Myth of the welfare queen - Column

Each time I bit into the coagulated hamburgers that I had to brown-bag in high school, I tasted the shame of being unable to afford the 35-cent cafeteria lunches That shame lingered long after a friend saw our family's dilapidated apartment building and asked me in disbelief, "Is that where you live?"

I remember being poor, fatherless an on welfare, and I cringe knowing that thousands of young girls still bear that same stigma Worse yet, my self-sacrificing mother would have been crowned a welfare queen" and made out to b one of society's biggest cheats.

When my father left us in the middle of my mother's fifth pregnancy, there were no bootstraps for us to pull ourselves up by. A mere $330 a month in public assistance had to feed, clothe and house our family of six. It was just a matter of time before the stress of trying to do too much with too little threw my mother into a deep depression. She was not yet 35.

I was 15 when our family went on welfare, 17 when I enrolled in nursing school and 18 when I went off welfare and supported my schooling by working as a unit clerk at a hospital. In the course of my 25-year nursing career, I earned a graduate degree in psychiatric nursing from Yale University and was named "nurse of the year" at a major military hospital.

My mother didn't fare quite so well-at least not at first. Because child care was not available or affordable, she and my three youngest sisters stayed on welfare for close to ten years. When my mother went back to work at a department store, my sisters became latchkey children, a term not yet coined back in 1974.

While I was a 21-year-old registered nurse in charge of the evening shift of an emergency room, I was surprised to hear preteen girls in my neighbor was hood imagining themselves becoming welfare mothers. Why didn't I follow that path? I'm sure it was because I had good role models.

Until I was 12 and until my mother had the first of four pregnancies, she worked in a department store. An aunt I admired was a single woman who always supported herself; and my grandmother, a widow, worked, too. My teachers believed in me and helped me get the skills I needed to succeed. My friends in our church choir believed in themselves, and in us.

I am convinced that the simplest but most effective thing each of us can do to solve the problem of poverty in our communities is to be involved with young people. We should also be aware of any plans politicians have in store for poor people.

The applause lines of politicians who rail against "welfare cheats" and want to "end welfare as we know it" should remind us that the powers that be find it easier to place blame than to share resources. The opponents of welfare should be challenged to end poverty as we know it.

Instead they attack public-assistance recipients, who are primarily women and disproportionately African-American, Latina - any color other than White. Who is this mythical welfare queen? Her creators say she's Black, young and eager to bear babies to boost her check. They portray her as spending public aid on clothes and cigarettes.

In reality, her "castle" sits in a precarious world of triple jeopardy based on race, class and gender. If she's Black, her life span is six years shorter than her White counterpart's. She's also twice as likely to give birth to a premature or low-birth-weight baby and nine times as likely to lose her son to street violence.

These abysmal statistics demand real welfare reform. The national policy debate thus far has been mired in racism and sexism. Actually, most people on welfare are White women and children who remain on for less than two years. Most of those who receive assistance longer are people of color - Black women and their children who are forced to remain in the system an average of eight years.

Fundamental reform must begin by removing the stigmas and exploding the myths. Poverty is nobody's fault. There's no shame in being poor. The real cheat in this country is the system that condemns so many women to a life of dead-end poverty.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group