The “welfare queen” is always depicted as a Black woman, one who stays home and collects money instead of working hard. She’s been used by white America to encourage or end government assistance.

But a new study found that white Americans on average aren’t opposed to welfare when they benefit from it.

Despite all the ways that the government provided welfare programs to help them, white Americans are willing to cut such programs if they believe that African-Americans and other nonwhites may benefit, according to new research by Robb Willer, professor of sociology at  Stanford University, and Rachel Wetts, a researcher at the University of California  Salon reported.

The research explores how white Americans’ welfare attitudes are shaped by concerns about the status of their racial group in American society. It was published in May 2018 in the Social Forces journal, entitled “Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived Racial Status Threats Lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs“.

Welfare has been part of America almost since the beginning, and white Americans benefited. ”In many ways, the United States was built on white welfare,” Salon reported.

Let’s review some history.

“During the 18th and 19th centuries, free land was given to European settlers as the intended result of genocide and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans. As part of this same racist project, the stolen labor and lives of Black human property is estimated to have been worth trillions of dollars. In essence, Black pain and Black suffering was a de facto intergenerational welfare payment to White America, one that fueled the country’s rise to global power and created income and other life opportunities for white people, both native-born and immigrants,” Salon reported.

But while white people were benefiting, people of color, especially Blacks, weren’t allowed to reap rewards. Blacks were prohibited from property ownership, and decades later, had trouble getting home loans.

Most history experts agree that the American middle class (predominantly white) was formed after World War II through federal programs like the VA, the FHA home programs, and the G.I. Bill.

“This example of white welfare was one of the largest wealth-creation and intergenerational wealth-transfer programs in history. Again, African-Americans and other nonwhites were, for the most part, denied access to those opportunities. Today’s extreme racial wealth gap is the most obvious result,” Salon reported.

And this trend is continuing today. “(W)e found that white Americans who saw a demographic report emphasizing the decline of the white majority tended thereafter to voice greater opposition to welfare, and this effect was partially mediated by increased racial resentment. In our final study, we found that information threatening the white economic advantage resulted in increased opposition to welfare programs when whites perceived those programs to primarily benefit minorities, but did not affect support for programs portrayed as benefiting whites. These findings implicate racial status threats as a causal factor shaping whites’ opposition to welfare,” the report states.

The study looked closely at why these feelings and perceptions about welfare have persisted.

“Robb Willer and I examine the sources of white Americans’ opposition to welfare. We find evidence that welfare backlash among white Americans is driven in part by feelings that the status of whites in America is under threat. These threats trigger heightened levels of racial resentment among whites, and in turn, heightened opposition to welfare programs that whites tend to perceive as mostly benefiting racial minorities,” researcher Wetts said.

She added, “While whites continue to enjoy many of their historical privileges in this country, much public discourse about race–particularly in the period immediately following the election of Barack Obama–emphasized America’s increasing demographic diversity and the declining dominance of white people in this country.”