Only historical materialism can explain why Black women are villainized as “welfare queens” and subjected to racialized stigmatization – the aff is a neoliberal tool to distract from the true issue which is class based inequalities

Furthermore, poor black women cannot depend on the state for protection from any kind of violence. In fact, violence against black women is intimately connected to state power. There is a clear correlation between institutionalized violence against black women in the United States. In 2015, a police officer named Daniel Holtzclaw raped thirteen black women between the ages of seventeen and fifty-eight over a seven-month period. This sort of crimes violating black women’s bodily integrity and ruining their psychic stability shows how poor black women lives do not matter and are not considered as grievable, lives conceived and exposed to deliberate police violence. It is worth pointing out that the women who were raped by Holtzclaw live in a poor black community in Oklahoma and are already reduced to absolute vulnerability and exposed to all kinds of state violence—physical, social, economic, and environmental. It is not surprising, then, that such atrocious acts perpetrated against black women that are utterly vulnerable took so long to be revealed. Is it because they are constructed as the “other,” the welfare queens? As a general rule, the “others,” the “them,” are always viewed as different from the “us” and not in need of protection. And since “we” presumably can never be “them,” it is likely that the “we” continue to ill-treat the “them” on ground that such an atrocity would go unnoticed. What such an account depicts, in no uncertain terms, is that gendered racism is a real problem for black women in the welfare state and society as a whole, which cannot be ignored.

Black women who want to be stay at home mothers and take care of their children, their elderly parents, and other needy family members are usually looked at as welfare queens and seen as profaning the sacrosanct principles of “good mothering” and the ethics of care as normalizing gender norms.71 And while, women in general were indeed excluded from the white male demos of free and equal subjects capable of practical reason, “self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation,”72 white women, in no uncertain terms, benefited from the cult of true womanhood. In other words, the rights of women to be protected from the drudgery of work outside the home, even if it denied them self-autonomy and freedom and strengthened paternalistic power, it was a right given only to white woman. This was shamelessly recognized and articulated in the Mothers’ Pensions Program, which denied social assistance to black women. In a word, white womanhood was safeguarded and defended against black womanhood.

Furthermore, if we approach this issue from the point of view of recognition, since black women were, and still are, misrecognized as the essential “other” of white woman, then, we would have to ask without closing off the question: who is the subject that has claims to the rights of women? What do the deployment of such rights tell us about the amalgamation of race, gender, and class? So, in the face of gendered racism, what alternative claims to “woman” should be proclaimed to include blacks in the category “woman” and not in that of welfare dependents? The cult of “good mothering” and true womanhood,73 which are constructed and developed within the western archive seem to be destabilized by the welfare dependency discourse assigned to poor black women.

Systematically viewed as welfare queens, poor black women must be constantly policed and disciplined. It is important to remember, here, that the idea of a natural woman has long lost credence and that there exists no ontological specificity to the category “woman,” in that, “the very subject of women is no longer understood in stable and abiding terms,”74 however, it can be likened to how the anti-Semite like Jean-Paul Sartre understands it, that is, as the one that makes the Jews.75 This analogy merely serves the purpose of showing that it is indeed the same kind of epistemic violence that phallocentrism imposes on the category “woman.” Notwithstanding that the category women has been expanded to include transwomen, whiteness continues to define and naturalize what women are supposed to be. The racialization of gender positioned a black woman outside of the norm of a recognizable woman, and a black woman is always exposed to castigation. So, when the queen of soul Aretha Franklin sings at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, “you make me feel like a natural woman,”76 she draws our attention to the very de-naturalization of black women, positioned outside of natural womanhood, but as the “other” of the “others.” For poor black women receiving welfare, this otherness extends itself to an “absolute otherness” always already nonnegotiable.77 This is the reason why I might feel interpellated at this moment by the existential question: “Ain’t I a Woman?” which exemplifies the black feminist’s challenge to the women’s movement and first and second waves of feminism.78 It will be used here to analyze how poor black women are positioned in the welfare state as the undeserving poor.

