“Poor single mother on welfare tell me how you did it?” rings the famous lyric of the late Rapper-Activist Tupac Amaru Shakur. The son of a former Black Panther, this ode to his mother provides a glimpse into the conundrum of surviving in the wake of being poor and black on public assistance. What Shakur unknowingly reveals is the image of welfare in a more empathetic and realistic way that illuminates instead of ignoring the lived realities of its recipients. While Shakur’s lyric is compassionate in it’s depiction, conservative lawmakers are less considerate in their elucidation of this group. Recipients are often demonized by the assumption that they are engaged in criminal and/or immoral behavior namely, drug abuse, high levels of unmarried parenting, or other illicit behaviors. Allegations of welfare fraud and misuse are often connected to these public claims and become the basis used by conservative policymaker to frame their policy concerns.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) becomes the site where conservative policymakers perpetuate certain controlling images (stereotypes) to paint recipients as the ‘underserving poor’ and immoral in order to justify including questionable and unnecessarily evasive eligibility standards in the reauthorized Farm Bill. I posit that these images are reinforced by accessing the public’s social memory in order to justify the defunding of essential programs like WIC, SNAP, and other services aimed to decrease food scarcity and poverty. Instead of addressing the structural inequalities and institutional racism that attributes to the conditions of the recipients, conservative policymakers use recipients as political scapegoats in times of national economic hardship. Through the lens of Intersectionality and the use of critical discourse as the tool of inquiry, I intend to discuss how the implicit meaning behind the language supports partisan value system that policy concerns derived from well-known controlling images.
Intersectionality Scholars within Black Feminist theory and related disciplines (you are lumping together theory and disciplines as though they are related—be careful not to do this) recognize the links between the various institutional spheres of life and recognize, honor, document the experiential knowledge of marginalized groups, namely black women. Most scholars view these unique experiences via the lens of Intersectionality. In that, they see social/political experiences, functioning together, rather than separately. Intersectionality is an approach to studying "the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.”(Collins 2011) Intersectionality offers an analytic approach, that supports the notion that the spheres of race, class, gender, and sexuality are experienced simultaneously and are influential upon each other.
Additionally, the varying societal oppressions are experienced uniquely by those subjected to Intersectionality. Scholar Patricia Hill Collins is credited with introducing a sub- theory of the Matrix of Dominion in her work entitled Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. The Matrix of Domination is a paradigm that deconstructs the multi-layered oppression of race, class, and gender, which, though recognized as different social classifications, are all interconnected as experience by women of color.
Other forms of classification, such as sexual orientation, religion, or age, apply to this theory as well. [b]ell hooks labels this matrix as the Politics of Domination and describes how it intersects at the points of race, class, and gender oppression. Hooks explains, ‘”this politic of domination refers to the ideological ground that they share, which is a belief in domination, and a belief in the notions of superior and inferior, which are components of all of those systems. For me it's like a house, they share the foundation, but the foundation is the ideological beliefs around which notions of domination are constructed.”(hooks 1990).
One issue discussed in black intersectionalty literature concerns the affect of poverty on the woman, and in particular the black woman in US society. Feminization of poverty is a concept is defined as the condition in which the percentage of females living in poverty relative to the composition of females in the population, is disproportionately higher than males and consistently so over time. Studies concerning this issue have focused on three areas as the causes for this phenomenon: (1) changes in family structure, (2) the labor market, (3) welfare programs. (Jimenez 199)
Martial status has been connected to the level of poverty experienced and the higher risk of female head of households slipping into an impoverished state. Black women experience this phenomenon in a distinct matter unlike poor white women, in that race adds another facet to the dimension and lived realities of their poverty. There are additional socioeconomic factors that contribute to the unique nature of the black feminization of poverty including the propensity of solo parenting. In addition, black women have to face the racialized and gendered frames projected by society that assist in the re-securing of their improvised position plus the shame associated with the Baby Mama/ Urban Teen Mother controlling images. White women also have never been blamed for the destruction of their family system and are often viewed as victims to be protected. The persistence of abject poverty among black women single head of
The Negro Family: The Case for National Actions by Daniel P. Moynihan was a study published in 1965 that has been the source of much criticism. In this report he describes the collapsing family structure, impoverished neighborhoods and propensity for crime as a cyclical experience of pathological doom to be repeated without intervention. And although there has been progress in the black community as a whole, the persistence of the conditions identified in Moynihan’s scathing report are ever present. One facet of his report refuted by many is the villainzation of the black woman, who is pinned as one of the primary factors contributing to the demise of the black family. This ill-informed conclusion, among others (employment, crime rates, marriage data) has been revisited by a number of scholars since the reports publication.
