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00:29culture so insistent on holding on to this outdated idea that black women are only out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 black China
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. In some ways,
01:33I guess you can say the black women are gold diggers because we have always been in the pursuit of
01:38education and success and financial independence, but not for men and not at the hands of the system,
01:46literally from our own hard work, from our own enterprising spirits. So where did this myth even
01:51come from? Well, there's two specific events that led to the modern iteration of the stereotype. The first
01:58was the Moynihan Report, and the second was Ronald Reagan. In 1965, sociologist Patrick Moynihan blamed black,
02:06female led homes for the high crime rates and poverty rates among African Americans. The conclusion
02:13that he came to was that black families do not have enough patriarchal households that have a mother
02:20and a father and are led by the father. And that explains why poverty is so rampant amongst black
02:26communities and crime is so rampant among black communities. Couldn't possibly have anything to do
02:32with institutional racism or anything like that. It's definitely because the women are too strong
02:37and domineering over the men. The Moynihan Report was eventually debunked, but not before it was
02:42validated by the U.S. government. That meant that it was hugely influential when it came to writing actual
02:49policy that would affect black women every day. The Moynihan Report itself was sanctioned and validated by the
02:57U.S. government. So it was used to influence politicians and like actual policies that were being made
03:05in the country. So it really got this kind of formal stamp of approval that a lot of the criticism
03:11of
03:11the Moynihan Report did not get. Okay, so to regroup, first you have the Moynihan Report, which blamed black
03:18women for the crime and poverty in black communities. And then you have Ronald Reagan, who racialized,
03:25I'm so sorry, reformed welfare in the 70s and 80s. Specifically, Ronald Reagan just kind of came out
03:33with it and coined this term welfare queen when he wanted to reform the welfare system. And he created
03:40this trope of black women as leeches on the American system who were like taking advantage of taxpayer
03:47dollars by having all these children, taking all this money from the government with no interest in
03:52working. And this image of the welfare queen continues to affect perceptions and policies
03:58regarding welfare. For example, did you know that working class white people without a college degree
04:03receive the most money from federal poverty reduction programs? Of course not, because it doesn't fit the
04:10perception. Who would you say are the real welfare queens of this country? So it's so interesting that you
04:17ask that because what does it even mean to mooch off of the country? If it's just using the financial
04:23services that come with being a citizen of this country, that then means that people who get
04:31financial aid, people who receive housing subsidies, food subsidies, first-time home buyer incentives that
04:39are funded by the government, married people who receive tax breaks, like all of those things count.
04:43Health insurance. All of those things count as government assistance. If a welfare queen is defined
04:50as someone who lives off of government handouts, then hi, I'm one of the biggest beneficiaries.
04:57As a white middle-class homeowner, I received one of the largest government subsidies,
05:01the mortgage interest deduction. That's what we call what the government pays us to help us own our own
05:07homes. And this isn't a small amount of money. In 2015, the U.S. spent so much money helping us
05:13own our
05:13homes, 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 an emasculating black woman. She's essentially
05:32contributing to the entire downfall of this community. From Ronald Reagan's welfare queen,
05:37we got a black woman who is willing to stoop to criminality and fraud and bribery in order to get
05:43money that she wants. And I think the result of that culturally was just that, like, we couldn't
05:48trust black women, especially not with money. But Cecily finds deep faults in this thinking,
05:53because the data actually tells a totally different story. She pointed out that the numbers don't really
05:58add up. Well, first of all, black women are one of the most educated groups in America. They are the
06:03fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in America. And they, as individuals, are more likely to escape
06:10generational poverty than black men are. So this idea that black women are only relying on men for any
06:18kind of, like, social mobility, financial mobility, is just simply not true. Even when Moynihan was
06:23demonizing black women for this, it was really just black women supporting their families in the best way
06:27that they knew how. I don't think that there's any reason to have any shame about that. And I think
06:33what we're seeing in pop culture right now is a lot of clap back to this idea that black women
06:37are
06:37gold diggers. A lot of women are kind of, like, really leaning into that. Like, yes, I am a gold
06:40digger. If you want any of my time, you need to make it worth it financially and otherwise. And, like,
06:45I'm actually going to embrace that and, like, own that because black women know that the reality for us is
06:51that, like, we have to go get it ourselves. And that's always been the case. Black women are not out
06:55for men's money.
06:56We are out to support ourselves and to build wealth and financial independence within a system that
07:03never supported us in the first place. So maybe it's time we take away the stigma of the gold digger.
07:08Thanks so much for watching. Make sure you click that follow button so you can check out a new episode
07:12every week.
