Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

7. Queens, Teens, and Model Mothers: Race, Gender, and the Discourse of Welfare Reform

chapter 7 Queens, Teens, and Model Mothers Race, Gender, and the Discourse of Welfare Reform holloway sparks Are you trying to get people off welfare by solving problems or are you punishing them for the choices that you disagree with? If you are trying to solve the problem, go back to the drawing board, and listen to people like me. —Tandi Graff, former welfare recipient, to members of Congress, 1995 For democratic theorists and other scholars interested in theorizing the promise and pitfalls of citizen participation in the contemporary public sphere, the welfare reform debate surrounding the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) provides an emblematic case study. In the period preceding the passage of the PRWORA, a lively public discussion on the shortcomings of the welfare system and Congress’s proposed solutions ‹lled the airwaves and other venues of public communication. Strikingly absent from this debate, however, were the voices of welfare recipients themselves. Congress and the media showcased the arguments of welfare administrators , politicians, business lobbyists, academics, and pundits, but welfare activists and other critics of “the end of welfare as we know it” often had a dif‹cult time getting their views heard. Marginalized at congressional hearings and mostly ignored or discounted by the press, welfare recipients ended up primarily on the sidelines of this critical dialogue. 171 ⠂ In their absence, commentators regularly invoked racist and genderbiased images of “welfare queens” out to cheat taxpayers and of irresponsible teenage girls bearing children out of wedlock as the quintessential justi‹cations for punitive welfare reform. The only seemingly positive public role for recipients during this debate was as a “welfare to work” success story. Politicians and journalists delighted in telling ragsto -riches morality tales about “model mothers” whose compliance with the new welfare regime meant they could leave the welfare rolls, provide better lives for their children, and become “respectable” citizens. Welfare recipients who opposed any part of the reforms, in contrast, were portrayed as troublemakers, not as citizens who might have important insights into public policy. The exclusion and stereotyping of welfare recipients during the PRWORA debate reveals a serious distortion in the contemporary American public sphere. In spite of widespread assertions that the United States enjoys one of the most open democratic societies in the world, it nonetheless remains extraordinarily dif‹cult for poor people to participate in democratic decision making. The fact that the absence of the poor was not widely questioned during the PRWORA debate only con‹rms the pervasiveness of the problem. The result of this distortion is that some citizens’ voices are consistently ampli‹ed in the context of democratic discussions, while others are muf›ed or silenced altogether. This distortion, moreover, has racist and sexist contours. Although the discourses of personal responsibility and citizenship used to frame the reform debate appeared neutral on the surface, these discourses in fact masked the racially speci‹c content of the stereotypes about welfare recipients that so in›uenced this debate. The stereotypes, furthermore, were not simply negative images of people of color, but were primarily negative images of women of color. The portrayal of poor women of color—and particularly African American women—as abusers of the system , immoral, and badly in need of discipline essentially destroyed their ability to appear as legitimate and authoritative participants in democratic deliberations about welfare. Since nearly one-third of all African American women are poor, and women of color and their children account for half of all welfare recipients (Albeda and Tilly 1997, 24–28), such stereotyping meant that the citizens with the most at stake in this policy discussion were the least likely to have input. For democratic theorists and others concerned about the legitimacy of our political institutions , such exclusions should raise fundamental questions about the quality of democratic life in the United States. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform 172 This essay analyzes the welfare reform debate of 1995–96 as a case study of public deliberation, and pays particular attention to how the construction of racist and sexist stereotypes affected the political participation of the poor. My argument has ‹ve steps. To ground my analysis, I begin with some contemporary theories of citizen participation and democratic discourse prominent in the ‹eld of political theory. Second, I explore the racist images and stereotypes of the poor invoked during congressional discussions of welfare reform in 1995–96 that undermined the meaningful participation of poor citizens. In the third section, I...