Over the decades, stereotypes about black women have penetrated politics and popular culture: Mammy, Jezebel and Sapphire. Another one has direct Chicago roots — the maligned “welfare queen.”
While on the 1976 presidential campaign trail, Ronald Reagan played to a conservative crowd that he knew hated welfare and what it represented. The candidate talked about a Chicago woman who used 80 names, 12 Social Security cards and 30 addresses to collect public benefits. Reagan didn’t mention the woman’s name at campaign rallies. “Chicago woman” was enough of a dog whistle to mean a black woman in the “inner city.”
And thus the welfare queen stereotype blossomed — after Reagan lost, again after he won in 1980 and through his presidency. He loved to talk about this woman, embellishing details and cementing an American fable.
The woman’s name was Linda Taylor. And a new book, “The Queen” by Josh Levin, demystifies who she was. Turns out her most egregious crimes had nothing to do with welfare scams.
But those crimes didn’t fit the lazy, trifling welfare narrative.
By page 40 my mouth dropped at the audacity of con-artist Taylor. Levin, an editor at Slate, spent six years piecing together the life of a woman whose image demonized black women. She eventually dropped out of public sight and Levin’s compelling narrative weaves Taylor’s story inside public policy.
The Chicago Tribune first introduced Taylor to the world as the queen of welfare in a series of articles that detailed her multiple identities and dozens of addresses. She landed on the front page in 1974. Her Cadillacs and mink coats were catnip for Reagan and his supporters.
At the time, criminalization of welfare fraud was a nationwide trend — although the actual fraud didn’t match what detractors had in their imaginations. Levin writes that in 1978, Cook County spent a minimum of $50,000 to convict Taylor of stealing less than $9,000.
Taylor’s vulgar and outlandish behavior served as a proxy to disparage low-income black women. But she was an anomaly, in truth, an outlier who wore her ostentatiousness and brashness as confidently as her fur coats.
“The welfare queen had been lurking just out of reach for decades, a mythical being rumored to hang around grocery store checkout lines and Cadillac dealerships,” Levin writes. “Taylor’s mere existence gave credence to a slew of pernicious stereotypes about poor people and black women. If one welfare queen walked the earth, then surely others did, too.”
Of course, Taylor did not represent black women on public assistance.
But decades later, as a reporter who has done a number of stories featuring the voices of low-income black women, I know the concept of Taylor lives on. Too often the feedback I have gotten via comments, emails and social media lean on the idea of the undeserving poor. I see how the legacy of Linda Taylor infiltrates, even if the commenters don’t realize it or remember her.
The welfare queen entered our collective psyche.
I once interviewed one of the last women living in the last high-rise of the Robert Taylor Homes public housing development. She told me how public housing women have been degraded; society sees them as whores and smelly.
Another time I interviewed a woman living on a Section 8 subsidized housing voucher. She wanted her children to go to a top neighborhood school in the city so she tried to move within the school’s boundaries with a special voucher that allowed her to pay higher rent.
She searched for apartments in buildings in River North, an affluent part of town. Building management illegally denied her an application, so she sued and won. And many naysayers thought she didn’t belong in a high-rise building that wasn’t public housing. Stay in a poor, racially segregated neighborhood is the message.
And another mother I met with a Section 8 voucher recently described to me how hard it is for landlords to accept her. She feels stigmatized when searching for an apartment.
I could go on and on with examples whether with Section 8, public housing or subsidized units. Our country despises poor people. But let that poor woman be a black woman and the ghost of Linda Taylor rises.
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Natalie Y. Moore is a reporter for WBEZ.
