Date of Submission
Spring 2019
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Sociology; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Africana Studies
Project Advisor 1
Allison McKim
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Based on six in-depth interviews with Black women in the Metro-Atlanta area who have at some point in the past ten years received welfare assistance, this project serves to understand how Black women relate to the welfare system in the current moment. To best understand their circumstances, I set forth a three-part question: how do Black women welfare recipients experience the welfare system in the current moment?; how do they interpret these experiences?; and lastly, how do these experiences and interpretations lend to how they conceptualize, construct, and/or manage their identities as Black women welfare recipients? I argue that my participants' experiences with the welfare system are varied based on their backgrounds of financial stability or instability and their adherence to or non-compliance with standards about work participation and the nuclear family order; this consequently influences their interpretations of their experiences which they express via whom or what they blame for their conditions of financial instability. Lastly, however, I argue that regardless of their circumstances and experiences, each of my participants believes that they are rights-bearing citizens who are a part of the mainstream American citizenry and thus adopt mainstream American values that center independence, work, and self-responsibility. As a result, through what I term politics of distance, my respondents are able to justify their claims on the welfare system as they conceptualize and construct their identities in adherence to the American value system.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Willingham, Eniyah C. and Willingham, Eniyah, "Beyond Repair: An Investigation of the Experiences, Interpretations, and Self-Construction of Black Women Welfare Recipients in the Deep South" (2019). Senior Projects Spring 2019. 96.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019/96
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Race Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Policy Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Policy Commons, Social Welfare Commons, State and Local Government Law Commons