A Response to Black and On Welfare: What You Don't Know About Single Parent Women

       Women should be tough, tender,laugh as much as possible,and live long lives. The Struggle for      equality continues unabated and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory – Maya Angelou 1993

Sandra Golden opens with a descriptive account of her first experience with the welfare office in her county. As a 20 year old, pregnant,scared and unemployed black women Golden sought assistance from the County Department of Human Services, a department she believed was created to help people in her situation. She then goes on to say that she left the welfare office feeling humanized and humiliated. She felt mentally abused by the caseworker's insensitivity, and her self esteem was damaged by the caseworker's discriminatory attitude. Her caseworker never inquired about her educational or employment background and it appeared that the assumption was that recipients of welfare were unmotivated, unskilled, uneducated or undereducated, and mainly responsible for raising fatherless children. Despite her caseworkers false beliefs Golden actually had over 2 years of banking experience and had completed 2 years of college course work.This is yet another example of the dominating systems such as welfare that do not recognize black women's social literacy skills.A black single parent female utilizes special literacy skills to negotiate within a social context that marginalizes and disenfranchises groups based on gender, race, education, and class.The welfare system places little value on home, family, and community literacy and primary recognizes academic literacy. Welfare is a means to an improved quality of life,not the means to barely fulfilling existence.  Although there is not much research on black women's learning in the home, managing a household requires skills in time management, budgeting, conflict resolution, facilitating and creating learning environments, and home maintenance. A woman's ability to realize her own ideal of mothering and nurturing is usually crafted by the other variables that work, family relations, and social interactions create in her life. We as a people need to take more time and care in the ways we address the issues that concern others around us.