority of welfare recipients are white, welfare attitudes are primarily shaped by public perceptions of black people on welfare, which perpetuates racial tropes such as the "welfare queen" and blocks access to resources that are needed by these families.
During Governor Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, he alluded to the "welfare queen" stereotype again when he attacked President Barack Obama by spreading television advertisements vilifying President Obama's leniency on the "undeserving" poor through reducing the rigor of TANF requirements to primarily appeal to a white, middle class demographic who believe in cutting government spending on welfare programs to force people in poverty out of perceived laziness and into self-reliance.
Gender and racial stereotypes
Political scientist Franklin Gilliam has argued that the welfare queen stereotype has roots in both race and gender:The trope of the welfare queen may be analyzed from the framework of intersectionality to better understand how race, class, gender, and other identities shape individuals' and groups' privileges and disadvantages.
The media's image of poverty shifted from focusing on the plight of white Appalachian farmers and on the factory closings in the 1960s to a more racially divisive and negative image of poor blacks in urban areas. All of this, according to political scientist Martin Gilens, led to the American public dramatically overestimating the percentage of African-Americans in poverty. By 1973, in magazine pictures depicting welfare recipients, 75% featured African Americans when in fact African Americans made up 35% of welfare recipients and only 12.8% of the US population. According to the United States Census, "In 2019, the share of blacks in poverty was 1.8 times greater than their share among the general population. Blacks represented 13.2% of the total population in the United States, but 23.8% of the poverty population." Van Doorn states that the media repeatedly shows a relationship between lazy, black, and poor suggesting why some Americans are opposed to welfare programs.
From the 1970s onward, women became the predominant face of poverty. In a 1999 study by Franklin Gilliam that examined people's attitudes on race, gender, and the media, an eleven-minute news clip featuring one of two stories on welfare was shown to two groups of participants. Each story on welfare had a different recipient—one was a white woman and the other was a black woman. The results showed that people were extremely accurate in their recall of the race and gender of the black female welfare recipient in comparison to those who saw the story with the white female welfare recipient. This outcome confirmed that this unbalanced narrative of gender and race had become a standard cultural bias and that Americans often made implicit associations between race, gender, and poverty.
Furthermore, research conducted by Jennifer L. Monahan, Irene Shtrulis, and Sonja Givens on the transference of media images into interpersonal contexts reveal similar results. The researchers found that "Specific stereotype portrayals of African American women were hypothesized to produce stereotype-consistent judgments made of a different African American woman". Additionally, some believe that black single women on welfare are irresponsible in their reproductive decisions and may continue to have children to reap welfare benefits. However, as analyzed from the United States General Accounting office data, there is no greater likelihood of these occurrences with women on welfare.
The "welfare queen" stereotype is driven by false and racist beliefs that place the blame of the circumstances of poor black single mothers as the result of their own individual issues while bringing forward racial tropes such as their promiscuity, lack of structure and morals, and avoidance of work. With primary narratives regarding poverty being driven by the myth of the meritocracy, the "welfare queen" trope illustrates the result of adding racial and gender dimensions to these inaccurate claims. This became a public identity mapped onto black women's bodies and the perpetuation of this public identity has been used to inform welfare policy outcomes. In addition to work ethic, family values, such as a heteronormative, working, two-parent household and having children only when married, are seen as the cultural standard. As a result, deviations from this ideal constitute a lower social value. By stereotyping single black mothers as "welfare queens," the interpersonal, structural, and institutional barriers that prevent adequate resources and opportunities for them which lead to or reinforce poverty are not addressed. The lack of accountability seen by institutions and structures within the U.S. government promotes individualistic and neoliberal ideals that put societal failures onto the individual rather than analyzing institutional barriers that might be preventing any necessary changes within the welfare system.