Hi, everybody! I’m just going to leave these right here. Or should I put them over here. Anyway, this is some of the stuff that has been occupying my mind lately. I’m sorry if everything feels over-saturated by it; I, too, was trying very hard to look the other way. In fact, lately I’ve been feeling so strongly about so many things that I’ve been trying even harder to stop feeling anything about them. The only problem is that being quiet and still and repressive about things that matter very dearly to you is a very bad idea. In fact, you may have noticed that I keep posting stuff to this blog, then immediately am deleting them. On one hand I want to share and comment and point to things, like, “Look, you guys! Lookit, let’s care, let’s share, let’s do!” and another side is like, “STFU, nobody cares, in fact, you look crazy and angry.” Well, guess what. Trying to not look crazy and trying not to look angry is driving me crazy. So I’m going to stop worrying and just be the only way I know how: me.
I know it’ll be a long while before I can sort out the gender, race and class thing for myself—as a Chicana who forgets that she’s a Chicana ALL THE TIME, ya know, shit’s confusing—but hopefully I’ll be able to make some sense of it all, and then put that sense down into some good words.
(On a very personal note: luckily, even if I don’t ever figure it out, at least I have a lovely boyfriend who encourages and cares about my intellectual, political and spiritual journey, because otherwise I’d go crazygonuts — not even kidding. Hi, 1234lander! Thanks for picking up the laundry today!)
“When a rich woman wants to stay home with her kids, she’s lauded, and parenting is called one of the hardest jobs you can do. When a poor woman wants to stay home with her kids, she needs to learn the “dignity of work.” A rich, white woman who stays at home is a good mother. A poor, black woman who stays at home is a welfare queen.“
— Romney Flashback: “Dignity of Work” | Washington Post (text above and link via sandandglass)
And then this one:
“To be female and poor in itself attracts a unique stigma. The 1980s saw the remarkable rise of the ‘welfare queen’ as popular bogey (wo)man of choice in the USA. This was fuelled by Reagan’s ideological crusade against an ‘excessive’ ‘soft’ welfare system and driven by racist and sexist stereotypes of ‘lazy’ African-American women, often single mothers. Indeed, the single mother is a recurring motif in the rhetoric surrounding welfare and benefits across the Western world. The idea that single women ‘churn out’ babies in order to generate more income or obtain free housing is commonplace in the UK and was a core part of the vivid American ‘welfare queen’ stereotype. Attacks on the integrity of single mothers are common; they are portrayed as less capable parents - despite evidence to the contrary - and are improbably blamed for a host of social ills, including, predictably, the riots that took place in the UK in the summer of 2011. The prevalent stigma borne by poor females in many societies is viscerally illustrated by British newspaper columnist James Delingpole who described several of the “great scourges” of contemporary Britain: “aggressive all-female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye” (The Times newspaper, April 13, 2006 ). Disturbingly, the stigma of female poverty and single motherhood has become embedded in public policy in many different countries: women are all too often the ‘accidental’ victims of supposedly gender neutral measures, such as budget cuts and welfare reform.”
—The feminisation of poverty and the myth of the ‘welfare queen’ | openDemocracy (via sociolab)