In 1965 the U.S. Department of Labor published a report entitled ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.’ In this report, Daniel Patrick Moynihan resolves, “at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.” (Moynihan 1965) Echoing the sentiments of scholars past in its assertion that blacks were innately prone to dysfunction, crime, and violence, this report took the propaganda to the next level with final claim. Moynihan points an accusatory finger at the black woman, claiming her dominance acted to destroy the black man and his attempts to lead the family. Moynihan even compares her destructive disposition to the suppressive nature of Jim Crow citing, “Segregation and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than the female personality.” (Moynihan 1965) Thus, the report concluded that the reconciliation of the family structure would be achieved once the black male took the position of dominance; in essence re-inscribe the patriarchal model of white America. This report, not only offended black men by emphasizing how woman is matriarch, but it also officially established this image a mirror on society that warranted a national wide response. Moreover, the use of data to support his claims only intensified the public’s attitudes towards black women. Moynihan asserts:
1. Nearly a quarter of urban Negro marriages are dissolved.
2. Nearly one-quarter of Negro births are now illegitimate.
3. Almost one-fourth of Negro families are headed by females. (Moynihan 1965)
The break of the Negro family has led to a startling increase in welfare dependency. (Moynihan 1965) Moynihan’s thesis suggests that poor black women are to blame for the socioeconomic struggles within improvised neighborhoods. In fact, he claims that illegitimate births and the propensity of black women to ‘divorced, separated, or are living apart from their husband’ for the dysfunctional family systems of black communities. These black women then place a burden upon Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program designed to help widows and their children not those who elect to be single.
In 1996 then President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. This act was to reform the Aid to Families with Dependent Children signed into law some thirty years prior. The program that would replace AFDC was the more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. This new policy sought to do several things: push employment/work ethic, decrease illegitimate births and promote marriage as a means to escape poverty. Shaming and moral judgment could be found throughout ‘the congressional welfare testimonies were studded with coded references to the alleged sexual promiscuity and out of wedlock births of black women.’
The ‘Illegitimate Birth Act’ as it was original called, rewarded states that could lower out-of-wedlock births and effectively promote abstinence programs. Policymakers referred to the sexual behaviors and assumed lascivious proclivities of black women as though they were common knowledge and constructed PROWRA accordingly. In addition, the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged inner cities across America between the mid-80’s and early 90’s, only aided in the moralistic approach of policymakers. As the image of the Crack Mother desperately looking for a fix poured through the TV screens and followed by human interest stories about abandoned crack babies that tugged at the heartstrings of viewers: policymakers invoked notions welfare fraud as the source of this destructive cycle. Yale political scientist Martin Gilens reveals a trend in the media coverage of welfare stories:
• Sixty-two percent of poverty stories that appeared in TIME, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report featured African-Americans.
• Sixty-five percent of network news stories about welfare featured African Americans.
• Fewer African-Americans are portrayed in “sympathetic” stories about poverty and welfare.
• Newsmagazines depict almost 100 percent of the lowest class as African Americans. (Gilens 1999)
According to Gilens in Why Americans Hate Welfare, racially biased coverage of poverty reflect the racial attitudes of the news professionals and subsequently influence the attitudes of the viewing audience. This argument can be extended to include not only to the American public but policymakers as well. Consequently, when officials invoke these images, the social memory of the viewing public can readily recall the phenomena, as it was just the subject of the nightly newscast. Deleterious attitudes about blacks have permeated the construction of social welfare policy in the United States since the early days of the 20th Century.
The intentional restriction or prohibiting of blacks from public entitlements can be documented as an acceptable practice by policymakers. Moreover, when social policy is directed toward blacks, it reflects the prevailing stereotypes and caricatures of blackness and all but ignores the structural inequalities within American Society. Social policy then takes on a paternalistic stance and moralistic tone that sexualizes, criminalizes and immortalize the family and subsequently, the black woman.
The Urban Institute published the Moynihan Report Revisited in 2013 and addressed Moynihan’s original claims and assessed the current state of the communities at the center of the original report. The Urban Institute found:
1. In the early 1960s, about 20 percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers, compared with 2 to 3 percent of white children. By 2009, nearly three-quarters of black births and three-tenths of white births occurred outside marriage. Hispanics fell between whites and blacks and followed the same rising trend.
