Woman Studies Questions

"WELFARE QUEEN": THE ULTIMATE OXYMORON

The public identity of the "welfare queen" is the indigent version of the Black matriarch controlling image (Collins, 1990:74), a dominant mother responsible for the moral degeneracy of America (Amott, 1990; Collins, 1991; Lubiano, 1990; Mink, 1998; Murray, 1984). Wahneema Lubiano, a former welfare recipient who is now professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Duke University, gives the following contemporary definition:

Within the terms specifically of, or influenced by, the Moynihan Report and generally of the discourse on the "culture of poverty," "welfare queen" is a phrase that describes economic dependency -- the lack of a job and/or income (which equals degeneracy in the United States); the presence of a child or children with no father and/or husband (moral deviance); and finally, a charge on the collective U.S. Treasury -- a human debit. (Lubiano, 1992:337-338)

The public identity of the "welfare queen," as enumerated above, crystallized into a political symbol during the Reagan administration, when President Reagan, taking up the cause once championed by Senator Russell Long (D-LA)(8), lambasted them in speeches for living off the hard working American taxpayers. The title "welfare queen," however, simply gives a name to long-standing beliefs regarding single poor African-American mothers' laziness and licentiousness.(9) These longstanding beliefs, according to theorists, have numerous effects. First, such beliefs contribute to the political marginalization of single poor African-American mothers within American political culture. Second, such beliefs are shared by many in the African-American community, producing secondary marginalization (Cohen, 1996) within African-American political culture. Third, the use of the "welfare queen" public identity as a proxy for all welfare recipients produces policy solutions that are based on a misrepresentation of welfare recipients and lead to a misdiagnosis of the problem. This miscalculation logically limits the potential success of a proposed solution. The next section of this paper explores the last phenomenon through an analysis of elite dependence on this public identity.

The public identity of the "welfare queen" is a constructed identity designed for the explicit purpose of justifying specific forms of public policy ideologically. The process of public identity creation and dissemination, while subject to challenge and intervention, is largely out of the hands of those who are characterized by it.(10) The introduction of the term "welfare queen" into the American lexicon serves a purpose similar to the term "inner city;" it becomes a code word for a certain "type" of individual with certain "pathological" behaviors preventing them from sharing in the American dream. Thus the public identity described here is a product of both stereotypes (of the intersections of race, class and gender identity) and the tendency towards individual-level explanations found more broadly in American political culture. That the "welfare queen" has a specific race in political discourse has been demonstrated in earlier research (Gilens, 1995, 1996); in upcoming sections of this paper I also account for class, gender and political values such as individualism in this product of the political culture.

While the term "welfare queen" is an explicitly political creation, the cognitive structure it is intended to trigger stems from a larger academic discourse dating to the work of sociologists E. Franklin Frazier, Kenneth Clark and Oscar Lewis, the coiner of a related term, "culture of poverty." The transition from academic discourse to political discourse occurred through the now well-known efforts of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), more commonly termed, The Moynihan Report.(11)

Moynihan's work, while perhaps well-intentioned,(12) exacerbated the impact of individual-level, behavioral approaches to solving poverty, sparking a wide body of research and policy analysis in this vein. Similarly, longstanding beliefs about single poor Black women, including attribution to them of lower morals and hyperfertility became guiding assumptions underlying subsequent social science research (Collins, 1998a:101). The report played an important role in shaping the debate both within and outside of the Black community.

In a curious mix of race, class, and gender politics, many aspects of The Moynihan Report received the sotto voce approval of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. (SCLC), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), and Whitney Young (Urban League).(13) Civil rights leaders, in keeping with the gender norms of most Black churches, encouraged men to take their rightful places as heads of households. In this sense, they tacitly reinforced Moynihan's and Frazier's arguments that female-headed households were countercultural and thus incompatible with the American lifestyle. Combined with pre-existing gender norms of African-American political culture, The Moynihan Report further shaped Black attitudes towards single poor African-American mothers, encouraging Black male chauvinism (Giddings, 1984:329) and hardening the lines of demarcation between the poorest African Americans and their more affluent counterparts.

