In 1974, Linda Taylor was a 47 year old woman living in Chicago. She was indicted on 31 counts of “involving her alleged receipt of illegal welfare benefits, medical assistance, food stamps, and Social Security & Veteran’s benefits.” While the average American may not know who Taylor was, many will know her by the nickname she was given in a Rochester, New York newspaper—the welfare queen. Though Ronald Reagan never used the term as part of his political ascension in the 1970s and 1980s, he did single out Taylor specifically on the campaign trail in January of 1976 although he did not use her name:
In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare, he said…In fact…her tax-free cash income alone has been running at $150,000 a year.
You could actually hear the audience gasp if you listen to the recording. Taylor became the poster child from that moment for the anti-welfare sentiment that has been widely embraced by the republican party for decades. Like Taylor, all Black women were feeding off a system of government handouts. This stigma was used to make democrats appear to be the party that was too eager to provide set-asides and other assistance for the poor.
It is worth mentioning, however, that Raegan in his speech never mentioned the race of Linda Taylor. According to Bryce Covert of The New Republic:
“While Reagan never used Taylor’s name, nor even directly racialized her, he didn’t need to. The ‘woman from Chicago’ who wore furs and drove a Cadillac while receiving government checks was clearly black to his White supporters. And while the AFDC’s[1] caseload never became majority black—60 percent of AFDC families were non-Black—the face of poverty in popular media had become Black, allowing Taylor to represent a group toward which white Americans were growing resentful. Without articulating explicit racial animus, Reagan conveyed a story that spoke to people’s racist ideas about public benefits and lazy black people.”
Similar to the affirmative action stereotype, the belief that Black people are gaming the system even when it is not true leads politicians to work to destroy all families in need rather than aid them. After Raegan’s successful presidential bid, Congress cut $25 billion in programs aiding poor people and over 400,000 households were cut off from AFDC. As Covert writes, “in 1974, 12 percent of the country lived in poverty, surviving on a little over $5,000 a year for a family of four. Such a family could expect just $3,456 a year from AFDC to supplement its meager income, an amount that went without an update for years while inflation soared.” Here is the kicker, however, while the face of the welfare system was attacked, even by poor White people who were the majority of people benefitting from the system, the real exploiters of the welfare system were the creators of the system itself. As Covert states:
“If there was an epidemic of fraud, it was almost certainly more prevalent among white-collar people such as doctors bilking Medicaid or civil servants who collected both salaries and benefits. A 1978 federal report found that just 1 percent of the annual budget of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was lost to ‘unlawful, willful misrepresentation (fraud) or excessive services and program violations (abuse)’.”
So in essence, some of the welfare recipients were not cheating the system at nearly the same level that the system was cheating then. For example, prior to the Taylor story, in 1970 alone, 39 states were illegally denying people their well-deserved benefits, according to The Associated Press.
Looking at the case of Linda Taylor, one might say that it’s old news, but I would ask you to look at the parallels between Taylor’s story and how President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better and COVID relief programs during the pandemic were viewed by many. It is a reminder of how this stereotype about the welfare queen would go on to affect all those in America who are poor regardless of their race. Biden’s policies to help families emerge from the pandemic were labeled “socialist” and “communist” by republican senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio. Some like democratic Senator Joe Manchin expressed concern that money from Biden’s expanded child tax credit would be spent on drugs. Note that West Virginia is over 93% White. Never forget that any “war on poverty” that is declared in America is usually a war against impoverished people.
Just as in the 1970s when the welfare program exploited welfare recipients, there was ample evidence of the people being cheated out with the COVID relief programs. Before Biden took over, clients of lobbyists connected to the Trump administration during COVID received over $10 billion in COVID targeted assistance through Trump’s CARES (Coronavirus AID Relief, and Economic Security Act) program. Furthermore, approximately $273 million was granted to over 100 companies owned or operated by major donors to the Trump campaign, and “unnecessary blanket ethics waivers [were] applied to potential administration conflicts of interest.”
