White Welfare

How did a program that had been championed for preserving the values of home life and the service of the mother in raising future citizens become a publicly denigrated program that stigmatized its recipients and catalyzed a national movement for its elimination? What can explain the mobilization of political and social forces to eliminate a program that represented only a small fraction of all social welfare expenditures? How can the An1erican people sin1ultaneously castigate ��welfare" and welfare recipients while reaching for increases in other social welfare programs? What made AFDC recipients undeserving? The answer is the same as it was in 1911, in 1935, and in 1966: race. What made African-Americans undeserving under mothers' pensions and under ADC is the fact that they are African-American. The anti-African-American rhetoric changed little from the early 1900s. But when African-Americans were actually receiving social welfare benefits, the rhetoric reflected a different goal on the part of policymakers-program elimination. After exclusion ofAfrican-Americans was no longer tenable, the dissolution of the program became the ultimate objective. What emerged in the 1960s was more than just a ��white backlash," as Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave argue.19 The elimination of AFDC as a national program represented business as usual in the evolution of the U.S. welfare state. Although periods of white backlash clearly occurred throughout the twentieth century and represent an integral part of a larger process of racial conflict, the significance of the elin1ination of AFDC is that the institutionalization of racism in the early 1900s was a determinant of its demise. It is not just the moments of the backlash themselves that are critical, but the embeddedness of race in U.S. state development that enable racial backlash to occur in the first place. Coinciding with an increase in AFDC recipients in the 1960s was the changing face of the welfare recipient. The mass media no longer portrayed the poor as the unfortunate white family, and ��poverty took on a black face. "20 As different studies of the mass media have shown, welfare recipients were usually depicted as African-American, regardless of the group's actual representation on the AFDC rolls. Furthermore, poverty was and continues to be portrayed as a ��black" problem. The media coverage of poor African-Americans was usually negative co1npared with that of whites; in positive stories on welfare� the faces of the poor are typically white.21 While a white mother on AFDC received sympathy for her poverty and hardships, an African-American mother receiving AFDC was labeled as undeserving, irresponsible, and/or criminal. Certain high-profile media stories exacerbated the racialized reform dialogue. In 1994 major television networks and national newspapers covered a story about a drug raid in a Chicago apartment that allegedly revealed the neglect and abuse of nineteen children by five welfare mothers and one African-American man. The image of the ��Chicago Nineteen" became a powerful backdrop for the welfare reform debate.22 As James M. Avery and Mark Peffley conclude in their study of race, public opinion, and the n1edia, the n1edia's racial portrayals of poverty n1atter. Their study demonstrates the media's tendency racialize welfare policy through the disproportionate use of images of African-Americans in stories on poverty. Furthermore, Avery and Peffley show that this racialization affects the way whites respond to the articles. 23 The media stories reinforced popular perceptions and created an environment in which policymakers could take this racialized discourse to the next level. Just as public discourse vilified AFDC mothers, many policymakers capitalized on racial divisiveness to push through a social policy agenda. As discussed previously, legislators criticized AFDC generally for the dependency it created and pathologies it reinforced. However, numerous policymakers used and reinforced racist stereotypes of minorities, especially African-Americans. The image of the ��welfare queen'; emerged with the help of Ronald Reagan 24 and spurred on by depictions of the typical AFDC mother as an irresponsible, lazy drug addict. Reagan's iconic representation of the African-American AFDC recipient was just one in a long line of pejorative representations of African-An1ericans on public assistance. In the eyes of these legislators, black AFDC recipients did not want to work, used their welfare money to buy alcohol and drugs, and neglected or abused their children.25 In comparison to the sympathy white welfare recipients generated, policymakers bla1ned African-Americans for welfare abuse and administrative mismanagement. During the 1995 debates about the Personal Responsibility Act, congressmen did not try to hide their associations of race, welfare, and the ��pathologies of the poor." Representative Martin Hoke (R-OH) commented, [W]e know that in the minority community among blacks two out of every three births is now out of wedlock .... [W]e also know being raised in a family dependent on welfare dramatically reduces a child's intellectual abilities and life prospects. . . . And teenage girls who grow up in fatherless families are far more likely to have early intercourse, pregnancies and abortions than those from two parent families. 