The State Perpetuates Structural Racism Through Social Security

State programs also have a range of political effects, which can be located on a spectrum—from those that assume and affirm political belonging to those that stigmatize and efface citizenship. Some programs, such as Social Security, were designed for “deserving” citizens and tend to enhance the rights, resources, and standing of beneficiaries. Such programs are rarely means tested, entail minimal surveillance, and in some cases obscure—often to the point of invisibility—any notion of dependence on the state. Despite the ostensibly universal character of many such programs, access has been highly racialized and gendered. New Deal policy makers effectively barred many immigrants, Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, and African Americans from these programs. They built a bifurcated welfare state, making domestic and agricultural workers ineligible for social insurance and relegating many of the most vulnerable workers, people of color, and single mothers to paltry and stigmatized programs that were typically means and morals tested.9

Where social insurance programs assumed their beneficiaries' full membership in the political community, other programs marked their own beneficiaries as being at the margins of the polity or the economy, but still as candidates for inclusion. Policy makers have used such assimilative goals to rationalize the redistribution of resources. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit has ameliorated the poverty of millions of families by subsidizing low wages through a refundable tax credit. However, assimilative strategies can also reify hierarchies and unequal social relations by marking certain behaviors and populations as deviant. For example, in the mid-twentieth century, AFDC social workers denied aid to mothers whose homes they deemed “unsuitable,” often because of alleged sexual misconduct. Programs aiming to rehabilitate beneficiaries, typically on terms delineated by elites or dominant cultural norms, can stigmatize those unable or unwilling to conform to prescribed social norms. They tend to conceptualize marginality as the result of blocked opportunities, or of individual or cultural maladaptation, instead of as arising from the dynamics of social or market relations.