The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen

Notes

Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1. Political context is used here as a commonly understood term rather than the more specialized definition intended by political scientists such as Huckfeldt and Sprague (1995) and Beck et al. (2002), which includes specific attention to state or neighborhood demographics as predictors of political participation. 2. Mountains of data have been collected over three decades to prove this public image false, but it lingers in most Americans’ minds (see Gilens 1995, 1996, 2001). 3. The empirical method utilized in the study is content analysis, from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. Further information about data analysis procedures appears in Appendix C. 4. This shift in the perceived race of many welfare recipients is largely due to structural changes such as the shift of widows to Social Security benefits and out of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) programs. As well, the New Deal marks an important historical transition in that the creation of Social Security in 1935 was facilitated by the support of southern Democratic congressmen, who wrangled the exclusion of African American–dominated occupations (such as agricultural labor and domestic work) from Social Security eligibility in order to preserve the racial status quo in the southern states (see Giddings 1984 and Quadagno 1994, among others). 5. The psychological transition here is described in Shaver et al. 1999. The political transition is my own extrapolation of that transition. 6. Here I do not mean to suggest that elites simply create the frames and American citizens are tabulae rasa, accepting the frames completely at face value. Rather, I mean to suggest that frames are created to comply with fundamental egalitarian and inegalitarian beliefs that are part of American political culture, with public identities crystallizing in the process. Notes to Chapter 2 1. All such quotations are in block format. 2. This is not to say that nationalism operates in universal ways among 185 women or even among Black women. A theoretically complex account of nationalism as an ideological discourse in all its facets is beyond the scope of this study but will be attended to as necessary within it. 3. Indeed, the highest prices for female slaves were paid for those deemed attractive enough for sale into the “fancy trade” that flourished in New Orleans and had an elaborate system of “octoroon” and “quadroon” balls, where women of mixed racial ancestry (deemed slaves because they were daughters of slave mothers ) were presented for male guests’ pleasure. 4. I am grateful to Michelle Hardy, M.A., UNC-Chapel Hill, for her excellent presentation on this subject, which has not yet been published. 5. Despite its demographics, the NWRO remained formally and informally committed to racial inclusion. Latinas and White women were included in the leadership via executive committee positions, and several WROs in the southwestern United States were predominantly Latina. Formal leaders urged mobilization outside the inner cities, and published their newsletter in Spanish as well as English. 6. A sense of injustice is a key affective component for building a psychological framework conducive to collective action (W. Gamson 1992, 7). 7. Leaders participating in the meeting included Johnnie Tillmon, Etta Horn, and Beulah Sanders from the NWRO, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernethy , and Andrew Young from SCLC. 8. In particular, debates about policy priorities revealed such cleavages. This included the debate over the top priority: economic independence (favored by the NWRO elected leaders and NWRO members) or reinforcement of intact, traditional , heterosexual families. Such controversies ultimately led to the resignation of George Wiley, the Black middle-class executive director of the NWRO and most of the White middle-class male staff. The outside funding went with them. 9. See, e.g., Levy v. Louisiana, Marsh v. Alabama, Goldberg v. Kelly (West 1981; Mink 1998). 10. I use this date to refer to the closing of the NWRO national offices in Washington and the cessation of nationwide organizing. Several state and local chapters continued to work for welfare rights post-1975. 11. I take up the role of the media explicitly in chapter 5. 12. See C. Murray 1986; Herrnstein and Murray 1994 for examples of such frames. 13. Taylor and Lincoln (1998) found that Million Man March attendees had higher levels of income (61 percent had incomes of $30,000 or more), education (73 percent had some education beyond high school), and voter registration (80 percent were registered to vote) than the overall Black male population. 14. See Collins 1990...