2. In 1960, 20 percent of black children lived with their mothers but not their fathers; by 2010, 53 percent of all black children lived in such families. The share of white children living with their mothers but not their fathers climbed from 6 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 2010.
3. In 2010 as the United States reeled from the effects of the Great Recession, nearly 40 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with about 13 percent of white children and 33 percent of Hispanic children. The Urban Institute differs in their assertion as to why the ‘persistent economic and social inequalities’ have remained consisted with in the black community and family structure.
Superimposed upon these societal structures is the ominous presence of differing structures of power. These hegemonic structures privilege, normalize, and value certain identities (in this case gender, race & class) more than others and this instance highlights the structural, institutional nature of power, while also highlighting the ways in which culture works in the creation and privileging of certain categories of people. Power in Western paradigm was structured within the oppositional binary, pitting gender, race, class, and sexuality, against one another as briefly mention before. Specific identities were privilege over others and made different in this two-world binary perspective. In her work, Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the concept of the objectification and the binary opposition. Collins explains, ‘”objectification is central to the process of oppositional difference. In binary thinking, one element is objectified as the other, and is viewed as an object to be controlled.”(Collins 2011, p. 77) According to Collins, the ‘dominant group always attempt to objectify the subordinate group (Collins 2011, p. 78)
T.H. Marshall’s seminal (1963) work defines of citizenship in terms of three sets of rights: civil rights, political rights, and social rights, gives a glimpse into how the blacks could have been systematically deprived of full citizenship by only being guaranteed some of these rights as encoded in law. In Citizenship and Social Class, Marshall suggests that these rights have evolved historically beginning with civil rights in the eighteenth century, political rights in the nineteenth century, and finally social rights in the twentieth century.(Marshall 1963) While blacks are granted civil rights and to some extent political rights (14th & 15th amendments respectively), there is little to no effort after the defunding of the Freedmen’s Bureau to equalize social rights between blacks and whites. According to Marshall these social rights include a certain level of economic welfare and security through provisions like social insurance, health care, and public education.
The question becomes, how does the systematic denial of full citizenship to blacks connect to the current state of welfare politics in the United States? Government assistance programs like Social Security are considered entitlements freely given to citizens as payment for their positive contributions to society while, welfare transfers are framed as stigmatized temporary relief tied to invasive rules and surveillance of racial minorities, in particular black women.(Donovan 1999) These regulations reaffirm the notion of the undeserving nature of black recipients and the need to control their immoral behavior to the public. Welfare policies, more specifically, eligibility standards, become regulatory tools used by policymakers to re-inscribe negative images of black people, namely black women. These Controlling Images help policymakers justify the dismantling of safety net programs to the public, under the guise of eliminating poverty.(Donovan 1999)
A number of controlling images have been identified by scholars including: Mammy, Matriarch, Sapphire, Jezebel/Bad Black Woman /Bad Black Mother, Black Lady, Welfare Queen, Crack Mother, and urban Teen Mother (Collins 2011). For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on only two of these figures (Welfare Queen & Crack Mother). These images were selected due to specific provisions pushed by the GOP; waste and fraud (long associated with the Welfare Queen image) and drug use (behavior attributed to the Crack Mother image). The intersection of two figures and US welfare policy in the mid-90’s cannot be ignored and although the cultural markers of this time period have faded (the decrease use of crack cocaine and the capping of stipend increases due to addition of a child.(Collins 2011)
Group Implication, Frames and Public Identity Dangerous Frames, by Nicolas Winters, provides two theoretical approaches that are helpful to this discussion: frames and group implication. The construction of a frame draws upon the available schemas involving race and/gender in order to be effective. It must also trigger analogical reasoning and be cognitively accessible for the public. If these two mechanisms are achieved, people then must be exposed to the frames and be The frames induce the public to evaluate the issue based on their feelings about the social groups in question.(Winters 2008, p. 31)
The Welfare Queen is described as a lazy, poor, and uneducated and/or willfully ignorant black woman. Much like her predecessor Jezebel, the Welfare Queen is known for her “recklessness, trickiness, wiliness and seductiveness.”(Hancock 2003) She is both celebrated and ridiculed for her qualities, in that, she must be presented in such a manner that accounts for her success against the system but also underscores her inferiority and immoral nature. Her sexuality becomes the moral inroad used to divert attention away from the contradictions within the narrative.
