Reason: Welfare is often painted in black face. What role does race play in the debate?
Anderson: I think there's an underlying belief in this country that we need to push to the surface. Many people believe that blacks are intellectually inferior. So a lot of people believe that we must have a system to take care of blacks, because they surely can't compete with us whites and Asians. The other thing is the subtle demonizing of blacks in the welfare debate. Every time we have something negative to say about welfare, there is a black mother or a black male. Any time you have anything positive to say about welfare, there's a white mother. These two things merge in the debate about welfare. Yet if people look at history, they would also know that most blacks did not come to welfare until the late '50s and '60s. What were they doing all those other years? Working.
Reason: Who's on welfare in California?
Anderson: A little bit of everybody. I mean, we've got two-parent families on aid. We've got single moms who've never been married on aid. That's our smallest group.
Reason: Really?
Anderson: Our largest group is women who have been married.
Reason: That contravenes the stereotype, which is that the largest group is women who never married and had children out of wedlock. Of those who are chronically on welfare, would the largest group still be women who have never married?
Anderson: We've only got 81,000 women on assistance who never married, never worked.
Reason: Out of how many?
Anderson: Whew, 900,000.
Reason: So less than 10 percent.
Anderson: Yes.
Reason: You have done some groundbreaking research on intergenerational welfare with regard to the age of the fathers of babies born to teenaged mothers. What did you find?
Anderson: When I first started looking at marriage in AFDC, I was interested in putting a proposal together that actually gets people married. I thought that teenagers were having relationships pretty much in their peer group.
Reason: That teen pregnancies were the result of condoms breaking in the back seats of cars.
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