Biopower and "The Welfare Queen"

I am interested in connecting the text to the concept of Biopower, introduced by Foucalt, when thinking about histories and narratives of racism and violence in the texts. This concept relates to the ‘practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects’ through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.”  More simply, I have come to understand this concept as the ‘State’ providing opportunities for life to certain bodies, (i.e. economic, racial, gendered privileges,) by disallowing the same opportunities to others. This concept might be helpful when thinking about the oppressive nature of the state (white supremacy), while thinking about the lethal consequences of cultural production.

This concept of biopower is often absent or ignored in discourses looking to connections between our history of slavery and colonization, to ‘current’ racialized tropes in popular culture. I am horrified by the marketability of the “Welfare Queen” trope used by racists, conservatives, and liberals alike. This is an interesting construction to me for many reasons, primarily because of its blatant denial of historical structural inequality. This trope is constructed along the lineage of “Mammy” stereotypes and problematized, incorrect judgements of a ‘matriarchal’ black family with an absent male role. This stereotype is politically potent and has real economic and social consequences in its proliferation. 

By constructing the caricature of a “lazy, young, fat, Black mother of four” as a serious ‘threat’ to economic security and a ‘waste of tax payers money’, the effects can be catastrophic. Not only does this narrative ignore a history of slavery and utter economic disallowment, but more importantly it ignores a violent  history of criminalized, targeted, incarcerated, and murdered Black men. 

So to position the “Welfare Queen,” the ‘matriarch’ of the Black Family, as a problem to her own family, to her own community, and to ‘the nation’ not only do we continue to ignore a legacy of violence, but we continue to enact a second kind of violence onto the Black woman. By problematizing a position that is in part constructed by the state, or through Biopower, and in part falsely fabricated through cultural production, we frame the issue as her own self- inflicted problem, we tell her its her responsibility, and ultimately her failure for  a white supremacist nation state that granted black people opportunities for death in grave comparison to the opportunities for life granted to whites. 

So what does this mean tangibly in 2014 for  low-income communities or communities of color if that trope still has a sort of political traction, (people still believe it and defend it) yet economic stratification is higher than ever, wages are low, and social programs are cut or nonexistent while criminalization of Brown and Black bodies persists. Cheap labor and a desperate working class are the goals of the white supremacist State. 

(this is my point!!!! racist people believe this)