Wimmin of color in the blogosphere have found themselves being attacked on and off their blogs for expressing their views. Recently, brownfemipower received this comment on her blog:

I am so tired of “women of color” bitching about not getting anything. You don’t realize that women of color get everything and us “white” women get nothing. We actually have to work for a living. We pay our own bills (not depend on the government to do that for us) we get a job (not depend on the goverment to find our babies daddies) We actually have to pay for college (government)and we get screwed over when we try to get a job that would pay better because someone else came along that was a freaking man (regardles of what color that man was) I’m so tired of hearing about race or color, that’s bullshit. We are women that get screwed over day after day, time after time. Stop bitching about what color you are and start pitching in.

Bfp’s response was an inspiring mix of insight and compassion. Her response starts with:

This woman reminded me a lot of all the working class poor white mothers I have lived around my whole life…they’re getting fucked as hard as the rest of us women of color–but largely white mainstream feminist organizations like NOW and Feminist Majority aren’t doing these women any more good than they’re doing women of color. They aren’t advocating for poor women (there have been more rights lost for poor women in the last decade than ever before, in my mind), they aren’t organizing these women and they aren’t connecting generational structural violence in the form of military recruitment, poverty and isolation to violence against poor white women.

And furthermore, women of color have they’re own movement.
Poor white women don’t.

I don’t wish to respond directly at this time to this anonymous comment. What i would like to do is to look at a common myth within this comment. The myth is that wimmin of color suck up all the social benefits while White wimmin are stuck scraping by with nothing.

In response, Nappy as I wanna be writes:

That’s all in the eye of the beholder. By and large white women are still the majority of women on welfare, still are the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action, and still consider themselves to be the only one working and not taking money from the government (and yet overwhelming are being presented with these advantages)….

1. White women have children out of wedlock and also have baby daddies (we just call them fathers).
2. White women are divorced and have to have people track down their baby daddies otherwise known as ex-husbands.
3. White women receive welfare.
4. White women receive scholarships. No one ever argues the merit of a white woman receiving a scholarship. One of the things that makes the discord between poor whites and poor people of color is the entitlement. It is as if they know that they are supposed to have more because of this “race” thing and yet they don’t. That’s where the ultimate joke is played, because we could never get together as long as people don’t respect us and as long as people have absolutely no understanding that they are being benefitted.

The myth that wimmin of color receive all the social welfare benefits is not accidental and it is nothing new. Chris Crass’s Beyond Welfare Queens: developing a race, class and gender analysis of Welfare and Welfare Reform gives us a hystorical look at the welfare system and how it has become gendered and racialized.

To understand the racism of such comments, however, it is best to understand the brief hystory of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). AFDC, which was rooted in the 1911 founding of the Mother’s Pension program, started in the 1930s as a way to allow widows with minor children to fulfill their “womanly” duties and stay at home taking care of the kids without having to “dirty their hands” with wage labor. This was meant to be a temporary solution until Social Security kicked in and survivors’ benefits became available. Obviously, AFDC was targeted towards middle-class White wimmin as working class wimmin rarely had the privilege of staying at home to take care of the children and, in the 1930s, it didn’t even occur to the US government that wimmin of color should receive such benefits. So essentially, AFDC welfare benefits were targeted to White, middle-class, widowed (”single”) mothers (a far cry from the single, poor, Black, teen mother, “Welfare Queen” stereotype of today).

Although it was the 1950s when the racialization of welfare first took place, the popularization of race-baiting was pushed forward greatly in the 1980s as Reagan took every opportunity to talk about “welfare queens”. The Right then rolled with this blatantly racist term and turned it into a national stereotype and a movement for welfare reform. The media played its role in perpetuating the stereotypes as well. During the debate on Welfare Reform, a journalist for Newsweek wrote, “Every threat to the fabric of this country - from poverty to crime to homelessness - is connected to out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy.” A few weeks later, the same magazine published an article on the “sexually irresponsible culture of poverty” that labeled teen moms as a social “underclass”. Newsweek was not alone in its attacks. The same month as Newsweek’s story on the “culture of poverty”, Diane Sawyer, on her show “Prime Time Live” asked a teenage mother on AFDC, “why should they [taxpayers] pay for your mistake?” Crass points to a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) of major news outlets and their coverage of welfare that showed the majority of welfare recipients pictured during the Welfare Reform debates were wimmin of color between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. One cover piece on welfare from US News and World Report pictured seven wimmin, all but one were wimmin of color with a majority being Black wimmin.

With an onslaught of images, it is easy to assume that those that benefit the most from welfare are young mothers of color. But the numbers speak differently. Only one percent of welfare recipients are under the age of 20, so this knocks out the teenage mother of color stereotype. Now let’s take a look at the rest of that stereotype.

Martin Gilens, in Why Americans Hate Welfare, finds that “the belief that blacks are lazy is the strongest predictor of the perception that welfare recipients are undeserving.” In a mid-90s study titled “White’s Stereotypes of Blacks: Sources and Political Consequences,” researchers Hurwitz and Peffley found that White people agree that most Black people are lazy (31 percent), not determined to succeed (22 percent), and lacking in discipline (60 percent). It was these stereotypes that fueled the racist attacks on welfare despite the fact that at the time, the majority of welfare recipients were White wimmin. By catering to racism through imagery and rhetoric, those with the agenda of wiping out welfare could convince the largest recipients of welfare (economically-poor White people) that it was a good idea.