Under the workfare program poor women must work outside of the home in exchange for their welfare checks. I already hinted at some of the detriments of workfare for single mothers with young children participating in the labor force. Having young children cared for outside of the home is rapidly becoming the norm. This is the result of what the political economist Bob Jessop refers to as “the hollowing out or erosion of the Keynesian welfare state, which has resulted in a Schumpeterian workfare state.”79 Given the racialization of welfare, as I will later show, the Schumpeterian workfare state is rapidly advancing for poor black women as a state of death-in-life, an apt phase that signifies the way in which mandatory work requirement remains outside the normal state of basic human rights and prevails over the health and well-being of welfare recipients and leads them to death-in-life, and sometimes actual death.80

Let’s remember here the story told by Vivian S. Toy in the New York Times on August 31, 2000, in which she reported that a Ms. Laura Morales, thirtyfour years old, and a mother of three, died while working on her workfare assignment as a kitchen aide at a Brooklyn homeless shelter. According to the story, Ms. Morales told her friends and relatives that she was experiencing severe headaches, but she could not take time off for fear of losing her welfare benefits.81 Considering the work conditions that workfare forces on single mothers receiving welfare, it is urgent to question whether a largescale participation and work requirement can be required in a way that will meet adequate humanitarian standards.

In fact, the workfare state remorselessly continues to produce conditions that lead to people’s death. Because of the racially structured schema, the lives of poor black women are not inviolable and grievable, in that, there are no institutional support that contribute to make these lives livable to their full potentialities. In fact, to quote Judith Butler, it is no surprise that the lives of the poor “are never lived nor lost in the full sense.”82 Certainly, policies and legal regimes such as workfare and “prisonfare,” that is, in the lexicon of the urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant, the enlargement of the prisons and law enforcement systems,83 the lives of the poor are precariously exposed to health risks and dangers, which bar them from living out their lives to the maximum.

It is important, here, to show the relation between workfare and “prisonfare.” While the government is restricting welfare for the underprivileged through workfare, it enlarges the prisons and expands law enforcement systems.84 The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is a case in point because the Act, as Michelle Alexander notes, “authorized more than $16 billon for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces.”85 How is it then that workfare and prisonfare are flourishing side by side? Are these two reconciled with one another in a non-antagonistic manner? What makes this possible? Wacquant provides us with enough evidence that make is possible to take these questions into meaningful consideration. Clearly, workfare and prisonfare are rooted in the same behaviorist doctrine, and each, in its own way, serves to deter the destitute from “a livable life” and reinforces the wretchedness of their conditions. The result is just a mammoth social deficit.

Furthermore, in some cases, these two processes of deterrence are not mutually exclusive. Workfare, in the words of Wacquant, “offers relief not to the poor . . . by forcibly ‘disappearing’ the most disruptive of them from the shrinking welfare rolls on the one hand and into the swelling dungeons of the carceral castle on the other hand.”86 In other words, poor black men are sent to prisons retained by overpopulation, bureaucratic severity, and diminishing resources. And while the workfare population is decreasing, the prisons, despite rising corporate crimes, are overcrowded with disadvantaged black men.87 In this regard, black men are increasingly marginalized from work altogether and the provision of a family wage, which have a direct impact on the lives of poor black women. And since the fate of the black middleclass remains tied to poor blacks because of the racial dynamic embedded in the economy, culture, and politics, an entire citizenry is impacted.88

The discussion of workfare and prisonfare, of course, offers what Wacquant shows are parts of the disciplinary apparatuses for the subproletariat trapped in black ghettoes, superghettoes, and the prisons.89 While in the workfare state, the infrastructural and economic conditions of life are constantly impeded by welfare racism and in the prisons by the “prison industrial complex,” the amalgamation of the workfare state, the prison industries, and the policies that defines contemporary United States justice system90 goes mostly unnoticed. This is what Michel Foucault explains in his first volume of The History of Sexuality and describes as “the polymorphous techniques of power.”91 It is more severe than ever. Foucault’s “techniques of power” might have broader implications for its normalizing techniques of reducing blacks to social death, a death-in-life. It is worth emphasizing, here, that workfare and prisonfare, each work separately and together to undermine “a livable life” for poor blacks. This is the society that we live in and this is what a state of death-in-life is for the truly disadvantaged. We are thus compelled to recognize that both workfare and prisonfare shape and reinforce the disadvantages that black women experience and the varied ways they respond to all kinds of violence, injuries, diseases, and, sometimes, even death.

