America’s racists are still here, and they aren’t going anywhere soon.
“I don’t have a problem with people using food stamps.” She’s pretty; her long, straight hair bounces in a few triangular points off her shoulders. Her eyes are neatly lined, and she has a nice, slightly-tanned face. She seems to know what she’s saying, responding to the “hate mail” she got from someone unhappy with her racist video. She spits out the word racist like an eagle spits out a poisonous frog, and it hangs in the air.
“Or welfare.” Her partner, sitting to her side, wears glasses, and has her hair longer. She’s slightly less glamorous than the host. Their friendship seems like a standard one from any high school in America — the pretty girl and the smart girl. She has on a t-shirt, but a nice one.
“Or welfare. It’s people who take advantage of it. Like…what were you saying before?”
“That people who — like, black people — well, I mean there are probably white people who do it too!”
There are very few people who “take advantage” of welfare, black or white. In California, in 2008, the stories of welfare fraud are shocking. A woman who made $19,000 a year, working two jobs, pled no contest to charges of felony welfare fraud because she applied for welfare while making more than the cutoff. In September 2008, in Stanislaus County, fourteen people were convicted of the crime.
Of those who were charged, many were not like the now-convicted felon, who was barely making enough money to be considered over the poverty line. Many of them were wealthy white people who falsely took in benefits. After federal welfare reform was passed in 1996, cash payments and food stamps were slashed, and eligibility requirements became substantially harder to meet. Yet that information clearly did not register with the two stars of this YouTube video —although they do go on to describe their understanding of what “taking advantage of welfare” means.
“Wait. First off, let me just say that we go to a large high school. There are about 2,000 students. 60% of — are black. There’s like a 10% of Asian whatever, blah blah blah, all those things, and there’s white people…So, out of the 60% that are black, um, 90% of the kids that graduate are white. 90% of them. Not a lot of black kids graduate from my school. They — they don’t, like, make a living for themselves. They just drop out of high school, like, oh, I’m gonna have kids, I’m gonna get a welfare check.”
“Imma get my G.E.D.”
“Imma get my G.E.D., Imma work at McDonald’s, and, oh, if I keep havin’ my babies, Shaniqualiqua and Ja-Quay-Quay, I keep gettin’ my welfare check for havin’ my babies. Like, that is how — okay, maybe up north, or wherever the hell you people are from, maybe that’s not how the black people are. But here, that is where the majority — that is how the majority of them are.”
“They take, they literally get their welfare check, they get whatever food stamp — that’s how they…Whatever. They get their welfare check, and they go, and they buy these, like, expensive name-brand clothes, and, like, then they don’t have enough money to pay for, like, rent or anything, because they do that. And it’s stupid…I don’t understand is how their priorities. They don’t have them right…that’s what’s annoying about it. I don’t care. I don’t care, like, if they’re black. I could care less about the color of your skin, as long as you’re not, like, stupid. And that’s just stupid.”
So, the understood definition of taking advantage of welfare for these girls is that a huge majority of black students at their high school drop out, have several children, and then demand from the government that their checks come in the mail. Then, they waste the money. And, while they fail to provide any counterexamples, they claim some kind of colorblindness — despite their caricatures of African-American people, performed with crude accents, as “Shaniqualiqua and Ja-Quay-Quay.”
Ignorance is the problem here. The two-girl team goes on for almost fifteen minutes, responding to “hate mail” about their racism. They claim to be above a racial discourse in which that they actively participate. They claim that society is just the way they see it, and leave no room for a dissenting voice. They have no shame. That’s the takeaway from their video. Their ignorance overpowers everything else. In many nations across the globe — but particularly the United States — this ignorance has been a problem for centuries. Judging by these videos, ignorance shows no sign of vanishing any time soon.
Fortunately, the two girls have been expelled. Serves them right.
Gary Gerbrandt ’14 (garygerbrandt@college) can’t believe some of the things he sees on the Internet. And then he remembers that it’s the Internet.