“We do depend on our benefits,” said Ms. Walker, who tries to economize as best she can. She and her parents purchased a chest freezer, so she can stock up on chicken, fish and frozen vegetables during sales. She also keeps a stash of ramen for the end of the month, when benefits run out. She’s familiar with two food pantries that can tide her over when there are paperwork snags. During her morning call last week, Ms. Walker wanted to ensure her next benefit deposit would arrive on time — or ready herself to “stretch a meal” if it would not.

Ms. Walker opened Revived Styles in 2022, and it has offered precious flexibility to her as a single parent with an autistic child. With her parents helping with child care, Ms. Walker has been able to forgo formal care that she estimates would cost around $20 an hour, which is more than she has ever earned. In its best months, her salon brings in less than her top earnings in her past jobs: $14 an hour at a local clothing store where she worked 32 hours a week. To give up the business, she figures she’d need to earn $20 or $25 an hour — pay that’s hard to come by.

Proponents of work requirements, tellingly, rarely discuss wages. Instead, they talk about welfare and dependency. The former term calls up a shameful history of opponents of public spending using racist stereotypes of Black, urban welfare queens to justify cuts — and maintain political support for those cuts. The charge of “dependency” broadens derision to all poor people regardless of race.

Neither term is an honest appraisal of the facts on the ground: Most of the incredibly diverse mix of Americans on SNAP are either working, like Ms. Walker, or are too old, too young or too disabled to be in the work force. They are also racially diverse, with roughly one-quarter Black, two-fifths white, and the rest spread among other groups.

Ms. Walker said that as a Black woman she knows that when politicians raise the specter of welfare dependency, they are talking about her — even if they don’t say it outright. “I do think that it is more so targeted toward Black people; that is an underlying thing that nobody’s actually saying, but everybody thinks,” she said. “I try not to dwell on it.” Besides, said Ms. Walker, whether someone is “orange, black or blue, if somebody’s getting these benefits, it’s because they need them.”