These “techniques of power” are deployed by the neoliberal rationality and governmentality for the implementation of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. In the end, all this leads to is the destruction of black families, the devastation of their neighborhoods, and the unlivability of poor people’s lives. Given that there is a separation between “a livable life” and an unlivable life, power delineates itself in relations to a biological field over which it takes authority and in which it entrusts itself. Based, in part, on the racialized gendered corporeality, this authority accepts the dissemination of human beings into groups and intensively subdivides the population into subcategories distinguishing between those whose lives are livable and those whose lives are unlivable.

In “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault explains and defines as state racism “a racism that society will direct against itself.”92 Even though Foucault has in mind the Nazi regime, state racism is easily extended to a gendered form of racism, that is, a discriminatory practice designed to reinforce, perpetuate, and sanction unlivability for poor black women. In retrospect, for capitalist productivity, this was important. The development of occupational segregation in the workplace along racialized gender lines, that is, as Nancy Leong phases it, “the process of deriving social and economic value from an individual”93 who is identified as a black or nonwhite woman “would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of [black women’s] bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic process.”94 In this sense, then, is it important to point out how gendered racism figures so significantly into what constitutes “a livable life” and is being advanced and made visible in the workfare state.

About the rights to “a livable life,” Mbembe, in “Necropolitics,” asks the question “who is the subject of that right?”95 Under the workfare state, the right to “a livable life” cannot be realized for black women. In returning to the death of Ms. Morales, according to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”96 In this sense, there is no ethical need to protect the sanctuary of poor black women’s lives and, in many cases, black lives as a whole. For black lives to really matter, one needs to start by interrogating whose life counts as life and what constitutes “a livable life.”97 The truth is that welfare recipients are treated as though their rights to adequate welfare do no longer matter. But, what matters, is the exploitive labor that they provide. The transformation of welfare into workfare raises an essential question as to the responsibility and role of a democratic government in terms of providing social assistance for the poor, especially black women.

Despite the obvious fact that poor people need welfare to ease the ills of poverty, the mainstream media chooses the fabricated images of full-faced pictures of “welfare cheats” as the “others” to make the headlines in the newspapers and the six o’clock news, which straightjackets more progressive alternative views about poor people in a world where poverty is produced and reproduced. In his ground-breaking work, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, Martin Gilens offers a clear and direct view of the media’s “ghettoization” of welfare and disrupts the media’s hostile portrayal of poor black women as welfare cheats.98 However, disregarding Gilens’ depictions, those in power fall prey to the media’s animus toward poor people and construe welfare dependency as a direct result of a failed work ethic conferred upon poor black women as a stigmatized and pathological status.

In the government’s imaginary, because the welfare queens live off the welfare state instead of being active participants in the workforce, they impact the financial interests of decent, hardworking Americans by increasing their taxes and destroying the good will of those willing to work. To express it otherwise, the habitual argument is that people taking advantage of the egalitarian “nanny state” without any contributions lessens the general social motivation to sustain such a state and the inevitable result is the appearance of a neoliberal “daddy state”99 that comes to counteract the bad will of welfare recipients.100 And while we cannot miss the implied gendered and racialized meanings in this argumentation, black women named as welfare dependents is a naming used to denigrate them as promiscuous, immoral, having children out of marriage,101 and refusing to work even though there are able-bodied.102 In that vast abyss of otherness, collapse the total identify of poor black women. This kind of identification only serves to create animosity among the undeserving poor (black welfare recipients) and the deserving poor (white working class) because the presumption is that black welfare recipients are living better than the poor working-class whites.

