karnythia: rdtrashpanda: ginsengmask: at the women’s studies conference I went to last semester,... 14

By: vivian on 7:09 PM

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karnythia:

rdtrashpanda:

ginsengmask:

at the women’s studies conference I went to last semester, someone did a presentation about how the myth of the black “welfare queen” was created and it’s so crazy to think that Reagan managed to make the American public believe that all black women were simply lazy and took advantage of the system when in reality, Reagan’s whole tirade against these supposed elaborate schemes of black women were based off of one Linda Taylor who assumed over thirty aliases and amassed a large amount of riches through a number of different ways (theft, forgery, insurance fraud, child abdication). It’s so easy to sway this country to believe racist allegations such as these because they don’t even care to find evidence to support such claims, they honestly just want an excuse to paint the black community as lazy criminals

The book I’m reading, The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah, talks ab Nixon and Reagan specifically using coded language to create the illusion of “race neutral” politics that were truly created to harm Black people such as Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” where Nixon told an advisor, “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this without appearing to” and Reagan’s “war on drugs” when Reagan launched a propaganda effort to associate drugs and crime with people of color, creating the stereotypes of “crack whores” “crack babies” and young Black men as “predators” that we still see today

What’s even weirder is that Linda Taylor was such a consummate con artist that she lied about her race and people believed her. She was born to white parents (and might have had some Indigenous American ancestors), but told people she was Black, Asian, Hispanic, & Jewish as it served her needs. The myth of the Black Welfare Queen is based on a long term con run by a white woman. 

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