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Sometimes it feels like that movie “Groundhog Day” — the same shit keeps happening over and over, and you keep wondering, will things ever change?
In this case, I’m talking about the never-ending tendency for white folks, in particular, to decide that the real problem facing Black people in America isn’t racism or a lack of opportunity — it’s welfare dependence.
If they would just commit to hard work and get off the dole, these folks say, they could make it in America. In other words, it’s their own fault or the fault of the liberals who “enslaved them all over again” with handouts.
This has been the default position for white conservatives for literally a half-century. And even though the social safety net has been largely eviscerated in the past two decades, especially cash assistance — what most think of when they think of welfare — they just keep saying it.
These ideas keep coming back, just like zombies, no matter how many times you thought you’d killed them.
Last night, for instance, I received an e-mail from someone who claimed to really like my work (sure) but who wanted to tell me (as if I had never heard this before) that many of the problems facing Black people were self-inflicted.
And featuring prominently in her utterly un-sourced, un-footnoted, un-hyperlinked cacophony of nonsense was…welfare dependence.
Sigh. Here we go, I thought to myself.
I have responded to this before, of course. I’ve done it in previous essays and several books, notably Dear White America, Colorblind, and Under the Affluence.
And although I won’t revisit here all of what I said in those volumes, I figured that I could take a few minutes to dig up the latest information and provide just this once, yet more proof that welfare-bashers don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