However, given the macdonalization and the walmartization of labor, there is a thin line between these two groups, the undeserving welfare poor and the deserving working-class poor. The individuals whose circumstances do require them to draw from this situation, for sure, are consciously reminded what can happen to them if their jobs folded. Both groups are confronted with the repercussions of the increasing gap between the rich and poor, and are made aware of the fact that they have lost most of the social and economic benefits that the Keynesian state once guaranteed them. The important point, here, is the reproduction of capital as a social relation, which is not simply located in capital itself, but how capital reproduces social classes.103 On capital’s behalf, “the economic functions of the state,” in this case “are in fact expressions of its overall political role in exploitation and class domination.”104

Since welfare politics have remained entwined with gendered racism, the mass media and public officials have continued to perpetuate the correlation between black women and welfare queens by finding ways to talk about the poor with an unpleasant race coded language. One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to recognize that black women’s exposure to this kind of namecalling (welfare queens), makes them susceptible to such name-calling, which establishes a vital feature of the speech act, through which we act because the speech is acting upon us. In fact, there is a mistrust performative effect of having been called a name, a name you yourself did not know and have never chosen. Am I that name, 105 interestingly, continues to be the existential question for all black women. In fact, poor black women own the signifier “welfare queens” to which all blacks are subjected and hailed.

Other issues beside welfare that are race coded include crime, immigration, terrorism, drugs, and violence. So, despite some claims according to which the United States would now be a post-racial society because a black man once held the highest position of power, we can see that race matters not only in the workfare state but in American society as a whole. Race as the signifier is continuously pegged to other signified such as gender, class, and sexuality, and its effect on black single mother welfare recipients is frightening. In fact, in the 2016 election, race was at the forefront of Donald Trump’s campaign during which he outwardly attacked the rights and citizenship of racialized minorities—blacks, Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese, and First Nations—in the United States. His slogan “make America great again” clearly meant the return of America back to its flagrant discriminatory laws unmasked to secure and uphold whiteness presumptive hegemony. The racial phantasms that uphold the presumptive hegemony of whiteness as a praxis have not disappeared and continue to distinguish between the deserving poor and undeserving poor along racial lines.

After all, the imposition of the welfare queens as the undeserving poor only serves to reconstitute and effectively circumvent the problem of poverty as a problem of systemic discrimination, which manifests itself at a metalevel, that is, how the poor explicitly relates to America’s laws, socioeconomic structures, epistemologies, and every day normalizing practices. This manifestation is absolute and should not be disavowed and ignored. Yet it is easy to overlook the fact that many welfare recipients, working “under the table,” are exposing themselves to mistreatment from their bosses and are faced with criminal prosecution just because they want to take care of the basic needs of their families. Based on many people’s ignorance about poor people, these moral or rational choices that women make to provide for their children are frowned upon. If we reflect on how the media continuously shows the “black face” as the “welfare cheats,” regardless of what black women do, they are always already criminalized. In fact, Gilens, rightly so, demonstrates how the interlocking of crime and welfare plays on many whites’ negative view of blacks and how it advances106 in name calling (welfare queens). For me, it is not surprising but I cannot think of this without a feeling of angst for the truly disadvantaged who cannot rely on the state (welfare) and male breadwinners for support because the justice system, as law professor Randall L. Kennedy reminds us, “is excessively punitive and destructive in black communities.”107

My inference is that it is important to problematize and decry the construction of the welfare queen as resting “on fuzzy and disturbing assumptions about poor people, poverty, and the world in which both are reproduced.”108 And while poverty related outcomes vary across race and gender categories, what interests me now is “setting the record queer” in the following chapters and lay bare indeed the specific ways in which welfare dependency is explained as the lack of work ethic among the black population and irremediably attached to black single mother welfare recipients. For now, I just want to draw attention to the genealogy of welfare in the United States that the welfare policies assumed and continue to assume in a patriarchal family in which women are the caretakers and men are the wage earners. This nuclear family model, of course, is rooted in white patriarchal prerogatives and the privatized liberal morality of family life. And while women headed households destabilized traditional family values, when relationships crumbled, for whatever reasons, these households turned often to the welfare state for economic sustenance. Readable data shows that welfare recipients do work. In the year prior to welfare reform, in States such as North Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Nevada, about 40 percent of welfare recipients had jobs.109 So, at this juncture, it is fundamental for us to see how welfare, because it is means-tested and far from generous, represents one of the root causes of women’s poverty.