She is sexually irresponsible (assumed to have multiple partners), frequently has multiple pregnancies and multiple births beginning in her teens. Aware of the possibility of an increase in her monthly stipend, she strategically orchestrates her pregnancies to increase her payments and/or remain on the rolls indefinitely. These unwed births are an indication of her bankrupt morality as it violates the societal norm of bearing children within marriage. In fact, if she would do gender correctly and aspire to marriage, she would then secure herself financially and affirm her womanhood (and worth) simultaneously. The refusal to do gender correctly underscores the selfish nature she embodies, and her immoral status as a human being. This vice-laden nature damages on her children and ultimately society as a whole. The physical depiction of the Welfare Queen is a portly, morbidly obese woman, who gorges herself on a menu of cheap fast food, snacks and a pantry full of processed junk purchased with her SNAP benefits. Her size is a direct reflection of her inherent laziness and lack of work ethic. Moreover, it is also a sign that she is not actually poor, on the contrary, she’s well take care of my the government’s doles.
Emerging for this controlling image is that of the Crack Mother. Other scholars have treated the Welfare Queen and the Crack Mother as one in the same and understandably so. However, due to conservative policymakers renewed fascination with connecting drug use to welfare, I am compelled to address them separately.
The “Cocaine Babies Congressional Hearing”, sought to explore the issue of the ‘crack baby’ as consequence of the introduction of crack cocaine to many urban epicenters starting in the 1980’s. Some of the testimony noted stated ‘poor Black mothers were clearly associated with crack abuse and deviant behavior when the word ‘crack’ was used, race and class were mentioned, sending the message that ‘bad’ Black mothers abused crack and led destructive lives at the expense of their families well being. (USC 2001-2001) Even at the federal level, the association of black mothers with crack cocaine was inescapable. Peter Kerr, writer for the New York Times, proclaims that drug use, specifically crack cocaine “has taken an unprecedented toll on women, children, and families. [] so many poor families are headed by single mothers that the sudden increase in women becoming crack addicts has caused disproportionate damage to families.”(Kerr 1988) He connects the detrimental effects of the feminization of poverty and the boom of the crack epidemic. Closely linked to the Bad Black Mother figure, the Crack Mother epitomizes all of its characteristics plus the use of illicit drugs, which criminalizes her. Collins provides a detailed description of the Bad Black Mother:
Bad Black Mothers (BBM) are those who are abusive (extremely bitchy) and/or who neglect their children either in utero or afterword. Ironically, these Bad Black Mothers are stigmatized as being inappropriately feminine because they reject the gender ideology associated with the American family ideal. They are often single mothers, they live in poverty, they are often young, and they rely on the state to support their children. Moreover, they allegedly pass on their bad values to their children who in turn are more likely to become criminals and unwed teenage mothers.”(Collins 2011, p. 131)
In the eyes of society, the BBM and her twin the Crack Mother are the sources for the disintegration of the moral fabric of American Society. Instead of offer drug treatment programs or the like, officials responded with punitive actions to correct the problem. The criminalization of poor black women is an example of how power is exercised to control what is seen as deviant behavior. In terms of the crack cocaine epidemic, officials sought to enact tougher punishments for those guilty of crack related offenses. The disproportionate punishment of black women and consequently their families is astounding.
Poverty-stricken black women are affected uniquely by this use of force because of the intersecting of the various social constructs like racism, classism, and sexism that unfairly afflict poor black women, who find themselves at the bottom rungs of society. Ignoring the damaging the effects of drugs use on the mental acuteness and reasoning of addicts, others only highlight the irresponsible decision made by women under duress. This become the site where expects and officials can argue for the sterilization of ‘unfit’ mothers instead of drug treatment. According to Collins these mother’s “selfishness and criminality punished their children from the womb’ making her a prime target ‘punitive social policies” due to her wanton disregard for the lives of her children, even while in utero (Collins 2011)
The Crack Mother narrative is an illustration of how language constructs controlling imagery. These narratives lead to officials creating policies to control the negative behaviors associated with these groups. Consequently, these stereotypes are easily accepted by society as they affirm pre-existing notions about black women and people. These notions or ideas are normalized once individuals stop questioning the sources and theory behind them and accept them as truth.
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