Overcoming Archetypes of Black Women on Welfare

In the article, Black and on Welfare: What You Don't Know About Single-Parent Women, Sandra Golden opens with a story about the trials she faced in her experience with welfare as a 20 year-old Black woman while pregnant, unemployed, separated from her husband, and living with her parents.  She uses the words "dehumanized" and "humiliated" when describing how she felt after her experience in a welfare office.

“A Black single parent female utilizes special literacy skills to negotiate with a social context that marginalizes and disenfranchise groups based on gender, race, education, and class.” (Golden 28) 

Golden speaks about young Black women who deal with burns from judgmental eyes.  Assumptions that these women are uneducated or inadequately educated are not the only ideas that are viewed as a common characteristic of the Black women who seek assistance in the welfare office.  People often assume that these women lack the skills and motivation that is necessary to find their way to a better situation in life.  Therefore, these women are given a hard time when they go out and seek help in a welfare office.  Because Black female-headed families have been recognized as inferior to other types of families, unproductive, pathological, and dysfunctional for so long, it is not easy to change those ideas of families headed by single Black women even though many of the situations these women are in do not match the image that was created by the ideas of the past.  Although the purpose of welfare, according to the PRWOPA, is to provide assistance to families in order to avoid unwed pregnancies, end dependence on government benefits, and to promote healthy marriage, it doesn’t seem as if this organization really has the best interest of these families at heart. 

The young Black women who reap the benefits of a welfare program are commonly close to illiterate in terms of formal education but, these women are highly skilled and educated in their respective venues of action.  They put forth a great amount of effort in order to obtain the respect of those around them and even more effort to be the best they can for their families.