In the mindset of the neoliberal government, the poor working for their welfare check is perceived as a justifiable tool for ending dependency on public handouts. In the government’s mind, if welfare is actually hurting the poor by creating dependence and a lack of work ethic, then denying welfare to the poor is not unkind but necessary. Hence, welfare contractualism,”a new contract between the citizen and the government based on responsibilities and rights”110 is indeed adequate.111 And since welfare contractualism marks a clear shift away from T. H. Marshall’s concept of the social rights of citizenship defined as “the whole range from the right to the modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society,”112 we must be against welfare contractualism and extend social rights to include the need for the poor to be positioned within the norms of “a livable life” and recognized as such, but not in the way identity politics and multiculturalism conceive of recognition.113 This is a point that I take up in chapter 4.

What is involved in having rights, a right to welfare, for example, is important for the liberal ideology. J. Donald Moon was amongst the first scholars to point out that “a positive right to welfare is not, at least in principle, conceptually or logically incompatible with our ordinary understanding of what is involved in possessing such a right.”114 However, when rights are undermined by race, gender, and class, and are further determined by the pervasive market values and other neoliberal tendencies valorizing and promoting the provision of welfare based on the neoliberal market rationality, once again poor black women are impacted. Precisely for this reason, it is a grave mistake to rely on market forces to address social inequalities because “the market has a force of its own, which it imposes on everyone, capitalists as well as workers, certain impersonal systemic requirements of competition, accumulation, and profitmaximization.”115 Given that no one can escape the prevalent function of the market or, if you like, in the words of Foucault, “to gather for the market,” it is on these grounds that workfare should not be a substitute for welfare.

In this book, I want to bring to the forefront the need to depathologize welfare for the undeserving poor, treat welfare as something other than the neoliberal government’s version of acting as a deterrent from Weber’s work ethic that is attributed to hardworking white Americans, return welfare to its original conceptualization of a minimum guaranteed income for individuals and families in times of economic hardship, and broaden its application to be more redistributive instead of means-tested, such as to provide a livable wage for poor people. That said, I take issue with the argument that citizens who “are fully cooperating members of a society,”116 have certain social rights and in return it is their responsibility to contribute productively to the common good of society instead of promoting their rational self-interests. Rights cannot exist by themselves. Rights have to be recombined with the recognition of personal and civic responsibilities, including one’s duty to work,117 which is rooted in swirling discourses of welfare dependency, a virulent culture that stigmatizes means-tested welfare informed by race, gender, and class. In the American cultural psyche, welfare dependency is what it is made out to be. Americans do not see the root of black intergeneration poverty. In fact, those who seek to debunk the claims to welfare for the disadvantaged insist that the needy are attached to their own dependency on welfare. If the needy can be shown to sustain her dependent status, then, the final responsibility for her poverty lies within the individual. Poverty is looked on as a result of an immense failure to work unchecked by welfare dependency.

Over and against this view, let’s put aside for the moment the question of what are the root causes of poverty, which is not at all complicated. If poverty is one of the nation’s most insidious production, we would have to take seriously T. H. Marshall’s observation that poverty “is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization,”118 and redirect our inquiry from what causes poverty to how to lessen poverty. As I see it, one of the issues is that, the United States, one of the richest countries in the world at the moment, has no clear plan on how to reduce poverty. Instead, the American government, through its workfare program bypasses already existing inequities and workfare is producing new ones that increase the unlivability of the truly disadvantaged and does not even try to mask it. The welfare poor are treated as a nuisance to society, an irritation to the liberal middle and upper classes morality. For sure, it is reasonable to argue that to be poor in the United States is to experience a specific kind of “epistemic violence,” to borrow from Gayatri C. Spivak’s famous essay,119 inflicted upon the disadvantaged through the regulatory power of the welfare queen discourse.