Another glaring example of secondary marginalization, defined by Cohen as political isolation within a marginalized community (1996), was the National Welfare Rights Organization's (NWRO) utter lack of support from two influential African-American institutions. During its ten-year existence, the NWRO, a grassroots organization of single poor African-American mothers, received virtually no financial support from Black churches, the strongest independent organizations within the African-American community during the 1960s and 1970s (West, 1981). The NWRO also faced an uphill baffle on Capitol Hill in its fight against a major piece of legislation, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP).(14) The newly formed Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) did not publicly reject the Moynihan-designed FAP (presented by the Nixon administration) or fight against it until the conference committee met to iron out differences in Titles IV and V of the act itself (West 1981, p.318). Anti-welfare attitudes in the African-American community continued into the 1990s (Cose et al., 1999; Kinder & Sanders, 1996).

While several prominent scholars generated voluminous research to refute the findings of Moynihan, the emphasis on individual-level explanations for Black poverty based on the public identity of single poor African-American mothers remained strong in both the American and African-American political cultures.

Moynihan's role in the political sphere has contributed a great deal to the persistence of the individual-level explanations for persistent poverty.(15) Moynihan, considered a liberal Democrat, contributed to the bipartisan consensus surrounding the public identity of the "welfare queen" during his tenure in the Nixon administration (West, 1981). Although ideologically opposed to Moynihan, Charles Murray (1984) and Lawrence Mead (1986) also predicate their work on the public identity of the "welfare queen".

This anecdotal evidence portends broader assertions of consensus among elites and dominant groups in the next section of this paper. As the public identity of the "welfare queen" went largely unchallenged, policy options remained focused on individual behavior modification rather than structural changes, largely due to another artifact of American political culture, American individualism. The tone of calls for behavior modification policies, however, shifted from earlier desires to paternalistically socialize welfare mothers into American middle-class values(16) to questions of deserving benefits. Allegations of "rampant" fraud and abuse uncovered by a fourth estate focused on investigative journalism following the Watergate scandal contributed to the changing public perceptions of the welfare rights movement. Requests for benefits or changes in policies signified in citizens' minds that recipients (and at times NWRO activists) were asking for more than they deserved. Dandridge v. Williams (1970) gave judicial force to the belief that public assistance is a privilege, not a right. While some members of the media earnestly sought answers to the age-old question of Black poverty, they, like Moynihan, reinforced the public identity of the "welfare queen."(17)

The contemporary findings regarding the outcomes of such investigative attempts note that media reports use African Americans 65% of the time as the face of poverty. Electronic media use African-American images at an even higher rate, to the point where they are used as proxies for each other in coverage on an alarmingly frequent basis (Associated Press, 1997:A2; see also Soss, 1999 for the impact on welfare recipients themselves). Similarly, in academic discourse the "new racism" thesis asserts that as overt racism is less acceptable in public, issues coded by race serve as a method for American citizens to express racially conservative views. This phenomenon has been found to affect welfare politics (Feldman & Zaller, 1992; Gilens, 1995, 1996). Single poor Black mothers, as the centerpieces of welfare discourse in the media and academe, are cast at best as incompetent mothers struggling to survive in a bewildering world. At worst, they are presumed to be lazy, baby-making system abusers in violation of America's most cherished political values.

The impact of the "welfare queen" public identity on political culture has distinct political and policy ramifications. The "welfare queen" is judged at all levels to be shirking her duty to carry her part of the load as an American citizen. She usurps the taxpayers' money, produces children who will do the same, and emasculates the titular head of her household, the Black male. In the language of the national family, she avoids contributing her fair share to the national well-being, either as a "bearer of American values" or as a contributor to the political economy of the United States.(18) Particularly with regard to a language of family that implies rights, obligations, and rules (Collins, 1998b:71), those who are presumed to be avoiding their contributions are prevented from sharing in the complete spoils of citizenship granted them via their location in the political system.

A significant amount of anecdotal evidence presented here from the media and academic discourses asserts that the public identity of the "welfare queen" is single, Black, and female. The influence of such an identity also undergirds recent findings exploring White Americans' negative attitudes towards welfare and their reliance on race as a factor (Gilens, 1995, 1996) and also influences the negative attitudes of African-Americans (Cose et al., 1999). In order to solidify my claim that this public identity constitutes an underlying assumption of mainstream contemporary welfare politics, I turn to the evidence of political elites' reliance on the identity during public policy debates.