A common mindset through modern American history is that people living in poverty simply don’t want to work.\u00b9<\/span>\u00a0For decades, politicians have used programs like food stamps, unemployment, social security, and Section 8 housing not as examples of a social good, but of lazy people wanting free money from harder-working taxpayers. Women who needed any of these social services were especially demonized, not only as lazy, but as sexually promiscuous, single mothers who would rather have more children than find work. And the term <\/span>welfare <\/span><\/i>has been racialized over the years, as well.<\/span><\/p>\n “<\/span>Despite the fact that white Americans benefit more from government assistance than people of color, means-tested aid is primarily associated with Black people and other people of color\u2014particularly when the term <\/span>welfare<\/span><\/i> is used,” wrote political scientist Ashley Jardina for <\/span>TalkPoverty<\/span><\/a>. “For many Americans, the word welfare conjures up a <\/span>host of disparaging stereotypes<\/span><\/a> so strongly linked to stigmatized beliefs about racial groups that\u2014along with crime\u2014it is arguably one of the most racialized terms in the country.”<\/span><\/p>\n The myth of the welfare mother was born from this prejudice, enabling decades of injustice that went largely unchallenged until the 1970s. The documentary <\/span>Storming Caesars Palace<\/i><\/b><\/a> takes an in-depth look at the life of welfare reformer <\/span>Ruby Duncan<\/b> and her fight to reform public assistance in America. But even before Duncan’s activism in Las Vegas during the late 1960s and early ’70s, the initial seeds of the social support net were planted at a time when Americans were working harder than ever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\t\t
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