Single white female

photographs by Mark Ostow, text by Yvonne Abraham

Lynne Buckson's daughter, Anica, holds the sides of the doorway, swinging one hot-pink-slippered foot back and forth. She has deep-brown skin, and tiny dreadlocks, which her mother twirls when the girl comes over and flops down in her lap.

"She's such a hambone," says Buckson, a white woman with long, curly hair. "Aren't you a hambone?"

The six-year-old, delighted, drops her head so far back onto Buckson's shoulder that her two little hearing aids whistle. Unfazed, Anica straightens herself and runs back from the sunny kitchen into her bedroom to don a bejeweled yellow plastic crown for visitors.

Anica's father was stabbed to death at a T stop four years ago. "I've never gotten his backpack back," Buckson says. "He was just another black man who got killed."

Since then, Buckson and her daughter, who live in Jamaica Plain, have relied on welfare. Because Anica is hearing impaired, she receives $161 a month from Social Security. Buckson gets another $400 a month in survivor's benefits. And her partner's life insurance brings in another $50 a month, all of which barely covers the rent.

Buckson never expected to end up raising Anica on public money: she grew up middle-class, and was working in theatrical costume design when her partner, an MBTA worker, was killed. Without his income, she and Anica quickly became poor. Buckson decided she wanted to help other children who've lost parents, and began studying elementary education at Wheelock College, where she has a 4.0 GPA. She's been there for the past three years, getting by with grants, scholarships, and roughly $3000 worth of student loans a year. When she's done, she'll be earning enough to stay off public assistance for good.

The stereotypical career welfare mother invoked by pundits to justify welfare reform is most often black or Hispanic. In the real world, only 3 percent of people on Social Security and 18.4 percent of those on welfare are black. And yet, as Buckson herself will tell you, the clichés -- and the prejudices -- have a firm hold, even among the workers who deal with welfare recipients every day.

"They're equal-opportunity assholes [in the Social Security offices], but more often, being white works to my advantage," Buckson says. "I see how the workers talk to the people who can't speak English."

But when Buckson says she gets treated better than minority recipients, that isn't saying much. In the past, when her student-loan payments came in, she'd have to go down to the Social Security office and suspend her food stamps for that month. Then, the next month, she'd have to reactivate them. Each change invariably took weeks to kick in.

"What they do is throw up hoops to have you jump through them, and they're hoping you won't so they won't have to deal with you," she says. Buckson decided the food stamps weren't worth the jumping, and gave them up in favor of food-pantry charity.

One time she waited two hours to see a caseworker, only to hear her name called just as she was coming out of the bathroom. She said, "Here I am," but the woman would not talk to her -- would not even turn around to face her, Buckson says -- because she hadn't been there at the instant she was called. The woman's fellow workers implored her to turn around, telling her Buckson was right behind her. "Nope," Buckson recalls the woman telling her colleagues. "She wasn't here when I called her, so I'm not talking to her now."

"There are a lot of petty tyrants in the system," Buckson adds. "They have so much contempt for the people who go in there for help."

And yet, being an articulate white woman in the system seems to minimize that contempt. She hears caseworkers talk to recipients of color with a condescension they rarely direct at her. One worker even told her, unsolicited, that she, as well as Anica, qualified for Medicaid, and even offered to approve her on the spot. Rarely do clerks volunteer such information, or offer to help recipients sidestep the red tape. Their job, especially now, is to move folks off the public payroll.

Buckson says few recipients would ever dare to complain about the way they're treated. She hardly ever does, either. "People are just sitting there because they absolutely need this money," Buckson says. "There was no one I could complain to about that woman. It would have been easy for her to just take my file and throw it away. You just don't know.

"If you need this assistance, you live in fear."