Good Ole Bill's PRWORA

“Black and on Welfare: What You Don’t Know About Single-Parent Women” is a wonderful essay written by Sandra Golden that describes her experiences being on government assistance, her studies on it and as well as her research on it. Her essay argues that majority of women on governmental assistance programs have low academic literacy, but are very high social literacy. This meaning that even though they are undereducated or uneducated all together, that they still understand and can describe the injustices and

discrmination that they face being on welfare. Her studies prove this.

One of her first research groups dealt with black women affected by Bill Clintons “end of welfare as we know it.” It was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This act was created to “provide assistance to needy families so that children can be taken care of in their own homes or in the homes of relatives; to end dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; to prevent and reduce out of wedlock babies and encourage the formation and maintence of two parent families.” (Golden 29) Reading this quote disgusted me and made me feel like a moocher and I am not even on government assistance. If you ask me the government does more harm than “assistance.” It does not stop there though. Every person affected under the PRWORA is assigned a self-sufficiency coach that is supposed to help them with job training and budgeting, but these “coaches” do more harm than good as well.

Many of the women in her study felt disrespected and belittled by these “coaches.” “The participants also believed the disrespect was a manifestation of social perceptions that individuals on public assistance are uneducated and lazy.” (Golden 30) The coaches were there to help these women pick up their lives so that they would not need to be on public assistance anymore. They felt that because the women had little to no academic literacy that they did not want to better themselves. The coaches were supposed to be setting them up for success not failure. How can the United States government want people to do better for themselves and their children if they do not give them the proper resources?