Socioeconomic Implications Of The Welfare Queen

The author of “The Black Beauty Myth” Sirena Riley has encountered multiple experiences concerning body image throughout her life. At a young age, she started to feel the pressure to have a perfect body. The struggle of making herself perfect ultimately lead to eating disorders for instance, bulimia and compulsive exercising. In her journey from a young age to her college years she has learned better ways to deal with negative body image through therapy. In her article, she states “I was in three body image and eating disorder groups with other young women on my campus. I was always the only black woman.” (Riley 2002, 229) This quote supports her belief that black women have body image issues but are not open to seeking help or expressing

Patriarchy’s Scapegoat: Black womanhood and femininity – A critique of racism, gender inequality, anti-blackness, and historical exploitation of black women.

At a campaign rally in 1976 Ronald Reagan talked about welfare queens and poverty. He said, “She used eighty names, thirty addresses and fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security and veteran’s benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands as well as welfare. Her tax free cash income alone has been running 150,000 thousand dollars a year.”The welfare system is full of gender stereotyping. Stereotyping is when we make perceptions on what we make about others. In the past forty years America welfare system has been designed around Reagan’s fake welfare queen (Black, Sprague). This slur has had negative effects for the families on welfare that urgently need support and are struggling. This paper will discuss the lies of the welfare queen and how it originated and its negative effects on African American families and young girls.

Changes within the welfare system as a result of policy shifts and by new thinking, more generally in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have had many methods, but the one that seemed most important, was that welfare recipients were required to do much more to justify their income support payments than before. The foundation of this new idea is that income support programs should allow individuals to maximise their participation in work. Due to the general shift in welfare administration, the number of activity test requirements an individual in Australia must meet in order to receive unemployment benefits, has expanded significantly since the early 1990s. This complex, overly bureaucratic process means that disadvantaged individuals cannot access the income support payments they require.

The welfare system first came into action during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployed citizens needed federal assistance to escape the reality of severe poverty. The welfare system supplies families with services such as: food stamps, medicaid, and housing among others. The welfare system has played a vital role in the US, in controlling the amount of poverty to a certain level. Sadly, the system has been abused and taken for granted by citizens across the country. The welfare system was previously controlled by the federal government until 1996; the federal government handed over the responsibility to the states in hope of reducing welfare abuse. However, this change has not prevented folks from scamming the system. The

Obesity was significantly more prevalent amongst female African Americans in this community. With the highest rate affecting women between the ages of 45 to 64. Obesity was also higher amongst Black females who’s educational attainment was lower

In American culture, the obese body is represented very negatively. One factor that contributes to this negative representation is the abundance of negative reactions that people display towards overweight people. It is a stigma that often taints and belittles the person, leading others to judge the individual negatively, rejecting, hating, or ridiculing him or her. That can often lead the obese person to develop sever psychological problems.

David Zucchino’s captivating book, Myth of the Welfare Queen, sticks to his journalistic roots and reads like an extended news article as it captures two separate yet interconnected stories of women struggling to get by in Northern Philadelphia. Philadelphia was—and is—an impoverished city in many ways, with huge percentages of the population struggling to get by at or bellow the poverty line. Zucchino spent much of 1995 with woman and families on welfare as it was a time when welfare was a particularly hot topic directly preceding the passing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Zucchino strove to cut through the stereotypes and misinformation surrounding welfare and those relying on it. In his own words, “this book is the story of

In America today, just over ten million people are on unemployment insurance, one hundred and ten million people are on welfare, and the total government spending annually is around one hundred and thirty billion dollars (Welfare Statistics). The welfare state is a political system based on the proposition that the government has the individual responsibility to ensure that the minimum standard of living is met for all citizens. Specifically, in the matters of health care, public education, employment, and social security, the welfare state assumes all responsibility. According to John Rawls, “In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice“(Rawls). In the 1840s, Otto Von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, was the father of the modern welfare state. He built the program to win over the support of the working middle class in Germany and ultimately reduce the outflow of immigrants to the U.S., where welfare did not exist (Welfare State). In the United States, not all companies provided workers with benefits, thus the workers appealed to the government, giving rise to the first form of welfare capitalism.

What would happen if the government made changes to the welfare system? There are approximately 110,489,000 of Americans on welfare. Many people benefit from what the system has to offer: food stamps, housing, health insurance, day care, and unemployment. Taxpayers often argue that the individuals who benefit from the system, abuse the system; however, this is not entirely true. Many of the people who receive benefits really and truly need the help. Even though some people believe welfare should be reformed, welfare should not be reformed because 40% of single mothers are poor, some elderly people do not have a support system, and college students can not afford to take extra loans.

Today we live in a society that over the years has become so obsessed with body image and how an individual should look. Different cultures have different standards and norms that help to define their ideal body image. African Americans because of their differences in culture have gone against most cultural norms and have set their own definitions of beauty, body image, and body satisfaction. Because of these key differences, the African American community is less likely to feel the pressures that come with body shaming that typically leads to many eating disorders. Through research of different studies, surveys, and interviews, we can begin to learn why African Americans have set their own set of standards and how they have decided to fit into todays society.

Linda Gordon’s study, which focused on the two-tier welfare system in place in 1890-1935, discusses “a nationally supported social insurance system [that] gave generous benefits to workers who were disproportionately white and male”(Dill and Zambrana, 182). While simultaneously there was a “poorly funded state-supported system of ‘means tested’ morally evaluated benefits for those who were irregularly employed, a disproportional number of whom were women and minorities” (Dill and Zambrana, 182). Clearly, this is another historical representation of hegemonic power completely mistreating women and minorities, this mistreatment stemming from a broken system based on systematically oppressing minorities. Programs like these which mistreat, dehumanize,

“Society tells girls how to look and how to act and that’s not good at all” “On late night talk shows people are more likely to hear about how thin Nicole Richie is then a fat joke abouthow heavy Queen Latifah is.” “Ideals of beauty change some what over time, but the simple fact is that proponents of plus-size preference have failed to convince America that fat is beautiful.”

They found that black women overall prefer a more voluptuous and robust body shape; the women seem to correlate this with wealth, stature and fitness across cultures (Ofuso, Lafreniere, Senn, 1998). Another study that looked at how women view their bodies supports these findings. This study shows how perceptions of body image vary between African American and Caucasian women. African American women tended to be happier with themselves and have a higher self esteem. The women were all college women from two small community colleges in Connecticut; this is very important that their surroundings are essentially the same (Molloy, Herzberger, 1998). Although these studies reveal that African American and Black women across the world have different cultural constraints and body image ideals than other ethnic groups, other studies urge researchers not to forget that Black women are not unsusceptible to eating disorders and low self esteem. One literature review cautions that the dominant culture of a society may impose its views on individuals and cause a deterioration or change in values and perceptions (Williamson, 1998). Interestingly, Black women with high self-esteem and more positive body images also possess more masculine traits than other women studied.

Throughout history, black female bodies have been marginalized by white society and viewed as only being valued for their bodies, specifically their genitals. bell hooks’ essay titled, “naked without shame: a counter-hegemonic body politic”, discusses the domination of the black female body and how there is little discussion on how the body has been “foregrounded as a site of conquest in all efforts of colonization”. According to hooks, black bodies are rarely highlighted in a way that counters the hegemonic representation of being