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

1 Introduction: The Face of Welfare Reform

Introduction The Face of Welfare Reform Imagine the following scenario. While watching C-SPAN in July of 1996, you observe a member of the House of Representatives reading the following statement: Bertha Bridges is still waiting for the end of welfare as she knows it. She and her three children have been on and off welfare since the early 1980s, and she has been unable to hold a job in recent years because school administrators often call several times a week to ask her to pick up her disruptive, severely depressed 13 year-old son for fighting and disobeying teachers. (Appendix B, Document 75A) If you close your eyes and picture Bertha Bridges, you envision a person “with issues.” Despite no overt reference to her economic class or race, “coded” categories abound, including welfare, a disruptive male child, unemployment, and nearly fifteen years of sporadic welfare dependency. We may blame the member of Congress for creating such an image, but the next statement reveals a more complex picture: Seventeen months after U.S. News first interviewed her for a cover story on welfare reform, matters have only worsened for the Detroit resident. Several weeks ago her son let three strangers into her house, and they promptly stole Bridges’ money, jewelry, clothing, dishes and videocassette recorder. Her son is now back in a psychiatric hospital, his younger sister is starting to imitate him by refusing to complete school assignments and Bridges doesn’t know where to turn for help. “I’m living a nightmare,” she says. (Ibid.) 1 1 Here Bridges herself contributes to your mental picture. Her life, most charitably, could be characterized as spinning out of control. A harsher view would see her as an incompetent mother nurturing the next generation of pathology. Importantly, the role of the media in the process of public debate is also made clear: a magazine is given as a source of information reliable enough to be included in the public record. This is the face of welfare included in the Congressional Record for the floor debate regarding HR 3734, now the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act (PRWA) of 1996. When citizens like Bertha Bridges are thrust into the public sphere for political purposes, the potential for “reasonable” democratic consideration of policy options is bleak. Reading the first excerpt from the Congressional Record triggers a comparison of Bridges to stereotypes about welfare recipients. This act of cognition occurs so quickly that before we read her own words (as quoted by a journalist), we have given her an identity that acts from that point forward as an interpretive filter. Whether her words reinforce or contest the identity assigned by the reader, any political claim she may make later in the article is still considered in the context of that identity. After those two paragraphs and the rest of the article, the debate of HR 3734 continues, with the identity lingering in our minds. What are the political implications of this image for our democracy? This book explores one compelling answer to this question. Bertha Bridges’s story triggers a specific identity in many American minds. The identity, although shaped by political elites, academicians, and the media, draws on citizens’ preexisting beliefs about women who exist at the intersection of marginalized race, class, and gender identities. The harsh light under which Bridges found herself in July of 1996 is emblematic of the political context in which HR 3734 was developed and ultimately signed into law. Political context,1 a key product of political culture, is commonly thought of as a primary influence on policy decisions. In this vein, historical and contextual changes in political culture and public discourse receive a share of the responsibility for the preservation of democracy (Almond and Verba 1963, 5; Merelman 1984; Barber 1998; M. Williams 1998), not the destruction of it. However, political culture encompasses more than the shared beliefs, values, and norms that coalesce to form a political context at a particular political moment. It also includes identities learned by means of experiences and relationships in institutions like 2 | Introduction families, schools, the media, and voluntary associations (Conover et al. 2002, 5). Certain identities, such as race and gender, are salient in American political culture due to long-standing beliefs of politically important differences between people of different races and different genders. Often at the insistence of members of marginalized races and genders, such differences...