INTRODUCTION

In the 1970s, America was introduced to Linda Taylor, a successful scam-artist who would eventually become known as the Welfare Queen. Taylor utilized 33 different aliases, 30 different addresses in various scenarios to defraud government welfare programs. She became a favorite example of welfare abuse at the expense of working Americans in the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign of 1976. 

Although Linda Taylor was a real person, the myth of the welfare queen has been largely perpetrated by anti-welfare coalitions for years and caused prejudice against the poor that persists to this day with the media playing a big role in creating this narrative about public housing and welfare. “It becomes a way for the public to generalize from the worst-case scenarios,“ says Lawrence Vale, Historian, East Lake Meadows. 

These stigmas that develop and become part of the narrative around people that receive public support are harmful. “It’s a myth that people aren’t trying …. The idea that people as a general statement want to stay in their conditions because they want to be wards of the state. It’s just not consistent with the evidence,” Mario Small, Sociologist, East Lake Meadows.

Mary Pattillo states, “We malign entitlements because we are often blind to the ones that we receive and have helped us so much, and we often see the beneficiaries of those entitlements or the beneficiaries of any kind of benefits, as weak, as a dependent. We spend way more on supporting people who buy multimillion-dollar houses and write off the mortgage interest from those houses than we do on subsidizing housing for poor people.”