By Congresswoman Gwen Moore, Representative of Wisconsin’s 4th District
In her article, Representative Moore tells her story through poverty to the United States Congress and how she benefitted from the welfare programs that are consistently under attack in American popular culture. As Nadasen’s article discussed, stereotypes and images of black women as “welfare queens” have reinscribed racial domination in the popular and political discourse. Moore attempts to take back this derogatory label as we saw other men and women have in the black community with other names and labels to redefine its meaning, in hopes of shifting their impact on black Americans from severe insult to empowerment.
You can call me a welfare queen. I proudly wear the crown. To me, a welfare queen is a woman who defies the odds against her to reign over her destiny and find a path out of poverty.
She goes on to discuss how welfare served to level the playing field for her as it does for so many others struggling in America’s unfair, capitalist society. This is its primary purpose, she argues, and one which she wishes to properly frame the narrative around in contrast to the image of laziness neglect, and moral depravity that continue to dominate our society’s popular conception of welfare along racial and gender lines from the 1960s.
The misguided notion that 38 million people living in poverty can simply “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” with no government support is ludicrous and unfair.
Much of the push-back surrounding expanding welfare programs to benefit the poor in our country is due to how it has been racialized in the popular image and stereotypes have caused reforms that now push single mothers into the workforce more rather than supporting their roles as mothers raising their children. I found Moore’s story especially inspiring and interesting in conjunction with the video about the Reagan administration and how they were able to use the story of one black woman who scammed the system to form the image of every welfare recipient in the public’s mind. They were able to use one woman to create this much popular protest and resentment around welfare programs, which raises a somewhat obvious question in my mind. If it only takes one woman’s story to do so, couldn’t we use someone like Moore’s success story to reshape the narrative as an example of how welfare programs help individuals succeed while ridding our popular culture of the racist and misogynistic image of the “welfare queen?”