Henderson and Tickameyer discuss the racial politics of welfare in the United States, drawing attention to the figure of the white Appalachian welfare mother. How is the status of the white Appalachian welfare mother both similar to and different from that of the urban black welfare mother?
March 20, 2019 at 10:45 am
In this chapter, Henderson and Tickameyer discuss the interplay between class and race amongst women in poverty. Interestingly, they point out that within the media African Americans, particularly women, are disproportionately at the forefront of poverty discourse. While in reality, it is lower-class whites that make up the majority of Americans under the poverty line. Similar to the way that Precious’s mother, Mary, is portrayed in Precious (2009), impoverish African American women are typically seen as “welfare queens” who are lazy bad mothers that are not willing to work. Henderson and Tickameyer then discuss how people tend to break up the lowerclass into levels of deservingness, tossing the black “welfare queens” in the group of undeserving welfare cheats.
Along with this, poor African American women fit in with the stereotype that race and class are conflated. Blacks are incorrectly thought of as being the face of poverty. Poor white women, many of which are from Appalachia, on the other hand, are often thought about in common discourse as the anomaly of the otherwise socially high-class whites. To distinguish between middle/upper class whites and the poverty stricken Appalachian whites, common terms are used to push them further down the social hierarchy such as “white trash” and “hillbillies.” In this way, Appalachian white welfare mothers are othered and ignored from mainstream politics.
Lastly, it is also interesting that although white welfare mothers are largely ignored by the media, Henderson and Tickameyer point out that poor whites in Appalachia are often used by policy makers to show that the welfare system is not racially biased. This is interesting because politicians can exploit the poverty of these people to advance their agenda, while not disrupting the stereotypes and inability for social or economic mobility.