Current welfare programs condition benefits on work. This disempowers African Americans – the work cannot solve poverty and reinforces dehumanizing social roles for low income workers

Policymakers have responded by ending welfare as an entitlement, replacing it with strict time limits and work requirements for benefit eligibility, and cracking down on urban crime, and especially on the drug trade, pushing for long prison terms and aggressive enforcement measures. The idea is to encourage work in the licit economy by changing the incentive structure. But implicit in this policy response is the assumption that the black urban poor’s reasons for refusing to work are insufficient. This assumption is widely held, quite old, and sometimes accepted by respected black leaders. But while I would not deny that high jobless rates in ghettos are worrisome and have far-reaching consequences, it does not follow that inducing or mandating work is the right solution to the problem of ghetto poverty. Indeed, many of the black urban poor have sufficient reason to refuse to work. One of the basic problems with the current work-welfare regime is this: many of the ghetto poor who have submitted to its requirements nevertheless remain poor. They simply become part of the working poor, often serving the private needs of the well-off—performing the roles of maids, nannies, dishwashers, maintenance workers, and so on. Others fall back into poverty because of recessions and economic restructuring. And because many of the schools available to the ghetto poor are so substandard, they do not allow for opportunities to develop marketable skills, limiting upward mobility. Thus, when work requirements do not allow for skills enhancement or promotion to better paid positions, these requirements are reasonably interpreted as attempts by the affluent to profit by extracting burdensome and unrewarding labor from the weak and vulnerable. Under these circumstances, mandating work to receive welfare benefits is disempowering—it ensures that the ghetto poor are a permanently exploitable class. To submit to an unjust and exploitative regime that stigmatizes and conveys contempt for poor black people is, for some at least, a fate worse than the ghetto. Many descendants of slaves embrace the imperative to resist race-based oppression, particularly those forms that are similar or related to past racial injustices. Blacks are therefore suspicious of and often bristle at any social arrangement that has the look or feel of race-based servitude. Perhaps some do not accept the jobs available because they believe that the basic structure of U.S. society is deeply unfair, and thus, on grounds of justice and self-respect, refuse to accommodate themselves to their low position in this racially and economically stratified social order. The ghetto poor have grounds to refuse work if their fellow citizens have erected a work regime because of racism. Poor black mothers, for example, are often forced to accept employment in order to receive much-needed benefits. But the work available to them is often domestic service in the homes of affluent white families. By refusing this kind of work, they are resisting the ideological image of the mammy—the self-sacrificing, deferential, faithful, and obedient house servant—and its associated social roles. As Patricia Hill Collins has argued, a lot of the work in the contemporary service industry—preparing and serving food in restaurants, janitorial jobs and hotel housekeeping, and looking after kids in childcare centers—is reminiscent of traditional domestic service.