http://prospect.org/article/truth-about-welfare
The Truth about Welfare
Paul Waldman
August 10, 2012
(continued)
So who gets welfare? This is where the race issue enters. Contrary to popular perception, the recipients of TANF are about equally divided between whites, blacks and Hispanics. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2009 the TANF rolls were 31.2 percent white, 33.3 percent black, and 28.8 percent Hispanic. Yet the primary image of a "welfare recipient" in most people's mind is a black woman. This has been demonstrated in study after study by political scientists, psychologists, and communication scholars. Most Americans not only drastically overestimate the proportion of welfare recipients who are black, they also tend to believe that welfare makes up a huge proportion of the federal budget, when in fact it accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending. As Donald Kinder and Cindy Ham wrote in Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion, "means-tested programs like AFDC and food stamps are understood by whites to largely benefit shiftless black people." The racialization in perceptions of welfare is reinforced by the news media, which usually use images of black people to illustrate stories about welfare and poverty (Martin Gillens' Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy is the most complete examination of this topic).
So when you say the word "welfare," the image that immediately pops into most people's heads is a black one. Opinions about welfare and opinions about race are inextricably tied together, and there is no one who works in politics, Republican or Democrat, who doesn't understand that. Which leads us to our final question.
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Does Mitt Romney's new welfare attack constitute race-baiting? The fairest answer is, yes and no. Its goal is without question to encourage middle-class people to resent poor people who are allegedly taking their money to lay about and do whatever it is poor people do with their cushy lives, and to adopt the false belief that Barack Obama is changing policy to make that happen more often. Note the difference between Romney's ad and the following ad from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. The policy goals expressed are the same in both—work requirements, time limits—but Clinton's ad doesn't frame welfare as undeserving poor people taking money from virtuous middle class people.
When an ad like Romney's arrives, it travels a well-worn path that Republican politicians have been carving for decades. The division between hard-working middle class people and parasitic poor people was the message of this 1972 ad from Democrats for Nixon, in which a hard-hatted construction worker contemplates the droves of new welfare recipients he'll have to pay for (and apparently also contemplates hurling himself to his death over it, if the vertiginous shots are any indication).
Like the Romney ad, this one doesn't mention race, but the Nixon campaign knew exactly what it was doing. So did Ronald Reagan, who famously complained of a mythical "welfare queen" in Chicago who supposedly drove in her Cadillac to get her checks. Here's an excerpt from a February 5, 1976 article in The New York Times, which pointed out that while "the former Governor of California has not made any direct appeals for antiblack votes," his indirect appeals weren't all that subtle:
Last night, for example, at an overflow rally in Fort Lauderdale, he said working people were outraged when they waited in lines at grocery store check-out counters while a "strapping young buck" ahead of them purchased T-bone steaks with food stamps. (*)
The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression "young buck," which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.
In the years since, prominent Republican politicians have become only marginally more circumspect in the way they talk about the social safety net; you still hear occasional comments like the one Newt Gingrich made earlier this year when he was asked if he would speak before the NAACP, and he replied that if he was invited, "I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps." The point is that when Republicans talk welfare, race is usually a subtext (at least).
Nevertheless, the racially charged nature of the welfare issue shouldn't mean that we can't debate it, and Republicans should be able to criticize the welfare policies of a Democratic administration without being charged with racism. But what's happening now isn't a "debate" by any stretch of the imagination, and the substance of Romney's attack is so spectacularly insincere that it simply can't be taken at face value. Up until a couple of days ago he hadn't said a word about welfare; on the policy, this is a battle Republicans emphatically won 16 years ago. Every last criticism of Obama in the Romney ad is simply made up out of whole cloth. Ordinarily, when a candidate makes a dishonest attack on his opponent there's at least a thin tether to the truth, even if it's distorted or taken out of context, but in this case what the administration has done is pretty much the opposite of what Romney says. That leads strongly to the conclusion that Romney has chosen to go in this direction for little reason other than the hope that something, anything, will generate a visceral reaction against the president. Don't think for a moment that Romney doesn't know that if his attack generates the reaction he wants, racial resentment will be part of the reason.
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Side notes (my own words, not plagiarized from others :D):
(*) "Buck" is a racial slur used by Southern whites to denote a large/tall black man. The more common term is "black buck." When Ronald Reagan the hero of neo-conservatives spewed out "young buck" to denote a young black man in one of his speeches, he revealed his racist character.
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Originally Posted by chuot_congus
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