Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature

4: The Language of Family: Talking Back to Narratives of Black Pathology in Sapphire’s Push

4 / The Language of Family: Talking Back to Narratives of Black Pathology in Sapphire’s Push On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, more commonly known as welfare reform. The Clinton administration described the legislation as a “comprehensive bipartisan welfare reform plan that will dramatically change the nation’s welfare system into one that requires work in exchange for time-limited assistance. The law contains strong work requirements, a performance bonus to reward states for moving welfare recipients into jobs, state maintenance of effort requirements , comprehensive child support enforcement, and supports for families moving from welfare to work—including increased funding for child care and guaranteed medical coverage” (Administration for Children and Families). Strict work requirements are the foundation of this legislation: heads of households must find employment within two years of receiving assistance and within months of receiving initial benefits they must work in community service programs (that is, volunteer) until they find employment. Additionally, families who get benefits have a maximum five-year cumulative limit on receiving welfare funds. While the reform has been relatively successful in getting people off welfare, it has been less successful in helping former recipients become self-sufficient because it largely removed a safety net for millions of the poorest Americans and moved other struggling families into a service economy that does not come close to providing a living wage. One of the most striking aspects of welfare reform is its impetus, however. Certainly, reforming welfare is an agenda item for almost every 104 / CLOSE KIN AND DISTANT RELATIVES presidential administration. Nonetheless, this 1996 legislation emerged during the height of the so-called culture wars, when the struggle between the political Right and Left over the direction of the country was part of a sensationalized national drama.1 Frequently, poor and working-class Americans, especially people of color, were pawns in this national game, representing some of the most loathed aspects of American society: the abject, unassimilated masses who rather than pulling themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps became “welfare queens” and sucked the lifeblood from the nation, reproducing incessantly without adding anything to society except for increasing financial burdens. Thus the welfare reform that emerged from this period was based less on solid data than on the notion that welfare recipients had little incentive to work—that is, they had a skewed sense of personal responsibility— and that they therefore needed governmental intervention to help make them responsible, respectable citizens. The very title of the bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, reveals this ideology. Thus, while the legislation was ostensibly billed as a hand up rather than a handout, it was guided as much by deeply engrained notions about misplaced entitlements as by a desire to better the lives of the nation’s poor.2 In 1996, the same year Clinton’s welfare reform passed, New York– based poet-turned-novelist Sapphire published her controversial and provocative novel Push, an indictment of the ideology around the black poor that emerges out the culture wars era. Push may at first seem like an outlier in the company of other contemporary texts that foreground respectability politics in their consideration of family that I have discussed in this book so far. The novel’s graphic depiction of the devastating effects of poverty, violence, and abuse may not immediately call to mind the dissemblance and strict emphasis on propriety, among other aspects, that typically exemplify respectability politics. However, like Praisesong for the Widow, Annie John, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and other texts that this book analyzes, Push troubles respectability politics, albeit in an unconventional literary form, by advocating for more transgressive expressions of family. An epistolary novel that employs journal writing, poems, and other first-person narrative devices, Push, like Annie John and Breath, Eyes, Memory, emphasizes the growing importance of educational communities in black women’s empowerment. It is critical to recognize the significance of the interplay of ambivalence and respectability in the novel, in addition to the novel’s subsequent delineation of an ethic of community support and ThE LANguAgE Of fAmILy / 105 accountability as a means both to resist repression and to foster intimacy and community. Push might also seem like an exception to other texts featured in this book because of its particular depiction of Diasporic cultural connections . While the connections to African Diasporic culture are markedly...