Welfare Queens

[Ava]

During his 1976 Presidential campaign Ronald Reagan told a story about a "welfare queen" from Chicago's South Side. Since then it has become a catchphrase used to describe poor mothers, particularly poor black mothers. It is a phrase that is used a disturbing amount even to describe those legitimately receiving welfare.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture more than one in 10 Americans, or about 31 million people, were using food stamp program to get by in October. The most recent numbers aren't available. I have to wonder what Reagan would say about the numbers.

When I was younger my mother was a single working mother. She worked as a nurse while also attending law school and still made time to spend with my brother and I. We were on food stamps like many other families in America. I've never known a person who worked harder than my mother, yet we still had to rely on the food stamp program for some help - to get by.

Still, I remember the dirty looks she would get sometimes in the check out at the grocery store when she pulled out food stamp vouchers. They saw her as one of those "welfare queens" Reagan had spoken about, and they judged without actually knowing that she was a hardworking mother of two.

What ever happened to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Have we really become such an insensitive nation that we judge others for accepting help they desperately need?

If nothing else maybe this financial crisis will cause people to look at welfare and so called "welfare queens" differently, because thanks to our current economy 1 in 10 Americans are "welfare queens" and many many more are struggling to get by.

[RB TexLa]

1. Get ready to be told those huddled masses are coming here to steal jobs from 'Mericans and how we

need a wall to keep non-English speaking foreigners out.

[p4poetic]

3. get ready?

I'm already prepared.

[Catshrink]

2. Today's welfare queens are the bankers

with their megabillions in bailout money paid out in bonuses.

[MADem]

4. Reagan's Welfare Queen was not a "poor mother" though.

She was never categorized in that fashion.

I think she was fictional, but she was a woman who collected five or ten welfare checks, illegally, of course, under assumed names, who had a fur coat, and drove a Cadillac. She was a "Welfare CHEAT."

At least that's how I remember the "Welfare Queen" rollout.

The idea was to suggest that there were lots of "people" who were living high on the hog off of Uncle Sam's dime. It was also a rather viciously clever UNSPOKEN racial and racist dogwhistle:

Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments. ....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/opinion/19krugman.html

Nowadays, they do "food stamps" like a debit card. So long as you're not buying booze and junk with the card, they don't care. Gone are the days of the Monopoly Money and the obviousness of it all.

But make no mistake...that "Welfare Queen" story was more about race than poverty.

[Ava]

5. i know the welfare queen story well

but "welfare queen" has now become the view of those who are legitimately on welfare.

i don't think the "welfare queen" term was never really meant to describe welfare fraud. reagan knew what he was doing when he said it. i've never heard someone committing welfare fraud called a "welfare queen".. but i do often hear single struggling mothers called "welfare queen" just like i hear bullcrap like "why doesn't she just get a(nother) job?"

[MADem]

8. Welfare Queen was "code" for Lazy Black People cheating and stealing YOUR tax dollars!!!

That's how Reagan intended it to be taken, in order to rile up the Strom Thurmond-type electorate. "If ONLY these lazy people would get up off their asses and go to work, YOU wouldn't have to pay extra taxes to support THEM. See, if not for THEM, you would pay fewer taxes!" That's the theme he was working.

He should have been ashamed of himself.

People who use the term nowadays simply to whine about people who aren't employed, and don't understand that "root" meaning might not realize that they're engaging in profound racist insult, but they are.

[Terran]

6. A minor correction.

While food stamps are all (I think, state by state) done electronically now, the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program still uses big paper vouchers that look a bit like over-sized checks, and they can take some time to process at the check-out stand (I know, I'm a checker part-time). So there's plenty of opportunity for other people to stand around looking pissed off and upset because of the young mother ahead of them in line who has to wait for the checker to go through a rather complicated process just to check out maybe a dozen items at most. And I can attest to the fact that are as many or more white people using WIC as there are black people.

I am always at my most polite and professional with WIC customers, because I think it may make a few of the impatient bastards feel guilty.

[Ava]

9. i don't believe it was wic

this was early 90's and WIC is for mothers with children under 5. she did have paper vouchers. i'll ask and check, but i'm pretty sure that it was food stamps, not wic.

[SergeyDovlatov]

7. Military-Industrial complex is the biggest welfare queen of all!