How the Poor Became Black - University of Michigan Press

[Pages:30]Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, Editors The University of Michigan Press, 2003

chapter 4

How the Poor Became Black

The Racialization of American Poverty in the Mass Media

martin gilens

? Race and poverty are now so closely entwined that it is hard to believe there was a time when discussions of American poverty neglected blacks altogether. African Americans have always been disproportionately poor, but black poverty was ignored by white society throughout most of our history.

In the following pages, I analyze over 40 years of news media coverage of poverty in order to trace changes in racial images of the poor. I ects--and reinforces-- the centuries-old stereotype of blacks as lazy.

Real-world changes in social, economic, and political conditions combined with existing racial stereotypes to shape the media's coverage of welfare and poverty over the past decades. But this coverage has in turn shaped social, economic, and political conditions as states have dismantled and reformulated their welfare policies in response to the 1996 PRWORA reforms. American democracy is far from perfect. But public policies do re>ect--if inconsistently and incompletely--the public's preferences (Monroe 1979; Page and Shapiro 1983; Wright, Erikson, and McIver 1987; Monroe and Gardner 1987; Shapiro and Jacobs 1989; Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995). In the case of welfare, however, citizens' preferences have been shaped by media portrayals that exaggerate the extent to which poverty is a "black problem" and that systematically associate African Americans with the least sympathetic subgroups of the poor. Other chapters in this volume ably document the many ways in which welfare reform has been infused with racial considerations and re>ective of racial biases. In this chapter, I show how distorted news cov-

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Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, Editors The University of Michigan Press, 2003

how the poor became black

erage of poverty has helped to generate a citizenry that views welfare and poverty through a racial lens.

African Americans: The Once-Invisible Poor

The American public now associates poverty and welfare with blacks. But this was not always the case. The "scienti ................
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