Government payrolls?
Lord, that's funny.
Never heard welfare quite referred to that way!
No, she’s citing the fact that blacks are wa-a-a-a-a-y overrepresented in the federal, state and local bureaucracy/civil service and derive their “middle-classness” from that. Welfare is another subject. Of course, if all you do all day at work is loaf, how is that so different from being on welfare?
More than 20% of the Black working population over 16 years old are employees of the federal, state, or local government which is just over 5% higher than the national average. On the other end a much smaller percentage of African Americans are self-employed (3.6%) than the national average of 6.2%.
Among the major race and ethnicity groups, Hispanics continued to have the highest labor force participation rate (68.5 percent) in 2008, while the participation rate for blacks was the lowest (63.7 percent). The participation rates for whites (66.3 percent) and Asians (67.0 percent) were roughly midway between the rates for blacks and Hispanics, continuing a long-term pattern.
http://blackdemographics.com/economics/employment/
If the districts were redrawn to dilute black voting power they did it in a very strange way.
Stats below for District 1 which Ferguson is in.
White 325,286
Black or African American 363,394
American Indian and Alaska Native 1,495
Asian 19,826
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander 14