The neoliberal welfare state is ingrained with gendered racism and parasitic on black women

My intention in this book is to provide an analytical and interpretative reflection of the markedly new ways globalization is impacting the welfare state in today’s America. My concern is not simply that in the United States, post-Fordism and its emphasis on service production escalate the need for an abundance of flexible, exploitable, cheap workers. I am more interested in the many ways in which the neoliberal government responds to capital need for exploitive cheap labor through welfare-to-work-programs and the implementation of workfare, the generic term for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). While there is a clear link between welfare and low-wage markets, with the specious garb of ending welfare dependency, workfare forces welfare recipients, including single mothers with young children, to work outside of the home. More importantly, workfare provides an “underclass” of labor that is desolately trapped in jobs that pay minimum wage. This “underclass” is gendered and racialized, occupying a central place that is oppressive and unsettling, which is in accordance with “neoliberal governmentality”2 and its cartography of power. It is therefore critical, here, to revisit and reframe T. H. Marshall’s notion of “the social rights of citizenship”3 and the ethical question of social “rights claims” to include economics and the right to a modicum of a livable wage for all members of a democratic polity, including poor black women positioned outside of the norm of “a livable life.”4 To capture and elaborate on the precise form of the lived experience of poor black women under the workfare state, I used the concept of “deathin-life” as a condition that afro-pessimism describes as “ontological death,”5 that is, the loss of their personhood. This ontological death, as I will later show, is intrinsically linked to the trope of the welfare queen that reduces black women on welfare to that stereotype. In other words, as racialized gender bodies, black women are, in the words of the French postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, “overdetermined from the outside,”6 another form of black-women-on-welfare profiling as I named it. In fact, prior to the very prospect of their livability, they must, in order to live, draw upon and develop an alternative way of being in the world, which is impossible until racialized gender norms and institutionalized forms of power that produced and form them are challenged and rejected. In this regards, life needs to be “livable” first before any arguments for social “rights claims” for poor black women can be made. And to be rights bearing subject, black women’s lives have to be first recognizable as lives worth preserving. Social “rights claims” won’t necessarily reduce structural inequality, such as “gendered racism” no matter the form it takes. However, I would like to focus on rights as important to the liberal tradition that shaped and continues to shape social policies in the United States and draw attention to its limitations, especially, when such rights are, for the most part, curtailed for the undeserving poor. The upshot, as I see it, is to make a case for welfare as a right for poor people. It is understandable that my discussion seeks to illuminate a crucial but largely overlooked aspect of the negative impact of the restructuring of welfare on black single mother welfare recipients. The stereotype of the welfare queen, which is infused with racial meaning is used to describe and illustrate the position of black single mother welfare recipients as welfare dependents and undeserving of welfare. More so, it is a way of talking about poor women with an invidious racist and sexist subtext that merges in “gendered racism,” that is, a form of racism and sexism that “narrowly intertwine and combine under certain conditions into one hybrid phenomenon,”7 in the words of black feminist and critical race theorist Philomena Essed.8 Since an ethical concept of gendered racism must simultaneously be a theory of the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and other forms of differences, an intersectionality framework is properly vital for interrogating and problematizing the restructuring of welfare in which poor black women are implicated. Additionally, an intersectionality framework is antithetical to the neoliberal model of welfare restructuring in which the market and not democratically elected government is to determine poor people’s social rights. Thus, I make an argument for moving beyond T. H. Marshall’s notion of “the social rights of citizenship” and the ethical question of social “rights claims,” largely conceived to include poor black single mothers. It is only, then, that life can plausibly be “livable” for them