Reddit reviews Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion)

I'm glad this study is getting some visibility, because people seem to be largely unaware of the explicitly white supremacist history of the fight against entitlements.

Welfare programs created under the New Deal were intensely prejudiced toward African Americans and immigrants. They contained many mechanism for states to segregate and deny access to these programs for minority groups.

What killed the welfare programs in the US was the civil rights movement which guranteed somewhat equal access to public services, including welfare programs, to non white people. Welfare reform and entitlement reform has always been first and foremost anoit perpetuating white supremacy.

https://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/welfare01b.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Americans-Hate-Welfare-Communication/dp/0226293645

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393328511/

The notion that welfare promotes a culture of entitlement is a myth, perpetuated by century old American stereotypes of black laziness.

Would highly recommend the seminal Why Americans Hate Welfare. Upshot: the only reasonable explanation for why Americans don't like welfare but like other social programs is their (incorrect) perception that the majority of the recipients are black.

It may have been wacky to see someone act like that, but it's a prevailing attitude in the United States. I was doing some research on New Deal politics and found the book Why Americans Hate Welfare and it turns out that among other things such as media manipulation, there has been a calculated strategy to turn American's attitudes against the poor, in order to make it easier to defund social safety nets.