The story behind the “welfare queen” | Hacker News Reader

The story behind the “welfare queen”

nytimes.com

12 pointspseudolus6 comments

> According to a state statute, “Any woman who shall have been delivered of a mulatto child, the same shall be prima facie evidence of guilt without further proof and shall justify a conviction of the woman.” If Taylor had been declared a “Negro,” her mother would have been guilty of a felony.

1926 Georgia, a few years before Germany enacted similar laws.

As the article argues, she was almost obliged to become a fraudster; merely existing made her evidence of a crime, so she had to lie about her ancestry. From lying about ancestry as a necessity of survival to lying about it for personal gain.

This [1] is a far better written version of the same tale, and I expect the entirety of the "research" for this article. It actually tells the story (in incredible detail) instead of glossing over it, cherry picking, and and using it as a a thin veil for a cookie cutter partisan rant. Using an archive since it does not seem to be loading on the normal link even though slate is not down. Not sure what's up with that.

Very interesting read!

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190427164817/http://www.slate....

Taylor fit perfectly into rhetoric forming the GOP "Southern Strategy."

How is it a "myth"? She committed welfare fraud and was convicted as a result. The dollar amount is also accurate.

The article explains that the dollar amount was a huge exaggeration ($150,000 per year claimed by politicians, versus $40,000 in total over many years in reality).

But more importantly, the myth is that she was not just a criminal, but one of many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people defrauding and abusing the welfare system. It's like when one immigrant ends up in the news for committing a crime, then some groups call for a total ban on immigration.

This [1] is likely the source for the entirety of research that was done for this article. It's a voluminous article on the lady with extensive citations, sources, and information. Suffice to say she stole way over $40k, and way over $150k for that matter. She was a complete psychopath with 'ties' to crimes up to and including murderous insurance fraud. For instance in one case one of her husbands would end up getting killed by another man. A month after his death she took the insurance money and moved and bought a new house, with her new companion - the man who killed her husband. Nobody would be found guilty of any crime in that instance.

And something that this article leaves out is that her case and conviction set off a wave of further prosecutions. In the first year following her welfare fraud conviction, an additional 241 people were indicted on the same. And this was at a time with a much smaller population and an even smaller chunk of it on social programs. It sparked a crackdown on what seems to have been relatively lax enforcement beforehand.

And the $150k figure did not come from politicians. It came from investigative journalism and journalists who reported on her fascinating and sordid tale. The real article mentions that the Chicago Tribune was the first source for the $150k. It also reported on her jewelry, furs, Cadillac, etc - which were also all real. I hate the word because it's become so loaded, but this article probably qualifies for the title "fake news." In that it takes real and falsifiable facts and presents them in an intentionally distorted manner to try to push forward an agenda that is very likely to mislead and misinform the reader.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190427164817/http://www.slate....

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