2 6 In his congressional testimony, Representative Adam Smith from Washington added to the stereotype by stating incorrectly that 8o percent of all births in ��black inner city poor neighborhoods " occurred out of wedlock.27 Representative Major R. Owens from New York summed up how welfare stereotypes have contributed to the continued racialization of welfare: ��when people think of welfare, the media, the political leadership, have handled the problen1 and issue in ways which have led to an association of welfare with African-Americans, with black people. So it becomes a demonization. "28 The fact that welfare reform seemed a poorly veiled attack on minorities did not go unrecognized during the welfare reform debates. Congressman Gary Franks of Connecticut asked very pointedly, ��As we continue to address these issues, the question is, Mr. Speaker, are we, as a Congress, looking at constructive changes or merely attacks toward African-Americans and the poor? Sadly, Mr. Speaker, at this point I am not quite sure. "29Just as race is significant in explaining why a state was late in adopting mothers' pension legislation during the 1920s, why some counties did not implement the programs at all during the 1930s, and why ADC benefit amounts varied from family to family during the 1940s, race is also significant in explaining why son1e states adopted restrictive AFDC waivers during the early 199os3° and why the national government abolished AFDC and replaced it with TANF in the 1996 reforms. Race has influenced not only different policies adopted at the state and local levels but also the levels of public support for these policies. Even after the adoption of PRWORA, state policies remained influenced by race. The strictest welfare reforms were more likely to be adopted in states where minorities made up a larger proportion of the welfare caseload.31 The devolution of welfare to the states has not eliminated racial prejudice in welfare provision but has merely reinvented the parochialism emblematic of the state n1others' pension programs. Returning to the mothers' pension philosophy of a previous century, state TANF programs can reflect local values and determinations of deserving, fit parents. The United States began its path of welfare state development with a particular deserving recipient in mind-white women. In a class by themselves, white women have been endowed with the right to stay home and raise their children without suffering the pejorative stereotypes imposed on mothers of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. With such strong racist currents running through society, it was ultimately predictable that the United States would generate public policies that perpetuated the racial hierarchy.32 At different points in U.S. state development, different ethnic and racial groups were deliberately excluded from social welfare provision. However, unlike most other racial/ethnic groups, African-Americans never had a legitimate right to ��welfare." Paradoxically, as this book has shown, mothers' pensions and ADC evolved from relatively small social welfare programs institutionally designed to exclude African-Americans into a sprawling program perceived by the public as dominated by unworthy African-An1ericans. The decentralization and fragn1entation of policymaking resulted in the following pattern of African-American participation and status in the American welfare state: initial exclusion, conditional inclusion, stigmatization and political isolation, and finally exclusion through devolution. At various junctures in the development of this social policy, opportunities arose to institutionally challenge the racialization of aid to dependent children. The state-building process is not linear. ��Its character depends on choices taken at pivotal historical moments," write Ira Katz-nelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, ��when fundamental questions about ties between the state and the economy, or between the state and civil society, enter the political agenda. "33 During the passage of the Social Security Act, legislators could have fought for provisions that did not hand to the states a bill that guaranteed the continued exclusion of African-Americans from the benefit rolls. During the War on Poverty, Johnson's advisers argued for a national standard for AFDC, but the administration never proposed such a standard to Congress.34 Furthern1ore, the Johnson administration did nothing to counterbalance the growing rhetoric linking race to the ��welfare problem." When the PWRORA was being debated, legislators could have raised the level of debate beyond the inflammatory racial discourse but instead chose to embrace this discourse to their advantage. By bestowing the administration of this program on states, the national government implicitly accepted the fact that the TANF would be implemented according to local norms and values, which, if the Progressive and New Deal eras are lessons for us, easily translate into racial and ethnic discrimination. Since TANF has been implemented, different studies have demonstrated that white recipients are more likely than members of other ethnic groups to be encouraged to get an education, less likely to be sanctioned for policy violations, and more likely to receive child care subsidies. Studies have also shown that the agencies administering TANF are the least helpful to African-Americans in providing job-readiness skills and are least likely to provide basic academic skills or tutoring services to African-Americans. These mothers are not receiving the assistance needed to successfully transition out of welfare. Finally, white women are more likely than AfricanAmerican women to receive benefits for children born out of wedlock. Some of these disparities are more noted in southern states, such as Virginia and Mississippi.35 Throughout its history, the path of this social policy has never deviated. Welfare policy constitutes one of many examples of state-building in a racialized society. Because race is woven into the An1erican econon1ic, social, and political fabric, any analysis of welfare policy should be considered within this larger institutional and policy context.36 We can see how mothers' pensions and ADC contributed to and strengthened existing civil, political, and social inequalities by mirroring existing social and racial cleavages. Mothers' pensions became the vehicle through which racial differentiation permeated U.S. welfare state-building. The racialization of U.S. welfare policy has resulted in a welfare state that stigmatizes and/or penalizes African-Americans and other ethnic minoritieswhile providing nonstigmatized entitlements to white citizens. This book provides a new lens through which to view and understand the development of America's welfare state at both the state and national levels but is just a starting point in what will be a scholarly reconsideration and reconceptualization of the role of race in the evolution of U.S. social welfare policy and state-building