The usage of social welfare programs has been historically contested, drawing on racialized and gender-based stigmatic notions of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. This thesis explored how racialized and gendered-informed bodies of discourse, which circulate themes of welfare and poverty, distort the image of Black impoverished women in media. Using the Chicago Tribune's digital newspaper archives, I explored how welfare was written about and represented from the mid-1960s to present-day. Key findings include: (1) The Chicago Tribune placed Black impoverished women at the sight of blame for their precarious experiences, by promoting the idea that the sexual reproduction of Black women holds poverty-determining trajectories - dangerously advancing the biological etiology of poverty. (2) The Chicago Tribune exemplified the long-standing history between White wealth and Black poverty, which mobilizes as a welfare-sustaining mechanism that perpetuates a continuum of distorted imagery, through the utilization of racialized and gendered discourse. And (3) when The Chicago Tribune sought to challenge racialized and gendered-based ideologies of poverty, the association between Black poverty and welfare dependency was sustained. These findings draw awareness to the ways in which Black stereotypes mobilize false realities of poverty and welfare abuse that shape public discourse.
Kennedy Patterson (Sat,) studied this question.