Stereotyping and the Welfare Family
There were times when I would pick up my little brother when he was covered in dirt from playing, laugh at his smudged little face and say, "you look like a little welfare baby." This was funny to me, it was easy to make light of the welfare system. Welfare recipients were lower class, which made for easier targets of ridicule. Truth be told, my family wasn't much higher on the economic scale. There were times when my mother had to use food stamps to make ends meat. However, not being on welfare made us better somehow. None of our friends were on welfare (or so we thought), and we all acted and looked the same. For the most part, we all had the same images of the welfare family - dirty, tired and lazy. I come from a family who practiced good work ethics, so relying on welfare for support never entered my mind. Was I in for a rude awakening. One day my children would be little "welfare babies" and I would be a welfare mother. I would find that what had been instilled in my mind, as the typical welfare family, was just an image that we as a society have formed. The purpose of this paper is to enlighten us on the different stereotypes and "myths", if you will, of the welfare family and to set the record straight in the minds of society.
Stereotyping is what we call these perceptions we make about others. The welfare system is full of sex and gender stereotyping. As a society, we categorize the visual world to make sense of it. This action is part of human nature. We make behavioral decisions based on perceptual cues all the time. When it comes to looking at people, we often make many judgments based on first impressions of what we observed. We also...
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While many believe that social welfare in the United States began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal plan, the first American movement towards welfare came from a different Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt. He stated in his New Nationalism address that “every wise struggle for human betterment” objectives are “to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity... destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and the commonwealth” (Roosevelt). Behind such a speech with charged language about democracy and fundamental equality, Roosevelt was instituting welfare programs such as limiting word days, setting a minimum wage for women, social insurance for the elderly and disabled, unemployed social insurance, and a National Health Service. After his proposal came Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom initiative, FDR’s aforementioned New Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society (Historical Development). While social welfare is steeped in America’s history, there is a very contemporary debate on its effectiveness and ethicality. People argue that the reason welfare has such a long history in America is because it helps people get out of poverty, equalizes opportunities, reduces crime, and helps children; in essence, that welfare works. Many in opposition to welfare disagree, citing that the system creates a culture of dependence, is easily abused, hurts the middle class and costs the government too much on a system that isn’t wholistically addressing the needs of the American people.
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There is a wide variety of opinions about how and why perceptions are formed, however the most basic result is that perceptions are a form of stereotyping, which is used to recognize what our brain wants to see. These perceptions can enable us to automatically draw up conclusions which may or may not capture the truth of the situation
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Being a kid that lived on the west side or the “bad” side of town I did not really understand why people were so upset about the change until myself and all my friends from school entered the school of the “other” kids. It was made very apparent to us that we were not welcomed, that we were all dirty and that is when I realized my family was “poor”. I remember many of us trying to blend in as much as possible, not talking about our previous school or what side of town we lived on. It became even more clear the old I got and the more vocal others became toward those in my social class and the assumptions made of those that live on the west side of town. The stereotypes about people that need government assistance to survive their daily lives have dated back to the colonial days of America. However, the ‘most significant example of the stereotype comes from Susan Sheehan’s article, “A Welfare Mother,”’ (Coughlin, 1989, p. 83) this story is of a women that cheats the system in various ways thus creating the stereotype that now follows all of those that are in need of assistance. This stereotype has followed me throughout my entire life and it still follows me today. It is what drives me every day to work as hard as I can to break through the stereotypes, to show that just because someone is a victim of circumstance is does not mean that they should not be given the same opportunities as everyone