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

5 Contending with the Politics of Disgust: Public Identity through Welfare Recipients’ Eyes

Contending with the Politics of Disgust Public Identity through Welfare Recipients’ Eyes Lost are the voices of mothers who receive welfare, yet speak with pride and strength. (L. Williams 1995, 1194) I began this book with a portrait of Bertha Bridges, a Detroit welfare recipient whose life was “a nightmare”—her words. Congressman Scott McInnis (R-CO) used her story as an ideological justification for his ideas regarding welfare reform, not Bertha’s ideas about improving her life. I characterized this behavior as a perversion of democratic attention : employing the story of a less-empowered citizen to advance one’s own political purposes. Absent a strong and effective National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in 1996, what was the response of recent welfare recipients to the persistent misconceptions about them? Chapters 2, 3, and 4 provide ample evidence of the public identity of the “welfare queen” in historical context, media discourse, and congressional debate. They document how cues of the “welfare queen” public identity undergirded both sides of the 1996 welfare reform debate. The discursive hegemony of this public identity prevents accurate information about welfare recipients from being integrated into citizens’ preexisting beliefs about the identities of welfare recipients. It also bombards welfare recipients themselves with “demeaning imagery of who society says she is” (L. Williams 1995, 1193; see also Steele and Sherman, 1999). To this point, I have emphasized how the public identity of the “welfare queen” played a role in shaping the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. In this chapter, I want to focus on the more personal 5 117 political outcomes for mothers receiving public assistance just before and after 1996. Two former welfare recipients have emphasized welfare mothers’ response to the distorted images found in the media and Congress about them. Wahneema Lubiano writes: The cumulative totality, circulation and effect of these meanings in a time of scarce resources among the working class and the lower class is devastatingly intense. The “welfare queen” represents moral aberration and an economic drain, but the figure’s problematic status becomes all the more threatening once responsibility for the destruction of the “American way of life” is attributed to it. (Lubiano 1992, 339) Sandy Smith Madsen, another former welfare mother, concurs: “[M]ost welfare mothers know their precarious places and wisely, question nothing” (Madsen 1998, A44). Madsen’s article discussed the welfare agency experiences of welfare recipients who pursue higher education , to which I will attend later in this chapter. Recent empirical evidence reveals that many welfare clients would not challenge a situation unless it constituted a predicament extremely detrimental to their children (Soss 1999, 366). My purpose in this chapter is to explore how welfare recipients contend with the politics of disgust in 1996 and beyond. Instead of exclusively using media and legislative documents, I seek a richer treatment of the complex reality of their lives by including the results of seven in-depth interviews and other quotations from welfare recipients themselves.1 In addition to illustrating the four aspects of the politics of disgust—perversion of democratic attention; an inegalitarian communicative context; the failure of representative thinking; and lack of solidarity—I will again distinguish between the stereotypes and moral judgments of public identity and the facts regarding welfare recipients, despite decades of scholars’ previous attempts to do just that (Jennings 1994, 26). The Perversion of Democratic Attention Chapters 2, 3, and 4 show how our attention is drawn in very specific ways to the need for welfare reform through cues of the “welfare queen” public identity. The perversion of democratic attention emerges not sim118 | Contending with the Politics of Disgust ply in the story about Bertha Bridges or in the profile in this chapter of any welfare recipient. Another disturbing manifestation of democratic attention gone awry was the association of welfare recipients with animals, particularly animals with detrimental characteristics. These metaphorical associations again take the multivaried realities of welfare recipients’ lives and reduce them to their most base common denominator. In this sense, such allusions are very closely related to psychological findings regarding cues of disgust as an emotion (Rozin, Haidt, et al. 1999, 332; Keltner and Haidt 1999, 513; Rozin, Lowery, et al. 1999, 575). The reduction of women on welfare, and the women of color who are assumed to be, to animals is not a new phenomenon (White, 1985; Giddings , 1984). In chapter 2, I noted Senator Russell...