00:00Hey, I'm Elisa Kreisinger, and every Tuesday I unpack my strong opinions with the help of an
00:05expert who might not have all the answers, but they certainly know more than I do. That's why
00:10this is Strong Opinions Loosely Held. And on this week's show, why do we still consider black women
00:16gold diggers? I recently learned that black women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs
00:22in this country, and black women are also the most educated group in America. So why is our
00:29culture so insistent on holding on to this outdated idea that black women are only out
00:33for men's money? And where did the idea even come from? This is something Refinery29 senior
00:39entertainment writer Cecily Bowen has thought a lot about. So long as black women have been
00:44on screen to be seen, there has been suspicion specifically around them and sexuality and
00:51money. This myth of the black woman as a gold digger is constantly being reinforced in popular
00:56culture. Now, for starters, there was a Kanye West song called Gold Digger, and Blac Chyna
01:02was considered gold digger number one when she started dating Rob Kardashian. And let's not
01:07forget reality TV. We can look at shows like Love & Hip Hop, Real Housewives of Atlanta, where
01:13it's always this conversation about what is this woman's intention with this man? What is she
01:19trying to get from him? So I think we can literally look everywhere for this gold digger trope.
01:27And these are just the recent examples. Cecily points out the irony in this portrayal.
01:32In some ways, I guess you can say the black women are gold diggers because we have always been in
01:37the
01:37pursuit of education and success and financial independence, but not for men and not at the hands
01:44of the system literally from our own hard work, from our own enterprising spirits. So where did
01:50this myth even come from? Well, there's two specific events that led to the modern iteration of the
01:56stereotype. The first was the Moynihan Report and the second was Ronald Reagan. In 1965, sociologist
02:04Patrick Moynihan blamed black female-led homes for the high crime rates and poverty rates among African
02:10Americans. The conclusion that he came to was that black families do not have enough patriarchal
02:18households that have a mother and a father and are led by the father. And that explains why poverty
02:25is so rampant amongst black communities and crime is so rampant among black communities. Couldn't
02:31possibly have anything to do with institutional racism or anything like that. It's definitely because the
02:36women are too strong and domineering over the men. The Moynihan Report was eventually debunked,
02:41but not before it was validated by the U.S. government. That meant that it was hugely influential when
02:48it came to writing actual policy that would affect black women every day. The Moynihan Report itself
02:55was sanctioned and validated by the U.S. government. So it was used to influence politicians and like
03:03actual policies that were being made in the country. So it really got this kind of formal stamp of
03:09approval that a lot of the criticism of the Moynihan Report did not get. Okay, so to regroup, first you
03:15have the Moynihan Report, which blamed black women for the crime and poverty in black communities.
03:21And then you have Ronald Reagan, who racialized, I'm so sorry, reformed welfare in the 70s and 80s.
03:30Specifically, Ronald Reagan just kind of came out with it and coined this term welfare queen when
03:37he wanted to reform the welfare system. And he created this trope of black women as leeches on
03:44the American system who were like taking advantage of taxpayer dollars by having all these children
03:50taking all this money from the government with no interest in working. And this image of the welfare
03:54queen continues to affect perceptions and policies regarding welfare. For example, did you know
04:01that working class white people without a college degree receive the most money from federal poverty
04:06reduction programs? Of course not, because it doesn't fit the perception. Who would you say are the real
04:13welfare queens of this country? So it's so interesting that you asked that because what does it even mean to
04:20mooch off of the country? If it's just using the financial services that come with being a citizen
04:27of this country, that then means that people who get financial aid, people who receive housing subsidies,
04:36food subsidies, first-time home buyer incentives that are funded by the government, married people
04:41who receive tax breaks, like all of those things count as government assistance.
04:48If a welfare queen is defined as someone who lives off of government handouts, then hi, I'm one of the
04:54biggest beneficiaries. As a white middle-class homeowner, I received one of the largest government
05:00subsidies, the mortgage interest deduction. That's what we call what the government pays us to help us
05:06own our own homes. And this isn't a small amount of money. In 2015, the US spent so much money
05:12helping us
05:13own our homes. It was larger than the budgets of the education, justice, and energy departments combined.
05:20But when we think of welfare queens, we don't think of me. And that's a problem.
05:27From the Moynihan Report, we got this image of a emasculating black woman. She's essentially
05:32contributing to the entire downfall of this community. From Ronald Reagan's welfare queen, we got
05:38a black woman who is willing to stoop to criminality and fraud and bribery in order to get money that
05:44she
05:44wants. And I think the result of that culturally was just that like we couldn't trust black women,
05:49especially not with money. But Cecily finds deep faults in this thinking because the data actually
05:54tells a totally different story. She pointed out that the numbers don't really add up. Well, first of all,
05:59black women are one of the most educated groups in America. They are the fastest growing group of
06:05entrepreneurs in America. And they, as individuals, are more likely to escape generational poverty
06:11than black men are. So this idea that black women are only relying on men for any kind of like
06:18social
06:18mobility, financial mobility is just simply not true. Even when Moynihan was demonizing black women
06:24for this, it was really just black women supporting their families in the best way that they knew how.
06:28I don't think that there's any reason to have any shame about that. And I think what we're seeing in
06:34pop culture right now is a lot of clap back to this idea that black women are gold diggers. A
06:37lot
06:38of women are kind of like really leaning into that. Like, yes, I am a gold digger. If you want
06:41any of my time, you need to make it worth it financially and otherwise. And like, I'm actually
06:45going to embrace that and like own that because black women know that the reality for us is that like
06:51we have to go get it ourselves. And that's always been the case. Black women are not out for men's
06:55money.
06:56We are out to support ourselves and to build wealth and financial independence within a system that never
07:03supported us in the first place. So maybe it's time we take away the stigma of the gold digger.
