Hillbillies and Welfare Queens, Revisited

For my first Caffeinated Commentary, I wrote about the revival of the culture of poverty myth since the 2016 election. At the time, self-described “hillbilly” turned venture capitalist J.D. Vance was promoting his book Hillbilly Elegy. Its descriptions of the inherent dysfunction allegedly at the heart of Appalachian poverty motivated me to write this piece as I thought about who gets to speak for poor and rural communities. Today, I’d like to revisit some other complications inherent in the narratives and delegated speakers for broad swaths of people.

Since writing the piece, I’ve stolen and read Millennial Initiative director Reid Cramer’s copy of David T. Ellwood’s Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family. The book begins with a vignette of two low-income mothers on the Oprah Winfrey show in 1986:

One said that even though she was working her tail off, trying to earn enough money to raise her family, she was hardly making it. But she certainly was not going to take any handouts. She deeply resented the mothers on welfare who were getting money, medical insurance, and food stamps while they were doing nothing. The other woman, who was on welfare, countered by saying that no lazy person could raise and clothe a family on the tiny amount that she was given for welfare and food stamps and that hers was a hard and often desperate struggle. Both women felt they were trying hard. Both women felt they weren’t making it. And both hated the welfare system.

Like Vance’s perspectives on social life in Appalachia and the chorus of current Appalachian residents who contested his book, the mothers in this story are two people who come from similar circumstances, yet have wildly different opinions on what is to be done and who is at fault. Finding the truth here is not a matter of cherry picking an authentic, tokenized voice to speak for a group, but understanding perspectives within working class communities as being complex ideological and material struggles that shift over time.

This isn’t to say it isn’t still worthwhile to incorporate the perspectives of Black, Latinx, Native American, Alaska Native, elderly, and disabled working class communities - communities which are disproportionately poor. Rather, it is to say that the mere tokenization of people from these groups in policy development is not enough. Without adequate contextualization of excluded narratives within policy history, we risk the sort of reductionism that leads us to believe our personal narratives alone can qualify as rigorous sociological research.

An ideal example of contextualizing narratives within broader histories was published within my first few months in the Millennial Public Policy Fellowship. “Becoming Visible: Race, Economic Security, and Political Voice in Jackson, Mississippi” - a policy paper by Family Centered Social Policy’s Rachel Black and Aleta Sprague - captures the ways in which exclusion is built into social policies that affect the lives of mothers working to meet the needs of their communities. Carla, a mother from “Becoming Visible,” describe not only the stigma one must endure to receive assistance from a program like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), but the unrecognized ways mothers contribute to their communities when governments shirk responsibilities to their constituents. Case in point, Carla ran a bus service with her own vehicle for children when the school bus service was discontinued in her neighborhood.

Single-handedly running a school bus service does not fit the narrative of the lazy, uninvested “welfare queen” frequently attached to mothers like Carla. This myth of the welfare queen, popularized by Ronald Reagan, shaped social policies throughout the 1980s and 1990s in a manner than stigmatized Black motherhood and sought to remove a class of people supposedly leeching off of lenient welfare programs. The fact that Carla’s public service would not qualify as “work” under many means-tested public assistance programs that require participants to adhere to work requirements is a testament to how out of step social policies are and how distorted the general narrative around people living in poverty remain.

Yet, many of us continue to gravitate toward narratives that fit comfortably within prevailing notions about poverty provided by J.D. Vance.

Without so much as an attempt to understand behaviors and trends within larger histories of policymaking, we risk disseminating narratives that not only harm mothers like Carla, but families like that of Vance as well.