The ‘Return’ of the Welfare Queens: Feminism, Secularism, and Anti-Racism
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In the American imagination, black women are the poster children for disreputable, irresponsible motherhood and Latina “illegals” are a close second. From birth to adolescence, every girl of color must navigate a political climate in which Ronald Reagan’s racist welfare queen caricature casts long shadows. Ending its “boycott” of feature stories on black women, the Los Angeles Times recently served up some red meat for welfare queen watchers. The front page featured an extensive profile of twenty-seven-year-old Natalie Cole, a jobless, unmarried, unskilled black mother with four kids. Entitled “Caught in the Cycle of Poverty,” the article trots out an expert from Harvard who sagely proclaims that “poverty is bad for kids,” offering no further analysis on how the richest, most militarized nation on the planet pimps out its children. Instead, we are regaled with Cole’s hot mess of personal failure and pathology. Coming from a long line of young single mothers, by the time Cole turned seventeen she was already raising two children. Now she can’t be bothered to create a résumé or use birth control to avoid having a fifth child. The prayer, “God in heaven, hear my prayer, keep me in thy loving care,” is taped to her bedroom wall. Needless to say, she will not be getting her own Oxygen, TLC, or Lifetime reality show à la GOP teen mom Bristol Palin any time soon.
For me, the article was especially timely, tragic, and enraging because I recently found out that one of my most inquisitive students is pregnant at sixteen. Several of my Women’s Leadership Project alum, who worked incredibly hard to become the first in their families to go to college, speak of friends who have had children shortly after graduating from high school. As budding feminists they are overly familiar with the “validation” pregnancy supposedly provides working class young women of color inundated with media propaganda that hyper-sexualizes black and Latina bodies and demonizes abortion.
In this South Los Angeles school community, only a small fraction of the student body goes on to college and many youth are in foster care, often having to raise themselves. Small evangelical storefront churches grossly outnumber living wage job centers, God and Jesus are touted as some of the biggest “cultural” influences, and high teen pregnancy rates are a symptom of the expendability of “other people’s children” (to quote education activist Lisa Delpit). Thirty years ago, scoring a living wage job with benefits was still a possibility for a South L.A. teenager with only a high school diploma. Now, having a college degree is the bare minimum for getting a decent paying job…