“Welfare,” in those days, meant Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program ended by Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which turned AFDC into block grants known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). As Premilla Nadasen, the author of Welfare Warriors, writes, AFDC was relatively uncontroversial until the 1960s, when an increasing number of black women taking advantage of the program—and organizing to demand better of it—opened the door to racialized attacks. “The punitive approach to addressing poverty was a result of the way race and poverty had become intertwined in the national debate,” Nadasen writes. “In the 1960s, urban social disorder, black demands for economic equality, and federal anti-poverty initiatives drew the nation’s attention to the persistent problem of black poverty. But the dominant liberal approach explained poverty as a product of black culture, reinforcing the notion that certain poor people were responsible for their own poverty.”

The women of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded in 1967, challenged this idea. Importantly, they also argued that raising children was itself work. Welfare, they said, was a safety net that would be there for anyone who needed it, not a handout to a pathological segment of the population. “Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women,” argued Johnnie Tillmon, chair of the NWRO. “As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the front-line troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women—the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.”

Yet NWRO’s struggle was ultimately unsuccessful; instead of expanding the AFDC program and removing its more punitive aspects (home inspections and even forced sterilizations), the U.S. government slashed it. And sloppy reporting and endless repeated lies about “welfare queens”—introduced in Ronald Reagan’s infamous 1976 speech—enabled that slashing. Even publications like this one had their role in pushing welfare reform through—The New Republic’s notorious August 1996 cover called for Congress to “sign the welfare bill now,” under a photograph of a black woman holding a baby and smoking a cigarette.

Reagan wasn’t the first to blur the lines between “welfare” and other broadly used and broadly popular social programs, and his rhetoric lives on in today’s GOP, from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. While AFDC was not, in fact, predominantly used by black women, the image that was used in speeches and in stories was the irresponsible black mother. That image echoes today in Trumpist paeans to the “white working class,” which implicitly contrast white people, who work, to the black poor, presumably non-working. Yet “welfare” cuts have always been about pushing people into work, as Trump made clear in his State of the Union Tuesday night, trotting out an old cliché: “We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity.” What that looks like in practice, so far, is new work requirements for Medicaid.