It was Clinton’s Welfare Reform in the mid-90s that changed the face of welfare and turned a racist stereotype into fact. By the time Clinton came along, the Right had successfully convinced the nation that welfare was creating a pathological dependancy among poor people. The solution to this “pathology” was work, and thus the AFDC was replaced with Temporary Asistance to Needy Families (TANF) program which gave welfare recipients a short period of time to find work before they would be kicked off the benefit rolls. Ironically, a program that was created to keep mothers out of having to work was now forcing them to work for an average of $5.50 to $7.00 an hour with little-to-no benefits and a major shortage of subsidized childcare.

Though the benefits of TANF (commonly referred to as “welfare-to-work”) have been touted across the party lines, the celebration parade is largely just a morale-boosting, self-congratulatory spectacle. Among the “proof” that TANF and Welfare Reform have been so successful are the facts that benefit rolls have been cut in half and, perhaps more importantly, White wimmin now make up a minority (one-third) of welfare recipients. But it is easy for numbers to obscure reality.

Let’s look at the first evidence of proof: benefit rolls. What the numbers fail to mention is that just because the rolls have dropped by more than 50% does not mean that those that have left the rolls have done so because they have nudged their way into the job market. Quite the contrary. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services suggests that of those that have left the TANF rolls only 21.7% left because they found jobs. Fifteen percent leave because of changes in state policy and the majority (56 percent) leave for “unknown” reasons. As Gary Delgado points out in ColorLines magazine, “People disappear from the rolls because they are “sanctioned” for missing appointments or because they can’t find childcare, or they are “diverted” from applying in the first place.”

So what happened to the White wimmin who left the benefit rolls? Due to employment discrimination (and Affirmative Action policies that benefit White wimmin over people of color), White people found themselves in the job market in larger numbers than those of people of color. However, this doesn’t mean that these former welfare recipients found the euphoria of the working life that was promised in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Instead, the newly employed workers often find themselves no better off or even worse than before they left the benefit rolls. Since 1979, the number of employed people living below the poverty line has jumped from 23% to 30% (33% for White wimmin and even higher for people of color). And less than a quarter find jobs with health benefits. So even those with jobs are finding that it is impossible to pay for all of life’s necessities. Many former recipients report that they skip meals, go hungry, or turn to food pantries and other emergency food assistance because they are unable to afford sufficient amounts of food.

A Government Accounting Office survey found that between nineteen and thirty percent of families returned to welfare soon after leaving. A quarter of those who leave welfare for work quickly lose their unstable jobs. Hystorically, welfare was there to provide a social safety net for those that found themselves pushed out of the unstable job market, but due to time limits for TANF, many families are finding themselves without such a net. Numbers suggests that a disproportionate amount of those returning to welfare are wimmin of color. While systemic racism will lead us to believe the stereotypes listed above (that people of color are lazy, not determined to succeed, and lack discipline), Delgado explains it as follows:

for women of color leaving welfare, there is the old triple whammy of race, gender, and welfare-recipient-status to shape their experiences in the job market. A 1999 study comparing the treatment of black and white welfare recipients, conducted by Dr. Susan Gooden of Virginia Tech University, found that black women earn less than whites, are less likely to be employed full-time, and are overrepresented in lower paying occupations. Gooden also found that black job applicants were asked twice as often as whites to complete a pre-application and that blacks were less likely to receive thorough interviews (45 percent as opposed to 71 percent for whites). Furthermore, 36 percent of African American respondents were subjected to drug tests and criminal record checks, while the 24 percent of whites who were asked to take any test at all were merely asked “character questions.”

There’s more:

*A 1999 study conducted by the Poverty Research and Training Center at the University of Michigan School of Social Work found that 14 percent of participants in employment programs reported four or more instances of discrimination.

*A recent survey conducted by the Idaho Community Action Network in the cities of Lewiston, Burley, and Nampa on the availability of the Child Health Insurance Program found language barriers and racial bias in the administration of the program.

*Respondents to the National Partnership for Women and Families’ 1999 survey of employment service providers in Tennessee, Florida, New York, California, and Pennsylvania reported employer biases against either women or welfare recipients, or both. The survey also uncovered individual cases in Iowa where a welfare-to-work participant reported having to endure a co-worker’s racially derogatory comments on a daily basis. In Indiana, a woman left her job at a fast food restaurant after a co-worker made sexual comments and touched her inappropriately over several months.

So, while there is not yet an overwhelming body of research, the research that does exist clearly establishes that racial and gender discrimination is intensified by welfare reform.

So we see that until recently, the stereotype that most welfare recipients were wimmin of color just wasn’t true and that it has only become true recently because of discriminatory employment practices that have largely left wimmin of color out of the job market while given beneficial treatment to White people. While the “benefits” of welfare-to-work are certainly up for debate, it is apparent that those that benefit most, despite the myth, are NOT wimmin of color.

Regarding the notion that wimmin of color are doing more “bitching” than pitching in, it does not take a lot of research to find that organizations like Incite!, Kensington Welfare Rights Union, The Center for Third World Organizing, the Women of Color Resource Center, and other organizations consisting largely of wimmin of color are doing tremendous work to create a fair and just economy.

I’ll cover the topics of babydaddies, college scholarships, and pay inequity in future posts.

For more info, you can check out the links above and read the following:
Beyond Welfare Queens: developing a race, class, and gender analysis of welfare and welfare reform by Chris Crass
Racing the Welfare Debate by Gary Delgado
Women of Color and Welfare from Incite!
Welfare Facts from the Women of Color Resource Center
The Color of Welfare by Roberta Pergher
Affirmative Action Works! by Paul Kivel

Cross-posted at Ally Work