Raised by a Welfare Queen

For our first episode of the Direct Message Podcast, we chose a topic that greatly shaped our childhoods - welfare reform. In the 1990s President Bill Clinton campaigned on a promise to “end welfare as we know it” in response to mounting concerns about the decline of marriage rates and the myth of the welfare queen. What did this mean for the children who grew up under this policy prescription that became a flashpoint in the erosion of the American social safety net? To help us answer this question, we sat down with Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University, Dr. Marcia Chatelain to discuss the fraught history of welfare policy and the gendered and racialized narratives that have shaped it.

“Raised by a Welfare Queen” epitomizes some of the struggles central in framing the work that think tanks do. The arc of public policy in the late ‘90s easily elevated the two-parent household, but how can you identify the ways that this affected the children that grew up during this time period, regardless of how many people raised them? We spent some time talking with Dr. Chatelain about the ways in which the loaded idea of “personal responsibility” still lingers in the financial decision-making that Millennials deal with now. In the discussion, we mention a few things worth reading:

• Millennial Fellow Roselyn Miller’s Direct Message blogpost on chosen family
  
• Family-Centered Social Policy Director Rachel Black’s article in The Atlantic titled "The ‘Welfare Queen’ Is a Lie"
  
• An annotated version of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report
  
• Becoming Visible: Race, Economic Security, and Political Voice in Jackson, Mississippi
  
• Political Reform’s Mark Schmitt’s New York Times article on the “Scam Economy”
  
• A Freakonomics Podcast on “Marriageable Men”
  

As always, thanks for letting us slide into your DMs.