Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

9. The Hard Line and the Color Line: Race, Welfare, and the Roots of Get-Tough Reform

chapter 9 The Hard Line and the Color Line Race, Welfare, and the Roots of Get-Tough Reform joe soss, sanford f. schram, thomas p. vartanian, and erin o’brien The Social Security Act of 1935 laid the groundwork for something poor families had never had in the United States: a federal entitlement to public aid.1 Thirty-‹ve years later, in the wake of legal victories in the 1960s, this entitlement began to bear fruit in the form of greater access and equity in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. By the 1990s, however, the political tides had turned. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) abolished the federal entitlement to aid. In its place, federal lawmakers created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a system of block grants that gave states more freedom to select among policy tools but also imposed a forceful mandate to promote work, reduce welfare usage, and change poor people’s behaviors. Public of‹cials in many states moved quickly, and with considerable public support , to implement tough new policies consistent with these federal TANF goals. In this chapter, we analyze the racial underpinnings of welfare retrenchment in the crucial years of 1996 and 1997. For the public at large, and for state policymakers in particular, welfare reform raised new 225 ⠂ questions about the terms that should govern aid for low-income families . Some states used their new discretion to pursue relatively stringent and punitive program rules; others opted for a more moderate course. Some citizens supported the most restrictive new approaches to public aid; others resisted the call to “get tough” with recipients. Accordingly, our analysis proceeds on two levels. First, we ask how racial factors might help explain why some but not all states chose to impose restrictive welfare policies in the name of reform. Second, we ask how race and racial attitudes shaped public support for such policies. In what follows, we use multivariate analysis to isolate the impact of race on state policy choices and citizen policy preferences under welfare reform. In doing so, we consider a variety of alternative explanations for state- and individual-level outcomes. Our ‹ndings af‹rm that “get tough” welfare reform has had complex political roots. No factor, however , eclipses the central importance of race. In the period immediately following federal legislation in 1996, the strictest welfare reforms were signi‹cantly more likely to be adopted in states where people of color made up a larger proportion of the welfare caseload. Public support for these tough new welfare measures arose from many sources. But support ran stronger among whites than blacks, and within the white population support was signi‹cantly enhanced by negative stereotypes of African Americans and Hispanics. The entwining of race and welfare provision has a long and troubled history in the United States. Regrettably, our contemporary experience suggests that the past remains prologue. Much is new in today’s welfare politics, but the “problem of the color line” remains. Welfare Policy Making: A New Division of Labor When the federal government abolished the AFDC program in 1996, it removed a framework of rules that had structured state-level administration of cash aid since the 1960s. The new block-grant system ended the federal guarantee of matching funds and allowed states to pursue a wider variety of policy innovations without seeking waivers from the federal government (on waivers, see Fording, this volume). Proponents touted the new TANF system as a “devolution revolution” that would liberate the states from sti›ing federal rules, allowing them to create more effective poverty policies. Such claims contain a grain of truth regarding shifts in the intergovernmental division of labor, but they also Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform 226 mislead by implying that states were given a historically unprecedented degree of liberty. In the American political system de‹ned by federalism, localism, and a relatively weak and fragmented national government, state-level politics has always played a key role in shaping the amount and form of public aid for the poor (Trattner 1999; Noble 1997; Skocpol 1996). Beginning in 1911 with mothers’ pensions, and later in the Aid to Dependent Children program, state administration and interstate variation were de‹ning features of public aid for poor families (Gordon 1994). In the wake of legal activism in the 1960s, the federal government applied a broad set of national standards to administrators (Davis 1993; Melnick 1994). Interstate variation, however, remained a...