Symone D. Sanders Townsend writes:

There’s a persistent myth in American politics that poverty has a single face and that face is usually Black, often female, and somehow responsible for her own hardship.

That myth was not born by accident. It was crafted, polished and weaponized. It was built on decades of policy choices and political messaging that added racial overtones to programs designed to combat poverty among all Americans in an effort to erode public support.

Ironically, these programs began as ways to help poor white people. When the New Deal began tackling poverty, programs such as Aid to Dependent Children (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC) were designed to support mostly white, widowed mothers suffering in the Great Depression.

It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement gained traction in the 1960s that more Black families became able to access these same benefits. That led to a backlash against them that the right has long used to try to undercut them.

By the 1970s, amid rising inflation, economic anxiety and racial resentment, conservatives began to cast what was known as “welfare” not as a ladder out of poverty but as a trap and its recipients as ungrateful, unproductive burdens on the system.

That set the stage for Reagan, who took a story about a real woman convicted of fraud and exaggerated it into the fictional “welfare queen” who was supposedly cashing multiple checks under multiple names and driving a Cadillac.

The strategy worked. The “welfare queen” myth gave policymakers from both parties permission to strip benefits from millions of people. [Continue reading…]