Furthermore, Trump’s administration created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to be administered by the Small Business Administration to…well…help small businesses. Forbes Magazine reported, however, that most of the $525 billion issued went to larger corporations, many of whom (25 of them) had ties to Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner and received over $4,000,000 in loans each. While most small businesses that received PPP assistance received $150,000 or less, the parents of White House Press Secretary at the time, Kayleigh McEnaney, received $1- $2,000,000for their roofing business. It should also be noted that the Trump administration attempted to hide this information and media outlets had to sue to obtain these records. Other prominent figures who received PPP money and did not pay it back included NFL great Tom Brady, who received almost $1,000,000 for his TB12 health and wellness company at the same time that he signed a 2-year $50,000,000 contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who received $183,504 in loan forgiveness. The Linda Taylor-esque narrative, however, remained that it was Black people, and Black women specifically who were exploiting the system. The myth continues in 2025 now in the form of SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) benefits.
The current Trump administration is actively working to stop lower income people from receiving any form of assistance to either get ahead or just stay stable. From his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill that benefits the wealthy at the expense of Medicaid, to refusing to end the government shutdown and allow health subsidies and food assistance to continue, Trump’s policies are seeing Americans starve that are second only to the hundreds of thousands of people across the world who have died or are dying after he closed USAID. But just as the face of people starving across the world from USAID closing are only Black African women and children, the face of the needy SNAP recipient in America is a Black woman exploiting the system to supposedly feed her family.
Primarily using Open AI’s SORA platform, videos have emerged of Black women complaining about their SNAP benefits being removed. Not images of Black people but Black women only. I have not seen a single image of a Black man or child begging for their SNAP benefits and if they exist, they have not gone viral. FOX News ran an article that featured several of these videos as if they were real. Rather than apologize for the article, they just changed the title to speak about AI viral videos of SNAP benefit recipients. Popular influencers like Brett Cooper (and FOX contributor) shared these videos and spoke about them as if they were real people. Videos with Black women saying things like “I get over $2,500 a month in stamps. I sell ‘em, $2,000 worth for $12-1,500 cash.” Another AI-generated woman screamed “It is the taxpayers responsibility to take care of my kids to eat and for my kids to be taken care of.”
The aforementioned videos are shared widely by conservatives, republicans, and members of MAGA because they revive the Linda Taylor stereotype. Though the majority of people who receive SNAP benefits are White, the videos generated all feature Black women. It should also be mentioned that “food stamps” do not exist anymore and should have survived an instant factcheck but facts are not the point. It should me mentioned however, that AI is not the only problem. CNN has been accused by many online for primarily showcasing Black women in their stories about SNAP recipients, and other networks have done the same.
Over 50 years later, the Black welfare queen narrative is alive and well. While the Trump administration lives a real-life gilded age using tax-payer money to redecorate the bathroom in the White House, while Trump flies down on taxpayer dollars to Mar-a-Lago for lavish parties on weekends, while Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem spend almost $200,000,000 of tax payer money for two planes, while FBI head Kash Patel flies on the FBI private jet on taxpayer money to see his country music girlfriend sing in Tennessee, and while several government officials (Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Marco Rubio), move on to government military bases with taxpayer money, the main image of the person living off the American taxpayer is a still a poor Black woman.
It should be noted, however, that Linda Taylor was actually labeled as White on the 1930 census and her birth name was listed as Martha Miller. She did have darker skin and darker hair, and one of her husbands who was Black, said she could pass for Asian, and she also mentioned she had Native American ancestry. She also posed as Jewish at one point. She could have passed as different races and apparently did but that narrative was not acceptable for America after Raegan’s speech. She had to be a Black woman.
It must also be noted that those who denounced Taylor were also selective in their condemnation. There was credible evidence that Taylor murdered her roommate and also kidnapped babies, but she was never placed on trial for those more serious crimes because it would take away from the fraud case, according to Josh Levin in his book The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth: It also cost more to put her on trial than the actual money she was accused of taking. Scapegoating her solely as a Black woman who pimped the system was the only narrative needed. As Levin writes on Linda Taylor entitled “She was the fall guy for everyone who’d lost his job, or had a hefty tax bill, or was angry about his lot in life and the direction of his country…She was someone it felt good to punish.”
In 2025, despite the lies of who benefits from SNAP, and despite the overwhelming evidence of the Trump administration exploiting the system, America is still looking for that Black woman for whom it feels so “good to punish.”
[1] Aid to Families with Dependent Children
