welfare queen
On Work Ethic, Laziness, and Lies
i.
I was 9 years old the first time I was sent home with a note: "Bethany struggles to complete assignments on time. She seems distracted and unmotivated. Please reach out to schedule a meeting." My momma was furious. I was always forgetting to do my current events assignment. Always forgetting to ask for a newspaper in time. Always unwilling to ask daddy to get off his computer to look up an article. Her words hit like a slap: " How many times I got to tell you! You can’t afford to be so LAZY! Not in this world. It would have taken you two seconds to write your assignment down!"
“Lazy” became a curse I feared more than failure. It clung to me, a shadow I could never escape. If I forgot to take out the trash, missed a spot washing dishes, or didn’t finish my homework, the admonition of laziness was always waiting. My momma said it so often, it became the voice in my head. I learned to say it to myself. Why are you so LAZY?! I was 9, struggling to understand why homework even existed when we spent all day doing problems at school. Maybe it was executive dysfunction that kept me off task. Maybe it was lazy not to want to be bothered. But I was getting a whole lot done for a lazy girl.
By 7, I was cooking full meals. Nothing crazy, but I could get a bowl of spaghetti and meat sauce on the table for 4 people in 40 minutes. By 10, I was handling my sister’s bullies, packing her lunch, and checking her homework. (You can’t tell me I didn’t raise her.) I got my working papers the very first day I could. I held down a job at 14 while keeping my grades up. I volunteered with AmeriCorps, worked as a consultant, and took on countless other roles. I don’t remember the last time I sat still. But that word, lazy, still echoes.
Even now, when I make a mistake, the first insult that comes to mind isn’t from a boss or stranger. It’s from me: You. So. Damn. LAZY! That’s the voice I carry, even as I keep proving it wrong. And whenever I do manage to touch a blessing, it feels like a cheap trick.
My experience with laziness is a microcosm for the way we talk about Black women everywhere. If we not mules, we’re welfare queens. It boggles my mind that we pretend Black women are lazy, when we have what scholars call a foundational work ethic. 1
ii.
The myth of Black women’s laziness is a weaponized narrative that obscures our historical role as society's labor force and perpetuates the continued disenfranchisement and criminalization of poverty.
Have you ever heard of Linda Taylor? She’s a person pulled from the pages of a crime thriller. Linda had a history that included alleged homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking.2 In the 70’s, then President Ronald Regan, in conjunction with the press media, gave Linda Taylor a title that would become infamous: the “welfare queen.”
She was painted as the Cadillac-driving villain in Reagan’s war on public assistance in 1976, her story was used to convince voters that welfare fraud was rampant and public aid needed slashing. Reagan’s narrative worked. By the late 1970s, the welfare queen had a seat at every political discourse table, and haunted the halls of classrooms and voter booths around the nation. While the actual cases of welfare fraud were and remain rare (less than 1% according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) this narrative has persisted, fueling punitive welfare reforms. Studies show that the majority of public assistance recipients are white, yet Black women are disproportionately represented in public discourse and face the harshest stigma.3
The discourse on the welfare queen shifted away from blaming select women who unfairly exploited the system and … shifted to allege that no woman should be reliant on the state for the support of her children. … Once the welfare queen was mobilized in this way, the stereotype became an effective tool that decreased public empathy for people trapped in poverty, encouraged shame about the poor’s need to ask for family assistance, and marginalized the poor from political conversations about the state’s role in supporting families.
— Catherine Powell & Camille Gear Rich
The mythological character of the welfare queen, didn’t remain rooted in the past, or fade away with time or clarification. The narrative grew, twisted, and adapted through the decades like a nation state game of telephone.
The 90’s brought with it Bill Clinton. The sax playing, smooth talking president. The cool president. The president that was supposed to put the penny pinching days of Regonomics behind us. But the game was still afoot. Policies still needed rolling out.
President Bill Clinton's administration introduced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which expanded the death penalty and cut inmate education funding.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), imposing strict time limits and work requirements.4
This same rhetoric reappeared in Trump’s America, with the welfare queen trope repurposed to target immigrant mothers and voters of color. Immigrant women became the new villains—having “anchor babies” to exploit public benefits, or voting illegally to disrupt democracy. 5 The welfare queen stereotype has slipped into electoral politics, stoking fears about so-called “voter tricksters” as justification for creating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Republican politicians and media figures pushed the idea that Black and Brown women were flooding polling places to deceive officials and steal elections, undermining the voting power of “real” Americans. These accusations relied on familiar narratives of theft and dishonesty, long used to paint women of color on public assistance as irredeemable and unworthy of empathy or concern.
iii.
If labor is seen as any action that directly or indirectly supports capitalism, then everything Black women do is labor.
Whether in the plantation economy or today’s offices, Black women have been expected to nurture, fix, and maintain systems that would collapse without our efforts. From caregiving and emotional support to organizing and community-building, Black women have always been the invisible workforce that keeps both economic and social systems from crumbling. And yet, when the world chooses to define Black women’s work ethic, they point to… Linda Taylor.
Linda Taylor was indeed a terrible person. Her crimes against humanity and the state were vast. Even the mythology of the “welfare queen,” which was built around her, is dangerous, harming not only Black women, but also the victims she left behind. Taylor’s story has been distorted to serve political agendas, obscuring the truth in favor of a story about laziness, manipulation, and dependency on the state. And so many people believe in the laziness lie, and have taught generations of Black women to overwork themselves in order to counteract it. We have been taught to reject rest as a luxury we can't afford.
At 30, I finally found the truth behind my own laziness lie: an ADHD diagnosis. Suddenly, everything I couldn’t explain made sense. The procrastination wasn’t laziness; it was overwhelm. The missed deadlines weren’t carelessness; they were time blindness. The exhaustion wasn’t weakness; it was burnout. For years, I carried the weight of family, school, work, and life, all while battling an invisible struggle I didn’t understand. It felt eerily like learning that the commonly held beliefs about welfare, and who is on it, and how they’re using it, and why, was really just … propaganda. Mythology.
Even now, as I build a life that allows me to rest and thrive, I feel the ghost of that word—“lazy”—haunting me. But I am not lazy. Neither are you. We are tired. This tiredness doesn’t come from a lack of work, it comes from generations of overwork, of carrying burdens that were never ours to carry.
Soulwork is an attempt lay down some of that weight, to work in ways that honor my soul instead of depleting it. It feels revolutionary, but more importantly, it feels right.
Don’t believe the laziness lie.
Love yall. Mean it. If you love me back, buy me a book!
FURTHER READING
Here I am referring to Work Ethic as defined by Joan M Martin in More Than Chains And Toil. Martin's framework does not agree with the definition of labor or work as I have defined it here however, and makes the assertion that work must include self satisfaction. I disagree with this, and contend that there must be an intentional reclaiming of Black woman’s time, labor and wellness in order for there to be any personal satisfaction in her work. Adding these elements is soulwork.
https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html
This is still true. A report by the Pew Research Center found that in 2020, non-Hispanic white individuals comprised 44.6% of adult SNAP recipients, while Black individuals accounted for about 27%. Pew Research Center
Even the shift in language from 'Families with Dependent Children,' a term that casts no judgment on the families, to 'Needy Families,' which carries a negative connotation is shady.
https://digital.law.fordham.edu/faculty-spotlight-2020/the-welfare-queen-goes-to-the-polls-race-based-fractures-in-gender-politics-and-opportunities-for-intersectional-coalitions/