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Foreword
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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Foreword August 2005 marks the ninth anniversary of Congressional passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), popularly known as “welfare reform.” Despite repeated claims by key policymakers that welfare restructuring (the term “reform” is a misnomer) is a success and should be celebrated as such, Dána-Ain Davis joins other researchers whose rigorous research challenges this claim. Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform is a powerful book that deserves to be read widely. The book should, if read with open minds and hearts by those who make and implement welfare policy, compel changes in national and state welfare policies. For anyone who imagines that welfare policy promotes improved economic well-being and security, opportunity , self-sufficiency, and hope for poor women and their families, this book is a wake-up call. But Davis goes further than many, documenting how racism infuses both the welfare policies that directly affect the Black women she worked with, and also the jobs they do and don’t get, their relatively limited housing and child-care options, and, often, how they are viewed and treated by landlords, human service workers, potential employers, bosses, and many others. For those of us not intimately involved with welfare restructuring, who are not members of families who live “reform,” or welfare workers and administrators who implement welfare-to-work policies, or community advocates who ix assist families facing great hardship because of these policies, Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform takes us into the lives of 22 women who live at the nexus of poverty, violence, and the welfare system. Most of what counts as “knowledge” in this field comes either from large-scale studies that substitute statistics for human experience, satisfying a mind and heart-numbing confidence that that such knowledge is scientifically rigorous, or from thousands of anecdotes served up by reporters since 1996 to “humanize” newspaper, radio, or television stories about welfare. Dána-Ain Davis gives us something different. She takes us into the kind of community less often studied or reported on, far from the inner cities that have captured the attention of most scholars, to the kind of place where most of America’s poor live. These are smaller cities and towns across the country with economies that have been dramatically affected by deindustrialization, divestment, and globalization . She takes us into the lives of women and children who have lived with violence and abuse, sometimes over the long haul, sometimes for shorter periods, but always with profound results. She focuses on Black women and their children, and through their experiences shows us that social service workers and landlords are neither colorblind nor always fair or humane. She shows us that racism is deeply intertwined with a host of public welfare policies, as well as with private practices. And she does all this with an unwavering commitment to tell the truth about women who themselves understand that their own lives belie the truth of racialized stereotypes about women on welfare, and who also know they are nevertheless judged and often treated as though they were the living embodiments of those stereotypes. Davis begins her introduction with the reminder that “the clock is ticking,” a reference to federal and state time limits on welfare receipt. These time limits essentially say to poor women and children: it does not matter whether there are jobs that are available and can support you, or if there is decent housing or child care you can afford, it does not matter that you have been subjected to violence and abuse or that you are trying to keep your children safe or to give them the kind of x Foreword [3.238.5.144] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:05 GMT) home that might help keep them from enduring what you have gone through. But Davis shows us that it does matter. To stick with the image of the ticking clock, let me say to readers of this book, you are unlikely to lift your eyes to the clock while you are reading it. This is a beautifully written book that brings great insight, honesty, clarity, and humanity to a public policy debate that has marginalized and silenced women such as those whose stories fill these pages. But time will not stand still while you read this book. While the stories recounted in this book are in the past, other stories are being lived at this moment, stories of other Black women enduring the “ceremonies...