Last Wednesday I caught the last of this week's series of lectures by Rickie Solinger at the UI. It was entitled 9 Ways of Looking at a Poor Woman. What really stuck out for me was a point she made about visual culture and perception of people, especially women, in poverty.

In 1935 welfare was made available for the first time. This was the Depression, and the federal money was for white women only. When welfare became available to black women in the 1950s, the claim emerged that women were having babies in order to get "free" money. This sentiment is an easy step to claiming that black women were having sex for money. They weren't considered mothers, they were considered whores.

In the 1940s and 50s images of poor people as seen in Time, Look, and other such magazines were typically of "a well if shabbily dressed white woman holding hands of neatly if shabbily dressed children" going to church or other puritanical behavior. This changed shortly after welfare became available to black women, and those images of poverty found in white media became poorly dressed, messy black people, looking disheveled and defeated. These images came to shape white America's definition of poor people.

As more Americans were made aware of black women receiving welfare, those unwholesome images of blacks in poverty made a deep impression that lasts to this day. That sort of woven institutional racism can also be called white supremacy, which in our society tends to wear the noble label "meritocracy."

The image above was the first to appear in a Google image search for "poor woman."