The welfare queen. A woman living lavishly off of beating the system. And the welfare queen is always seen as a Black woman. It’s an image that has been associated with the welfare system, with the help of such Republican politicians as Ronald Reagan, who in 1976 “repeatedly invoked his own female bête noire as he barnstormed the country in a doomed bid to primary President Gerald Ford,” The Nation reported.
The woman was real. As were her fur coat and Cadillac. Linda Taylor from Chicago, who Reagan said “used eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare.”
Although the majority of people on the welfare system are people in need, Reagan and others made it seem, on the contrary, like the majority of people were like Taylor. Taylor of the
In “The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth,” Josh Levin, an editor at Slate, writes about the myth of welfare and race.
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In the book, Levin uncovers Taylor’s various identities, her lies, and how she cheated the government and others. He suggests she might have even been involved in a murder. But he also explores how race, class, and media collide.
“Before Taylor, the fur-coat-wearing, luxury-car-buying public aid chiseler had been something akin to the abominable snowman,” Levin wrote. “Taylor’s mere existence gave credence to a slew of pernicious stereotypes about poor people and Black women. If one welfare queen walked the earth, then surely others did, too.”
After all the attention brought on Taylor by the politicians, the media honed in on her welfare and other countless scams. “Taylor was ready-made for sensational coverage; stories about her were syndicated to newspapers nationwide. By 1978, 84 percent of Illinois voters considered welfare and Medicaid fraud to be matters of grave concern. As a result, a 24-hour welfare-fraud hotline opened and received more than 5,000 tips its first year. The Department of Public Aid also ramped up in-home spot checks of welfare recipients and began mailing checks to banks or currency exchanges, where multiple forms of ID were required to collect payment,” The Nation reported.
In the end, Taylor did wind up in jail, sentenced in 1977 to three-to-seven-years in state prison for welfare fraud and perjury.
After an early parole, Taylor continued her crime spree until she died in 2002 at age 76.
The media just didn’t decide to focus only on Taylor. There was a surge of stories on poor Blacks. According to Levin, in 1964 just 27 percent of news magazine stories about poor Americans featured images of Black people. But during the Taylor sensationalism in 1972 and 1973, that number exploded to 70 percent of stories. People were now associating welfare scams not only with Taylor but Blacks in general.
“Levin’s book is a moral seesaw. It’s tempting to feel sympathy for Taylor, born into a society and a class calibrated to beat her down. Gaming the system is every American’s dream, and Taylor achieved it with stunning ingenuity. But her lies, extortions, and crimes did real damage, not least of all to her children, and to the families of those she might have killed,” The Nation reported.
