Looking Deeper, Changing Perspectives

            Sandra Golden recalls her experiences as a 20 year old pregnant woman, with multiple problems, and many fears about life, as she begins her article entitled “Black and on Welfare: What You Don’t Know About Single- Parent Women”.  I was immediately drawn to the realness of the article, particularly as Golden began to explore negative connotations that society often connects to public assistance, commonly known as welfare. Golden asserts that many welfare recipients are not complacent, lazy, and abusing the system. Instead, her view is that welfare serves to assist you as you rebuild your life and is suppose to take steps to ensure stability through work training and placement programs and the creation of a support system for you.

            This article explores many topics, besides her methodology behind the “stigma” of public assistance.  Golden addresses problems within our system of assistance too. She believes that people are not placed into the proper programs, programs are repeated, and for these reasons and many others, public assistance has not aided in the growth of its recipients as much as it could. What has happened?

            In society today I’m not certain that people understand the meaning of public assistance and what it was created for.  This system was created to help manufacture more independent, self-reliant and stable people by aiding financially. Daily I see people who are in need, so public assistance is a necessity in our society. However, to the extent where people have children to receive more money and are completely abusing a system that was intended to help, it is unfortunate for the people who are truly in need. When this abuse continues to happen, the entire system becomes revamped because tax payers get frustrated because their money is not being used to serve the person who will directly benefit from it.

            Golden really sheds light on how people who may not have achieved high academic literacy levels, are still literate in other ways, including but not limited to survival, communication, and family.  We live in an age where education is pushed and I am definitely an advocate for education and advancing. With this said, it is still important to remember that college is expensive, sometimes support is limited, and everyone does not have the same belief. Sandra Golden wants us to not be so quick to judge but to understand that we all lead very different lives.