The impact of globalization in the restructuring of the welfare state only makes the positioning of welfare recipients as low-skill workers lacking opportunity to work and advance in decent paying jobs in the formal economy more difficult to rise above poverty. In fact, many welfare recipients do not have the formal education and skills that are required for decent paying jobs, but these women are not exactly “low skilled.” The fact of the matter is that there are not many opportunities for disadvantaged women to use the skills that they have acquired and made perfect by the unpaid work that they do in the home and the management of the family budget, which goes far beyond the check they receive from welfare. In a lecture on welfare, I once referred to welfare recipients as “hidden accountants.” So, the very fact that work is mandatory for welfare recipients, and some of them are assigned to food pantries, cleaning the streets and parks or shoveling snow, further increase the disdain for the work that the disadvantaged women do. In fact, these jobs are not conceived as regular wage jobs and offer no job protections, and do not guarantee workers paid leaves, vacations, or offer the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) passed in March 2010, also known as Obama Health Care. In Fact, at a Tea Party meeting, Congressman Ron Paul simply proposed that those who have serious health problems and cannot pay for health insurance should die.120 This brings us back to Foucault’s notion of biopower, that sphere of life where power has taken over to regulate who lives and who dies.121 In fact, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS), created under the Family Support Act of 1988, allowed welfare recipients to keep Medicaid coverage for twelve months while they worked in minimum wage jobs, but because they were no longer eligible for AFDC, JOBS participants typically were unable to afford health care when their Medicaid ran out. Thus envisioned, it seems that the underprivileged do not deserve to be covered by medical insurance. In the United States, health care is not “a public good, but a commodity,”122 and if one cannot afford health care, it is not the government’s responsibility to provide it; it harks back once again, to the neoliberal morality about personal responsibility.

I will later consider that even through in a democratic state, a state where the government should use its resources to improve the human condition by lessening poverty and assisting those who need social assistance, in the United States, it is clearly not the case. In fact, many scholars have provided ample evidence that the transformation from welfare to workfare is, in part, what Neubeck and Cazenave bring to light as welfare racism. And since they recognize that “the formation, implementation, and outcomes of the United States welfare policies have been rifled with welfare racism,”123 the legislatures, instead of expanding welfare to adequately meet the needs of the poor preferred “to end welfare as we know it.” The truly disadvantaged in their minds have become welfare dependents and conceived as welfare queens.124

Even though a large percentage of white women are receiving welfare, the misguided assumption is that there are more black women on welfare. In “Dethroning the Welfare Queen,” a work produce by the Harvard Law Review Association, it is noted that the image of what a typical welfare recipient looks like, which is produced within certain political, economic, and social contents that are connected to the dissemination of power and is subject to a single interpretation, is that of a young black woman living in public housing and having children outside of marriage so as to get welfare.125 To say it differently, she, has no will or drive to progress in societal life; not only she refuses to work, but undermines the secret code of marriage and family life as the regulatory norm that acts on welfare dependency. In fact, as I have already mentioned, since the 1960s, the alarmist undertone is that welfare has been framed as a program for blacks and the oversimplification of what causes welfare dependency, which has been introduced commonsensically into the discourse of work ethic, has been tied to concepts such as “culture of poverty,” “cycle of welfare dependency,” and the “underclass,” terms that need to be recognized as racist in their orientations. Having said this, we must ask whether the will to progress is not surreptitiously, in the present case, overpowered by a distinctive kind of will to power, that is, not a power over other people, but a power over yourself so that you can give directions to yourself. For poor people, this cannot be realized, for obvious reasons, and hamstrings them to will their own desires and dream of a better future for themselves and families. If we try to apply the observation, in the words of Žižek, that “people not only have to ‘realize their own (emancipatory, etc.) dreams’; rather they have to reinvent their very mode of dreaming,”126 we would miss the mark about black lives. Thus, we have to debunk such observation as an epistemic inevitability for poor black women. Therefore, for the racialized gendered subject, ownership of the self is indeed a continuous struggle. In the workfare state, such a struggle is not perceivable much less possible.